Shroud-bearer Vespera Morant

Vespera Morant apprenticed in turn to three Dominion shroud-bearers, the guild that dresses and masks the dead before void-burial. Each teacher died in service before she finished. By custom, an apprentice whose master dies inherits the mortuary mask and the names that mask was sworn to bury. Vespera has three masks. She wears them in rotation, by the engagement, the season, and what she calls the temperature of the dead.

The Dominion has twice insisted she choose one mask and settle the lineage. She has declined. The guild that ordained her teachers no longer functions, and she holds that her duty is to the names her teachers carried, not to a successor body that never trained her. She takes contracts that let her travel between the burial-grounds those teachers were promised.