STATUS Alive, last confirmed at Arn Griishank
SECTION Lord of Arn Griishank; unwitting host to Overseer Kaleb’s Dranathess operation
FIRST ON RECORD Session 50 – welcoming the Agents to Arn Griishank

Lord Valden is the third generation of his line at Arn Griishank, and the only one of it left – a mining estate turned into something considerably darker without him ever quite noticing. He met the Agents at the gates in person, waved them past a signpost bearing his own crest, and sat them down to a full table: soup, three tankards of Valden Ale, and a stew, served with the easy hospitality of a man who has never once had to ask whether his guests deserved it.

He’s an odd host to make sense of at first glance – genuinely warm, visibly unwell, a splinted leg he leans on the table to spare, a taste for medicinal “hooka sugar” that leaves him droning by the end of most evenings – and flanked at his own table by a Dranathess mage and a woman who spent the whole meal more interesting to look at than he was. He turned out to be exactly what he appeared: weak-willed, well-meaning, patriotic to a fault, and easy enough to keep in the dark that nobody around him ever had to try very hard.

FILE NOTES

The arrangement, once it came out, wasn’t complicated. Overseer Kaleb had been renting Arn Griishank’s isolation for his own project – paying Valden a minor wage to keep his silence, and topping that up with charm spells whenever silence needed reinforcing. Valden believed he was earning the King’s favour by putting a roof over some Dranathess research. What was actually happening under that roof cost the Agents most of a night’s fighting to stop, and left his donjon a ruin.

None of that explains what happened to the Agents on the ride home from his own table. Their carriage, sent by Valden in good faith, was ambushed on the forest path by a full pack of lycanthrope soldiers – men Kaleb had engineered to fight as wolves and shrug off wounds that should have killed them. Outmatched, the Agents yielded rather than die on the road, and were dragged off still bleeding while the same soldiers who’d just torn into them changed back to human shape a few feet away, dressed from spare packs, and tended each other’s wounds under Poruchik Karver’s approving eye. Nothing since has connected Valden to that ambush directly – it reads, like the rest of it, as something arranged entirely over his head.

He didn’t fight the truth once it landed on him. His retinue got him out the moment the donjon started coming apart, and by the time the Agents next saw him he’d quietly moved into one of the estate’s outbuildings while the wreckage was cleared, without complaint. He turned out to be more useful sober and horrified than he’d ever been charmed and comfortable – identifying the Agents’ recovered weapons by their make, trading a diamond for a blade to help fund a restorative ritual, standing at the front of the funeral procession for the soldiers who didn’t make it out, and riding out personally to see the Agents off before they headed south, with a warm word for the stranger travelling alongside them.

“Welcome, welcome guests, to Arn Griishank. I am Lord Valden. Please allow DeVille here to take your weapons. And have a seat.”

Lord Valden, greeting the Agents

STATUS: Filed under The Good. Not for what he knew – by design, he didn’t know much – but for what he did once he did: opened his home to a funeral he had no obligation to attend, and to Agents he had every excuse to blame for burning down half his donjon.