Social — Ormand Vex, the Refugee Scholar – The Boarwood Covenant (6/24)

Ormand Vex — Former Torvin Academy Librarian

The tracks lead to a hidden hollow where Ormand Vex is hiding with a wounded student. He is gaunt, haunted, and clutching a leather-bound journal.

"I fled Edme when the Gardeners marked me. They're looking for the covenant — the old binding. They think it can be used to legitimize their revolution. But they don't understand it. They don't understand what they're awakening."

Ormand's Knowledge:

The covenant's Fourth Seat is a "place of judgment where the unborn speak for the future."
The Gray Gardeners are searching for the treaty faces.
He possesses a fragment of Hosetter's writings about "oaths that bind beyond mortal memory."

Reward: Ormand shares a map fragment showing the Torvin Academy Research Outpost.

From Hosetter's The Perils of Binding

"Oaths are the chains we forge for our future selves. The covenant's architects believed they could bind the land's spirit to mortal will, but they forgot that the spirit of a place cannot be caged. The Fourth Seat was meant to be a release valve — a place where the land could speak for itself. They erased it because they were afraid of what it might say."