Orun Bellstone is a leading voice of the Deep Listeners, the mystics and geologists of the Stonebound who believe that deep mining has woken something beneath the Blackspine. He warned his friend Brogar Deepdelver not to break the ancient seal far below the oldest workings. Brogar did it anyway. Since then Orun has spent his days with his ear to the stone, and what he hears there is the hardest kind of knowledge: the kind nobody wants to act on.
Appearance
Orun is an old man, slight and narrow-shouldered by the measure of his folk, with the deep stillness of someone who has spent decades making no sound. His ashen-brown skin is dry and finely creased. His crown is bald, and the gray hair at the sides is grown long and bound into two thin braids that he tucks into his collar so they cannot brush against the rock. He is clean-shaven, and his dark, heavy-lidded eyes are usually half closed, because he listens better without them. Everything he wears is chosen for silence: a long robe of undyed gray felt, soft felt boots he takes off in the chapels, a cloth belt hung with tuned bells, each wrapped in leather so it cannot ring by accident. His ancestor-stone is a small, bell-shaped river pebble.
What he hears
To Orun the mountain is alive enough to be listened to, not only dug. He will not say the rhythms below mean less than they do just so others can sleep. After the Warm Shaft was opened and bells began to ring by themselves, he declared that Vuldra, the Heart Under Stone, is waking, and he has tracked its heat-pulse ever since, kneeling barefoot in the deep chapels with one palm pressed to warm basalt. Beneath that pulse, he says, there is another rhythm, slower, never falling into step. The forge bells now pause for it. What makes it, Orun cannot say.
His place in the story
Orun's testimony is the strongest evidence the Deep Anvil Compact has as it decides whether to close the deepest mines, and also the least welcome. Keld Marrbreaker has every reason to dismiss him as a mystic and nothing more. His friendship with Brogar is wounded but not broken, a standing argument between restraint and discovery. Far away in the Greenfold, the Hearthkin weather-reader Perrin Rainlistener dreams of old powers stirring, and the two exchange what they hear. Sometimes their signs agree. And Orun has begun to wonder aloud about the pause every Stonebound smith keeps in the oldest hammer rhythms, a beat no one strikes into, and what it was first made to leave room for.