Varden the Blind Trail

Varden guides travelers through the Bleak Fens—twenty miles of stagnant water, choking reeds, and rotting corduroy track where every map rots within a week. Bogfire burned out his eyes back in his youth, leaving them milky-white and pupil-less. Since then, he relies solely on his ears and the tread of others. By the scrape of boots alone, he can tell if a man has a limp or simply lacks nerve. Through the heavy tremors deep beneath his heels, he senses when a bloated monstrosity the size of a hay wagon rolls over beneath the peat.

He has no use for clinking silver; metal carries a dead smell and cannot whisper the way. What he requires is a drop of fresh blood upon his open palm. By that scent, Varden holds a traveler's trail in his memory for exactly one turn of the sun, long enough to make the crossing. He flatly refuses drunkards, children, and haggling scoundrels. Yet he takes on runaway convicts, cutpurses, and men with a noose at their heels without asking a single question.

His voice is low and deliberate, unburdened by sighted flourishes. He counts his strides under his breath and taps his iron-shod stave to catch the echo off dead timber. At the snap of a twig fifty paces out, he will cut anyone off mid-sentence. Varden tolerates no pity: when a group once tried to steady him by the elbow over a ruined bridge, he simply left them to howl on a moss hummock.

If left unbothered, he might explain what lightning smells like before it strikes, why lighting a fire in the fen calls down ruin, and how the patter of rain differs from the stalk of a creeping beast.