The High Elder

The illusionists who could not live in the world took Soulrend Mountain for their own, and they hold him as their head. His people call him the Venerable; he calls himself this seat. He is not one man: several juniors stand with him whose minds pass between puppet and flesh as freely as his own. Their bodies were spent long ago, but their minds remain in puppets, holding the Rift open from somewhere very far away.

To enter his gate one cuts every tie. A zither player who survived a massacre was taken in and given the name Yan Qiansui, and with the name a set of strings for an illusory pipa.

He means to open the Rift for the Merciful Lady, so that she may come down into the Perfect Vessel and return to the Waking Realm. He chose Soulrend Cliff for the place: the ground where the Eleven were born, thick with Sha-Chi, and close to where his people practise.

He says the passage had sixty years left to run, but a stroke of luck has cut it to three. The own child of a high lord of the Mandate is growing in the belly of a woman of the opera house. The child is what he wants — a sacrifice to shorten the passage.

Four Acolytes serve him — Hansui, Yanru, Lei Ting and Guhe — fire, poison, thunder and ice, one art apiece. Each hides in the Discordance behind some vessel, a scarecrow or a crystal eye, and acts only on his word.

He works with the Herald: Thread-Binding's puppetry, then dragon-body work, and at the last the High Elder seals it into No. 99. The Herald once sent him a pipa head as a token. To keep No. 99 beyond anyone's reach he made a prison of the Blizzard Blademaster, sealing the man and the puppet into one broken body.

Soul climbed Soulrend Cliff and destroyed their bodies. With nothing left to hold it open from afar, the Rift closed for good.