The Hand of the Architect is a person rumoured to aid the fabled Architect of Friedport.
The Real Hand
Secrets ahead!
While anyone is free to read what’s ahead, everything else in this article is privileged knowledge only known to a few specific people in the world of Vendrith. Take particular caution to not assume your character knows these things, or avoid it entirely if you’re worried about keeping your own and your characters’ knowledge separate!
The Hand of the Architect, real name Ferraud de Koyne, is the Architect’s twin brother, and a blind man. Sympathetic to his sister not being taken seriously enough to have her architectural plans turned into reality, he began playing a falsified identity and made himself out to be a respected male architect, while in reality just forwarding her designs. Doing so, the twins saw many of the Architect’s plans come to fruition.
The twins were also secret Crusaders involved with the Blackout Crusaders of the island. The Hand, having picked up an interest in mathematics, became an unlikely but talented marksman. He performed best while his sisters was around to be his eyes, calling out advanced and precise measurements and angles to adjust his aim. Utilising this, the twins performed a number of targeted assassinations against people standing in their way or whom had disrespected them.
The life of the Hand became difficult once his sister died and became a Ghost that was bound to the sites of her creation, and their ability to realise new projects slowed to a crawl. The Architect’s grand plan to have Crusader Armies invade Horiza failed, both the twins were eventually marginalised at the Crusader camp, especially after the rise of its new leader - Auldwell Fareawel. The twins would gain a grudge against him.
The Hand has attempted to kill the The Landcrab Plot on multiple occasions. One such occasion was at the Riseagain Tower, an enormous wooden tower the Architect realised the plans for based on the Amurrun Markings of Valfrid Veldaks. Here, they killed Mag Gafn, a goblin inventor fraud that had received the credit for the tower, but failed to kill Ashur Holdok and Gator Grippli. Later, Ashur Holdok installed a plaque honouring the Architect as the building’s actual planner on the tower.