Kael of the Bowmen was the second-eldest angel of Dremenus's twelve and the first of his order to arrive on Celesterra. He was older than most of the other angels by four centuries. He carried the steadiest attendance of any angel in Dremenus's council. He carried, on Celesterra, a bow whose wood and string the chronicler's mortal anchors did not have a name for, unstrung when no work required the string, drawn only at the moment the arrow had been earned.
The southern coast
He arrived on Celesterra in S12 and made his post the southern coast, in country the chronicle had not used in any of its earlier seasons. The Vornholt witch Issen, climbing the southern cliff to read a sea that had been off by half a degree for three nights, found him at the cliff's edge listening. She left a small carved stone at his left foot. He kept it. The kingdom of Vornholt — which had spoken to no outsider in seven generations — had, by his keeping of the stone, been in a kind of quiet correspondence ever since.
The few times he drew
The chronicle records him drawing his bow three times. Once on the southern cliff (the chronicle does not record the target, only that the sea afterwards held). Once at the Darklume gate in S19c2, when Maelis's grey horse came through the broken threshold: he loosed five arrows in ten breaths and the willing-dead front rank — including Grendar — was, by the fifth, mostly unmade. Once more in country the chronicle does not yet number.
He met Kira Morrow on the Caedrin lake-shore at dawn in S11c3 — the first angel she had been read by. Three sentences, three answers, a bow at his side that he did not raise. The conversation gave her, by its end, the small specific reading her office had not, in nine years, encountered. He did not name his order. He did not name his master. He gave her, instead, the architecture of three orders walking on her continent.
