Draven's Family

House Draven

House Draven is as old as a well-kept lie. Ellisara, last of the Vaerlan (a noble line burned three centuries ago by the Confraternity, an order of inquisitors that never disbanded), built it piece by piece to give herself a face the world would not recognize. Each of its members is held by a different thread, and none of those threads can snap without pulling on the others.
The patriarch shown to the world remembers nothing of the man he was. Viktor traded his human memory for a title, and it rests in the house reliquary, beside the pact that has bound the Draven to the Corvane (a merchant line) for three centuries. A single medallion seals both: if it is destroyed, the house loses its oldest alliance, and Viktor suddenly remembers everything he agreed to forget.
Norah is the last of the Corven, a family of landowners Ellisara made disappear fifty years ago to claim him. His memory was rewritten and he believes he has always been a Draven. The Corven blood has forgotten less than he has: the scent of his last cousins was once enough to send Saekh after them, during a day Norah cannot remember.
Saekh is the only mind in the house that no one has bought, sealed, or rewritten. A vahéran forms that bond only once in its life, and that bond is what draws Norah away from his sister: he feels his beast's mistrust of Ellisara without knowing it is not his own. Ellisara went to fetch him alone, six months in the southern marshes, and no one knows what she left behind to obtain him.
Morthelia is the only one who stayed by choice. Ellisara listens to no one else, and it is Morthelia who keeps the house's tempers from colliding; without her, the clan would not last a season.
That leaves Ellisara, who holds all the others. She sometimes travels alone under the name Elinor Vassane, hunting down the relics of her line still in circulation, such as Cruoris, a dark red armor forged by the Vaerlan that now wears another man. Each one is a thread the Confraternity could follow back to her. If Ellisara falls, all her leashes go slack at once, and the objects bound to her blood lose the balance she lent them.