⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"Poor child of earth. I am sorry the khrosh are taking you."
— Barash, to Lia
Full name: Chief Barash of Clan Monolith
Age: Two hundred and seventy years
Race: Deepfolk
Clan: Monolith
Position: Chief of Clan Monolith; master builder; chief engineer of the Gashdagan
At two hundred and seventy years, Barash is deep in the stage his people call the Crumbling — the long, irreversible process by which a Deepfolk elder's silicon tissues begin to lose cohesion. He is visibly as much stone as flesh. Cracks run through his face and hands like fault lines in granite, like dried earth after a long drought. His beard appears to be composed of crystalline growths rather than hair, catching torchlight and breaking it into rainbow refractions. His eyes are deep ruby-red, gleaming with intelligence even now.
He moves with the deliberate, ponderous weight of something that has become, in some real sense, partly geological. Each step purposeful. Nothing hurried. Nothing wasted.
He wears elaborate robes — black and purple, heavy with gold decoration and gems that must weigh a small fortune. Master craftwork, made by his own people.
His voice is extraordinarily deep. It vibrates in the listener's chest even through walls, even through brass hearing-tubes. Like stone grinding against stone. In moments of anger or distress it builds to something mechanical, a grinding growl that rises from deep inside him — the sound of great gears catching.
Barash arrives at the Harvest Feast of Empress Maren as head of Clan Monolith's delegation — one of the rare occasions when Deepfolk leave their underground realm for the surface. His delegation moves stiffly, breathing carefully, glancing at the high ceilings and the open space around them. The surface is hostile to Deepfolk physiology. They do not like it, and show it.
He does not waste time on diplomacy when he reaches the feast hall. The Highfolk delegation is already present, and Barash's opening word — delivered like a hammer blow — is simply: "THIEVES!"
The Bloodstone of his ancestors has been stolen from his chambers. He accuses the Aelorian delegation, who were seen near his quarters that afternoon. What follows nearly becomes a war in Empress Maren's great hall, with both delegations reaching for weapons before Maren's voice cuts through the room and stops them.
Through the crisis, Barash's anger is large and genuine — but so is his restraint when Maren asserts control. He is furious. He is not unreasonable. He understands that the Empress holds the balance, and he accepts her mediation, however reluctantly.
When Lia's magical search clears the Highfolk delegation, Barash personally oversees her interrogation under his people's truthsayer device — a brass-and-copper machine that induces a state of blissful, involuntary honesty. He has his answer quickly: the stone is not with the Aelorians. He accepts this result without argument.
As the Deepfolk delegation prepares to leave for the night, Barash finds Lia alone in the corridor. She is still shaking from the truthsayer device and the events of the evening. He moves with surprising speed for something of his weight and age.
He does not offer comfort, exactly. He tells the truth.
"Poor child of earth. I am sorry the khrosh are taking you."
He uses the Deepfolk word — khrosh, sky-demons, which is what the Deepfolk call the Highfolk, with considerable contempt. When Lia lifts her chin and tells him she is going willingly, that she is Empress Maren's kin and they would not dare harm her, he makes that sound — the low grinding almost-laugh, bitter and dark.
"Do you believe that?"
He tells her what he believes: that the Highfolk hate everything that has no wings. That her race and his are like animals to them, or worse. He wishes her luck. He says he hopes they will meet again on solid ground.
"But I doubt it. Farewell."
He turns and sweeps away. His crystalline beard catches the torchlight one last time.
Later — after Lia is already gone — Barash requests a private audience with Maren. He comes not to demand or threaten but, in his way, to explain.
He tells her of the Gashdagan — Clan Monolith's masterwork, the greatest construction any living thing in existence has ever undertaken. He was chief engineer from the beginning. The work took a hundred and fifty years. By the time the end was in sight, the Crumbling had already begun, and without help he would not have lived to see it finished.
The clan gave him a Bloodstone. Their most precious resource, clan property, granted in extraordinary circumstances for an extraordinary task. And he completed the Gashdagan. This year. The thing he was born to build.
The clan let him keep the stone — the first time in living memory this had been permitted. It would give him decades more.
"There is one inconvenience of the stone that few know," he tells Maren. It cannot be worn at all hours — too much exposure damages the very tissues it preserves. He wears it morning and evening, at fixed hours. During the Feast, it was the middle hours of the night. The stone was in his chambers, as it always is at that time.
Neither of them says what this means. Someone knew. Someone had been watching.
He is composed, or tries to be, when he speaks of the theft's consequences for him personally.
"If the stone is not found… so be it. I have lived longer than I had any right to expect. I have seen my work completed. Perhaps that is enough."
But Maren can hear what the words are covering. The trembling underneath the dignity. The fear that this greatest of builders does not yet want to be done.
He leaves with a threat wrapped in courtesy — if Barash dies because a surface-dweller stole his life-stone and the Empress could not retrieve it, the political consequences for relations between Clan Monolith and the Empire will be severe. He says it without pleasure. It is simply true.
The throne room feels very empty after he is gone.
Barash is the builder of the Gashdagan — a vast underground city carved over generations from living rock in a cavern of near-impossible dimensions. Its name in Hurud, the Deepfolk tongue, translates as The Made Place: a deliberate act of creation in the deepest darkness.
It is Clan Monolith's monument and its masterwork. Grand, mysterious, built for permanence. What it was fully designed for — beyond habitation and the demonstration of Deepfolk capability — is a question that different clans answer differently, and that Barash himself does not explain to surface-dwellers.
Completing it is what made him chief. He built it. He leads the people who live in it. He spent decades of a life sustained only by a borrowed stone to see it finished.
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