STATUS Missing, presumed dead – last seen carried off by a hag, Green Hell trail
OCCUPATION Native guide, hired out of the Cutters Inn, Last Hope
ACCESS LEVEL None – civilian, hired labour only
AGE Unrecorded
ORIGINS Ndege – one of the native peoples of the Indegee interior
YEARS OF SERVICE Unrecorded – a working guide, not a standing employee of anyone
FIRST ON RECORD Session 43 – hired at the Cutters Inn, Last Hope

Saul made his first impression by winning a bet rather than earning his fee – found at the Cutters Inn mid-argument over a chasm-crossing riddle he’d clearly been stuck on for a while, he offered to guide the Agents to Arn Griishank for free if they could solve it for him. They could. He kept his word, and kept up a running patter the whole way in – receding chin, a squat, muscled build, and a mouth of sharpened teeth that marked him as Ndege on sight.

He was good at the job. He read the jungle better than anyone else on the trip, called a storm coming an hour before it broke, identified a pair of drug runners by smell alone (heavy packs, a sweet rot under the spearmint – Basura, the raw paste Twitch gets cut from), and put a wounded pig out of its misery without breaking stride on the trail. “Better end its misery,” he said, drawing his machete, “also good for dinner, I think.”

FILE NOTES

The same instincts that made him useful got him killed, or near enough. A fog rolled up out of the undergrowth while he was field-dressing that same pig, and something inside it – a hag the Agents would later know as Zlotta Babbaa – took him before anyone could reach him, dragging his limp body off into the mist. Raven and Krusha found a rotting corpse, a bear trap, and no sign of Saul beyond a trail leading somewhere they chose not to follow.

Nobody confirmed the kill. Nobody went back for him either – the party pushed on toward Kenbro without him, on the reasoning that if a guide who knew this jungle better than they did couldn’t get himself out of it, there probably wasn’t much they could have done. It’s a cold arithmetic that’s hard to argue with and harder to feel good about.

His sharpened teeth turned out not to be unique to him – Lord Valden’s own carriage driver, Soltaan, was noted showing the same “small sharpened teeth, like Saul” further along the same expedition, suggesting the trait runs through more of the southern, Indegee-adjacent peoples than Saul alone.

“Senoirita, this is bad. Trap – a bear trap, I think.”

Saul, moments before the hag took him

STATUS: Filed under The Good. A hired hand who did his job well right up until the moment it killed him, left behind on the reasonable-sounding logic that finishing the trip mattered more than finding out for certain. Section 18 has no record of his remains ever being recovered.