Oren Voss

Oren Voss was born into a family that could not keep up with the brutality of a garrison town. His mother, a teacher from distant lands, made a fatal choice to teach him letters in secret, a crime in the eyes of the controlling garrison. When the captain’s purse vanished, young Oren was blamed as a culprit, beaten until he signed a confession he could not read. The next day, the soldiers whipped him again, threatening him with worse if he spoke the truth about who coerced him. In that hellish moment, his mother paid the ultimate price for rebellion, hanged before him as a warning to all who would dare to educate those they controlled. The memory of her body, the smell of the charred rope, and the taste of iron in his mouth became his enduring fuel. He learned not to trust officials and to measure a man by what he could hide. He found that the city’s broken people could be used; that those who could not read or write were the easiest to bend, the easiest to sell. As he grew, he learned to manipulate people with promises and fear, to exploit the city’s hunger for security, to smile while his ledger grew heavier with every bribe. His day job as sergeant gave him a platform to assign routes and watches, thus creating openings for smuggling and drug distribution. He maps the city’s arteries like a master architect, using the guard to build a network that pretends to uphold law while quietly feeding his empire. His hangers are filled with men and women who swear to him as a father would swear to a son. He never forgot the lessons his mother taught him about letters, but now the dark art of reading people supplants those lessons with a deeper literacy: the understanding that appearances are power, and power is the currency that buys safety for those who deserve none. Oren remains a protector and a predator, a sergeant who polices the city while secretly governing its shadows, and a man who will kill for a lie if that lie keeps the Ledger alive.