Mara Venn

Alder Venn's granddaughter, who came back to the family's drowned prospect and made it a Silt Hands cache — taking from the deep what it once took from her blood.

Mara grew up on the story of the Cut: the seam that lied, the debt that outlived her grandfather, the Venn name spent on water. She did not become a prospector. She became a Silt Hand, and when the ring needed a quiet cache within a short walk of Valenfeld she offered the one place no honest soul would dig again — her own ruined inheritance. She penned the ash-hounds that had denned in the flooded mouth as a living alarm, dried out the old workings, and calls herself the Cache-Keeper without irony. She skims a little off every crate that passes through, and tells herself the deep still owes the Venns that much. She holds the deepest dry chamber and will not leave it; her cutters and hounds are meant to wear an intruder down before they reach her.