Orren was a mason of a Kolonoth border-town the chronicle does not name beyond its proximity to the salt-flat at Tannakeel. He had been mortaring the wall since dawn on the day Grandex came, in the careful steady labour of a man whose trade had taught him to keep his hands moving in the presence of news he did not yet have a name for.
From the south-east bastion he watched the duel between his town's saviour and the Infernal General Skulvath for the full nine hours. He watched the salt outside the circle crack inward, in the seventh, by weight. He heard Skulvath laugh once in the eighth — a laugh he has, in the years since, tried and failed to describe, and has eventually agreed only to say, in private and only to his wife, that it was the laugh of a man understanding the shape of his own ending and finding the shape acceptable.
He saw the strike, in the ninth, only as a movement of the greatsword that ended in two pieces of body on the salt. He saw the Archangel stand over the pieces from the strike to the dusk to the first watch of the night. He spoke to Phaeren — who came to the wall as a courier, in cloak and without weapon — and helped him understand that the town's survivors needed Skulvath's body for grief.
The chronicle preserves Orren's testimony as the foundation of the Skulvath story. Orren the mason died at sixty-seven, in his bed, of the slow ordinary causes that take masons in their bed. His testimony is filed under the seal of the Twelfth of Kolonoth, with Phaeren's.
