The New Moon Gravediggers

A trade lineage with a single gravedigger at a time, the title passing from master to apprentice. Its seat is the Vale of Echoes, whose graves are “older than the Court, older than the Order, perhaps older than the Equinox”. The serving New Moon Gravedigger is Bram, since 960. It takes its name from the New Moon, the only light that reaches the bottom of the Vale.

The whole lineage rests on one sentence: the dead belong to whoever remembers them. The name is everything, and a dead person with no name is lost twice, so if there is none, the Gravedigger gives one. The Gravedigger receives those no one wants, neither choosing nor charging, and talks to the graves: it is custom, not madness. Since the Breaking the lineage knows it was right. An Echo that hears its name grows calmer, stays near its grave and stops wandering. “It was as if the name were an anchor.”