Background

Mara Cairn spent most of her life cutting stone, tending burial grounds and carving names for the people of Tower Haven. After Goldskull’s attack, she was asked to add Kruppe’s name to the Radiant Watch memorial. She had never met him, but the stories told by those who came to watch her work stayed with her.

After some desecration of the memorial site, Mara began looking into disturbed graves and missing remains. She had spent years giving the dead a place to rest; now she wanted to know who was taking that rest from them. Her search brought her into Lyra Voss’s work, and into danger she could no longer face with a mason’s chisel.

Appearance

Mara is a towering Stone Goliath with broad shoulders, slate-grey skin and faint pale veining like marble. Her amber eyes miss little. She wears her black hair in practical braids, marked by a broad streak of grey, and her hands carry the small scars of a lifetime spent carving stone. A pendant at her neck bears the first name she ever cut into a memorial, with Kruppe’s name newly carved on the reverse. On the road, she carries a heavy maul that looks as natural in her hands as a stonemason’s hammer.

Personality

Mara is patient with people and stubborn with problems. She listens before speaking, remembers names, and has little interest in whether someone was important in life: everyone deserves to be remembered truthfully. In a fight, that patience gives way to fierce, direct action. She steps towards a threat because she cannot bear to watch someone else be left behind.

She wants to understand what happened to Kruppe. She also fears what that knowledge may ask of Lyra, and of herself.

Lyra and Rowan

Mara first met Lyra while carving Kruppe’s memorial. Lyra returned later with questions about the dead, and Mara helped her search burial records. She respects Lyra’s devotion to finding answers, though she watches carefully how those answers are used. Mara intends to stay close enough to help her, and close enough to speak plainly when she disagrees.