The Soul Bearer
An itinerant chronicler, walking the roads between heroes and history.
Across Faerûn, taverns remember names badly. Scribes forget faces. Tombstones sink. Songs are shortened because the ale ran out before the verses did. Yet every so often, a name survives longer than it has any right to—carried from city to city, polished by many tongues into something like legend.
Some say this is chance. Others whisper about a single, stubborn figure who will not allow certain lives to slip into the dark.
They call that figure
The Soul Bearer
Names & Titles
In Waterdeep's dockside inns, the Soul Bearer is spoken of as “the one with too many stories in their eyes.” In Neverwinter's rebuilt quarters, they're called “the quiet bard with the heavy book.” Among certain elves of Evereska, the name is more formal: Taleara’thil, “the Keeper of Threads.”
These titles disagree on the details but agree on the essence: whoever the Soul Bearer is, they are less a person and more a function—a role meant to help the Realms remember itself.
The Mandate
The Soul Bearer does not guide fate. They do not command armies, bend kingdoms, or steer the Weave. Their task is at once humbler and far more terrible:
To collect the stories of the worthy. To carry their names beyond their final breath.
Where others see a brawl, the Soul Bearer sees a turning point. Where others forget a fallen ally, the Soul Bearer quietly inks a page. They walk through taverns, ruins, temples, alleys, guildhalls—even the fringes of other planes—gathering fragments of lives before they crumble.
Patronage of the Gods
No priesthood openly claims the Soul Bearer, yet the gods of record and revelation are said to watch their steps closely.
- Oghma favors the Soul Bearer as an unorthodox librarian, stuffing the world's margins with unexpected footnotes in the form of living people.
- Deneir smiles at the way each story is scribed—not on parchment alone, but in choices, scars, and strange little miracles.
- Savras delights in the tangled fate-threads the Soul Bearer collects: intersecting lives, almost-meetings, and unlikely convergences.
- Myrkul is said to tolerate this work with grim amusement. If souls must pass, let someone at least remember who they were.
Some sages argue the mantle of Soul Bearer is not granted by any single deity, but by a rare, uneasy agreement among them. Mortals die. Legends fade. Even gods, in time, are rewritten. The Soul Bearer is the compromise: a moving anchor that keeps certain stories from being lost entirely.
The Great Ledger of Fates
Those who have seen it—and remained sober enough to describe it—say the Soul Bearer carries a single tome wherever they go. Some call it the Great Ledger of Fates, others simply the book.
Its pages are said to rearrange themselves at dusk, grouping names not by birth or nation, but by shared moments: two strangers who once crossed paths in a market, heroes who never met but fought the same hidden war, companions bound by jokes no one else understands.
Every entry begins the same way—with a name, carefully written. The rest is a mixture of rumor, witness, and whatever the Soul Bearer has gleaned by watching from the edges of battlefields and barstools. Some stories span many pages. Others are a single, heartbreaking line.
Invitation to the Hall
If you are reading these words, you stand—for a moment—where the Soul Bearer stands: at the crossroads between quiet lives and loud legends. The figures you find recorded here are drawn from taverns, courts, ruins, and roadside shrines scattered across Faerûn.
Some are crafters. Some are wanderers. Some are trouble waiting for a context. All of them, in one way or another, have brushed their fate against the edge of the Ledger.
In time, new names will be inked. New tales will join the old. The Great Ledger of Fates is never finished; it simply pauses between stories, the way a bard pauses between songs to refill their cup.
Should you ever wish your own story to be written here, find the Soul Bearer where the light is warmest and the map is most confusing—very likely in a corner of Neverwinter, pen in hand, listening for the next name worth carrying.