The people who stand with Orin Calder — mentor, captain, glassblower, and the quarter itself. All fictional characters invented for this codex.
Keeper of The Green Flask, Orin's teacher, and the closest thing the codex has to its author — half the marginalia quoted on this site is in her hand. Voss taught Orin to brew, to measure, and to throw; she also taught him the line she most regrets: "a poison well-aimed is an argument." She still makes him sweep the shop when he visits. She is the reason he measures twice.
Captain of the Phialguard, Orin's training master, and the man who recruited him off a barricade at dawn. Holt's doctrine — measure twice, throw once — is stenciled inside every guard flask, and his red-chalk note "in the rain" still marks Orin's Seven Phials trial on the hall's slate wall. Gruff, precise, and quietly proud in a way he would deny under oath.
Master of the furnace-house at the Row's western end. Every phial Orin has ever thrown was blown in her works, and every guard bandolier is stamped with her furnace-mark. During the Ashen Siege she kept the furnaces lit on credit and nerve; Orin's evacuation veil in Scene 4 was thrown for her crew. She claims she can tell which apprentice blew a phial by the sound it makes breaking. Nobody has ever caught her out.
The codex treats the quarter as a character: prickly, loyal, and unanimous on exactly two points — the glassworks stay independent, and Voss's tinctures are overpriced (they are not). The Row raised Orin, hid him, armed him, and now argues about him the way families argue: constantly, and entirely on his side. See the [World Guide](/world-guide).