The Steward of the Nameless Hall

The most-watched boggart in the Marches, and the reason a handful of scholars have started visiting the ruin-country against advice. Like all boggarts it remembers nothing of what it was. Unlike most, its habits are elaborate: it keeps a formal protocol, in sequence, nightly, in a hall whose name appears in no Kingdom record — receiving someone who does not arrive.

In Person

Neat, courteous, and entirely undramatic. The Steward greets visitors at the gate — a gate in a wall with no other side — takes their names, shows them in, and offers what the hall has, which is a swept floor, a laid hearth that is never lit, and a place at a table set every evening for a fixed number of people.

It will answer any question it can. Asked whose hall this is, it becomes distressed: not frightened, not evasive — distressed, in the manner of someone who has been asked their own name and finds the word missing. Visitors have learned not to ask twice, and the ones who ask three times are asked to leave, gently, and are not received again.

History

There is none, and that is the point. Every fey loses their memories at metamorphosis, and boggarts lost theirs in a country full of ruins and kept the habits instead.

The Steward's habits are the most elaborate on record: a full household protocol, performed in order, nightly, in a forty-room hall — the arrival sequence, the seating, the hearth, the closing of gates that no longer close anything. Reconstructed from watching, it describes a working great house in a style the Kingdom's histories say never existed, and the number of places laid does not correspond to any known court.

Nine other boggarts have attached themselves to the hall over the years. None can say why.

Method

It has no power and exercises none. Its significance is evidentiary: it is the most complete surviving description of pre-Kingdom Faerie life, and it is not a document but a person doing a job, nightly, without an employer.

It also sweeps a path — every day, without interruption, for as long as anyone has known it — to the low domed rise in the meadow where the Marches' boundary-stone distances converge. It cannot say why. It does not like to be there after dark.

Household

The Nine. Boggarts who have taken up posts around the hall: a gate-keeper, a cook with no kitchen, a groom with no stable. Each keeps their own sequence. Together they are a staff roster for a house that has not existed in centuries.

The Rat Corporation of the Undercroft. Not the Steward's, but the hall's cellars connect to theirs, and the two have an arrangement of long standing that both describe in terms of terms and contract. The rats are the better witnesses and nobody has ever asked them anything.

The Antiquarians. The illegal, enthusiastic, and increasingly organized network of Leprechaun surveyors, Gnome clerks, Gremlin strata-keepers, and one Wisp astronomer, who have realized their separate anomalies are one anomaly. Several of them have sat at the Steward's table and been fed.

Relations

None, formally. The Great Hunt rides around the Marches and has never asked the boggarts for anything, which is either an oversight or the most interesting fact about the Goblin King. The Kingdom denies the Marches exist and has ensured for four hundred years that no expedition is chartered.

The Steward would receive either of them politely and lay two more places.

Reputation

To the Wilds: a haunted ruin with a very polite occupant. To the Kingdom: not a subject, not a person, and not a topic. To the handful of people who have understood what they were looking at: the single most important witness in either realm, giving testimony nightly, in the form of table settings.

Hooks

"It asked my name and wrote it in a book. There is no book. It wrote my name in it and I watched it do so."