Fredricks Walt

Fredricks is the Fifth Generation head of House Walt and one of the Seven Ancestors whose consciousness resides within the Blue Jewel that the protagonist Lyle inherits. Like the other ancestors, he appears to Lyle inside the jewel's memory-rooms, guiding and training him and sharing the harsh lessons of his own life. Short of stature and born partly of Court-Nobility blood, he was scorned as an 'upstart' by the surrounding lords throughout a reign he himself calls the worst and most joyless of all the generations.

As a child Fredricks was described as bright, honest and quick to smile, but a chain of tragedies hollowed him out. A staged 'bandit' attack sent his family's carriage off a cliff; his mother shielded him and lost the unborn child she was carrying, and could bear no more children. As an adolescent he was surrounded and beaten by noble children who mocked him as a 'shorty,' yet he endured in silence because retaliation would have destroyed House Walt's fragile position. Worst of all, when he grew close to two village sisters during a settlement tour, an informant sold that secret to his enemies, who tortured and hanged the sisters and the villagers and carved the taunt 'Shorty' into a tree to wound him. From that day his gaze turned hard and clouded, and he swore he would exterminate his enemies no matter how many decades or centuries it took.

The adult Fredricks is famously cold and expressionless, treating his own children as tools — turning them into heirs and marriage pieces for his vassals and giving them, by his own admission, less affection than he gave his animals. He kicks down doors to drag reluctant daughters into political marriages and shows no reaction to their tears or curses. Yet he genuinely dotes on animals, keeping a menagerie as a hobby, and adores the Kirin that imprinted on him and follows him like a child to a parent. In battle he is ruthlessly efficient: he authored House Walt's entire military code and drilled elite forces that could be mobilized across the realm, and he wields a unique weapon, the 'snake blade' — a sword with a trigger on its hilt and a segmented edge that writhes like a living serpent, whipping out to sever heads before coiling back into a blade.

His arc is one of a man consumed by vengeance who tried, and largely failed, to escape it. He held House Walt back from open war during his lifetime for the sake of his children, hoping to spare them the suffering he endured, but confesses that once he had a concubine and heir the machinery of revenge had already gone too far to stop. His legacy passes to his son, the Sixth Generation Fiennes, to whom he hands the blue stone, and echoes on through the Kirin May, who remembers him with gratitude for saving her life. Within the jewel he remains a blunt, self-aware mentor who insists Lyle understand that lords and nobles are all of one ruthless breed.