Barrier Warden

The Barrier Warden holds a Meroveil Empire commission as Warden-Sworn of the Aurel Gate — the rank the Cathedral of Aurel-on-the-Hill grants to the shield-bearer who stands its outer gate, one per generation, confirmed by the dean's seal rather than by ordinary muster. Her name on the Empire's rolls is Odile Kestrane, twenty-nine, daughter of a lens-grinder family in the Aurel diocese; the gemstone set in the centre of her shield was cut in her father's shop from the Cathedral's own Aurel lens, and the Cathedral's record of the cutting notes that the stone was shaped to fit the shield and not the other way round. Odile has said the same of herself, once, to a novice who asked, and has not repeated it.

Her combat-grant is the well-attested hard-light raise: when the shield comes up, the gem projects a wall of six faces, and blows meant for the line behind her arrive at the wall instead. Less well-attested is the count. Odile counts the six faces aloud before every raise — one, two, to six — because the one time in nine years she did not, the wall came up with five, and the novice standing behind the missing face lost an arm to the elbow. The Cathedral's deployment-clerks have recorded the count as 'a personal discipline'; the novice, who is now the gate's second shield, has recorded nothing and has never once asked her to stop. The gate she stood had not been forced in nine years; the Cathedral does not publish how many times it was tried. Eleven nights before the new Commander came, it was, and she was the last shield off the hill.

She shares the Cathedral's field-presence with Sister-Weaver Ottilie Danvers and Brother Ilario of the ink cloister, and the three of them are the south chapter's standing detachment on the imperial line under General Thalia Crowe's southern-army authority. Crowe has twice asked the Cathedral to release Odile to the front; the dean has twice replied that the gate is the front, and Crowe, who does not order a position she would not stand on herself, has twice stood the Aurel Gate for a night to see whether that was true. It was. Odile has not commented on either visit. She has, without writing it down, started counting to six a little more slowly since the second one.