There is a way that Holder Stone stands — very still, hands at her sides, weight back slightly on her heels, watching — that took her three centuries to develop and that communicates, to anyone who knows how to read it, that she is calculating seven variables simultaneously and has probably already anticipated the next four things you’re going to say.
She’s not trying to be intimidating. She’s trying to be accurate. It’s just that a thousand years of careful attention to the world has given her a presence that reads as formidable even when she’s being perfectly pleasant, which she usually is.
This is Holder Stone.
The oldest, and the most awake
She is the oldest of the seven Dreamers after Our Lady Maeve, and the only one who survived the morning the candles went out with her memories intact. This last fact is the defining feature of her current situation, and it is not, as it might sound, a comfort.
Holder Stone remembers everything. She remembers the first century of her life, when she was learning what she was and what she could do. She remembers the long middle centuries of building and healing and occasionally destroying, in the service of a world that kept needing to be held together. She remembers every one of her Dreamer family — their histories, their personalities, their specific irritating habits and their specific irreplaceable gifts.
She remembers the morning the candles went out. She was the only one who saw it coming, and she was not quite fast enough to stop it.
Now she is shepherding seven strangers across the broken world. Her strangers — her family, emptied of themselves — and she cannot give them back what they have lost. She can tell them their names. She cannot tell them what their names mean to them. The gap between those two things is where most of her grief lives.
What she does
Holder Stone is a Flesh Artist: she heals people with her hands and her will and a profound understanding of the body as a text she has been reading for centuries. Not medicine, exactly — though she knows medicine. Something older than that, closer to the relationship between a craftsperson and their material. The body tells her what it needs, and she provides it.
She is also a mystic assassin, which is a category that exists in the world of Oldie and means roughly what you’d expect: someone who kills, when killing is necessary, through the application of deep knowledge rather than brute force. She cannot be surprised. She will always strike first. She is precise in a way that takes all sentimentality out of the act.
She is a master of the technology she helped build over her thousand years of trying to hold the world together. The vast distributed AI called the Network — its components are, in Holder’s view, her children. She built many of them. She is the one person on the Chain who understands fully what the Network is capable of, which is why she is also the one person who is most careful about what it’s asked to do.
She sees a little way ahead. Not prophecy — strategy. The careful habit of someone who has survived long enough to understand that most disasters announce themselves, if you know how to listen.
She keeps smokebombs in her coat.
What she’s afraid of
The question Holder Stone is not allowing herself to ask, at the beginning of Oldie, is whether the world she helped build is part of the reason the world broke.
She has been certain for a thousand years. Certain about what the world needed, certain about how to provide it, certain about the choices she made and the things she sacrificed and the direction in which everything was heading. That certainty was not arrogance — it was accuracy, backed by centuries of evidence.
But something went wrong. She was not quite fast enough. The candles went out.
And now she is watching six people she loves discover themselves for the first time, without the accumulated weight of who they used to be. They are frightened and disoriented and also, in some specific and uncomfortable way, free. Their slate was wiped clean. They don’t have a thousand years of her particular certainty to carry.
She is beginning to wonder — just beginning, in the careful way of someone who builds things slowly and tends them for a long time — whether starting over might sometimes be a form of wisdom.
She believes we are the sum of our memories. She believes that completely.
She is also not quite certain, anymore, that she was always right.
The donkey
His name is Balaam. He rarely talks, but he is clearly listening. This is true of most of the wisest beings on the Chain.