Vetch Harrow

I must confess, of all the figures I have encountered in my reconstruction work, Vetch Harrow required the least... interpretation.

A straightforward man. A loyal friend. Two millennia dead, yet his engrams speak with remarkable clarity.

Where other accounts from this era demanded careful cross-reference and echo analysis, Harrow's memories came through almost intact. I suspect this says something about the man himself—he did not obscure. He did not embellish. He simply was.

The Man

Harrow served as pilot and breacher for a Caleedan crew operating from Drift's Edge in the years before the Breakage—though I hesitate to define him by occupation alone. He was planet-born, from Hearthe, a world I have yet to fully reconstruct. This marked him in ways both physical and spiritual.

Among the tall, wiry spacers of the Edge, he stood shorter but denser. Muscle built under true gravity does not fade easily. On Hearthe, the engrams tell me, even Vetch had been tall.

One wonders what else Hearthe took from him.

What Came Before

The engrams speak of "the war" but offer little detail. Five years prior to his arrival at Drift's Edge, something drove Harrow from his homeworld. The ruin he left behind was sufficient that he does not miss it—"not even a little," the records state.

His military service is evident in his bearing, his competence, his instinct to go first into danger. But the specifics remain sealed, either by damage to the source material or by the man's own reticence. Some memories, I suspect, are not meant to be recovered.

He carries what he carries. Busy hands, quiet head—his own catechism against the past.

His Nature

I will not pretend to clinical detachment here. Having spent considerable time with Harrow's reconstructed memories, I find myself... fond of him. Fond of a man who died before my civilisation was born.

He drank more than he intended. Monarian whisky, by preference. He had little patience for dreamers or ghost stories. He protected those younger than himself even as he struggled with his own shadows.

When asked if his captain had ever lied to him, his response was simply: "Plenty'a times."

And yet he stayed. He flew. He went in first.

There is a lesson in that, I think.

His Words

"I'm just appropriately scared shitless, unlike you."

Would that more of us possessed such honest fear.

I expect some within the Temple will question why a figure unknown to the Symphony before now merits such detailed reconstruction.

Let them question.

Harrow's account of the days before the Breakage—preserved across two thousand years of archival silence—may prove the most honest witness we have to that lost age. The Song needs its heroes, yes—but it also needs its survivors. Its quiet, stubborn, frightened survivors who did the work regardless.

The reconstruction continues.

~ NV