Brod Walt

Brod Walt is the Seventh Generation head of House Walt and Lyle's grandfather. In life he was a strict, dignified provincial aristocrat who raised the family to the rank of count and served as an advisor to the King of Banseim, at times leading House Walt's soldiers into the field. After death his memories and skill were preserved in the small blue Jewel worn as a pendant, making him one of the Seven Ancestors who counsel the protagonist Lyle from within it — referred to throughout as the 'Seventh Generation.'

Unlike the other ancestors, Brod broke with family tradition by refusing his father's halberd and choosing the gun (a rifle/pistol), determined to fight in his own style rather than be measured against his brilliant father, the Sixth Generation Fiennes. He was taught to shoot as a boy by his aunt Mireia, the first woman he admired. His inherited skills are the third-tier 'Swap,' which trades his own position with another's, and a second-tier 'Warp' that teleports a bullet past an obstacle — abilities that prove decisive when Lyle inherits them.

Beneath a confident, commanding public face, Brod was privately insecure and exhausted by the crushing weight of leading an ever-growing House. Wracked by comparison to his celebrated father and grandfather, and later to his own prodigiously gifted son Maizel, he struggled to connect with a child who never seemed to need him — a wound that echoes in Maizel's own strained fatherhood toward Lyle. Warm, hardworking, and deeply devoted to his sharp-tongued wife Xenoa, he wanted nothing grander than a quiet life, rejecting his wife's ambitions to conquer the continent.

Though later blamed as the one who 'drew all the roots of evil into House Walt,' Brod genuinely loved both his son and his grandson. His arc culminates before Lyle's final duel against Maizel: rather than let his grandfather witness father and son kill each other, Lyle inherits Brod's art and lets him fade with a smile. The Jewel then takes the form of a silver gun — Brod Walt himself — with which Lyle strikes down Maizel, the old man's last words affirming that Lyle was truly loved.