Death-Curator Umbra Kessith

Umbra Kessith trained as a death-curator in the Sepulchral Archive, a discipline that is mortuary record-keeping and, by any other culture's word, funerary law. Every captain who falls in Dominion territory is logged, appraised, and assigned a disposition by curators of her grade. Her master, Vaen, taught her that the dignity of a corpse is the precision of its paperwork. She believed him. She still does.

The Reliquary is built around an indexed vault of effects, fragments, and signed final rites from more than two thousand engagements. She left the Archive after Vaen was overruled on a political reburial: a dead general was upgraded to please a surviving house, and Vaen would not sign. He was retired. The records were altered. Umbra walked out with her seal and the original, unaltered file. She has not given the file back.