Antoine de Cerberus

A noble paladin of Archon. He answered Commode Telus's call for help the night Anastasia Varanov died, saved the murderer from the Minotaur, and saw enough of that room to know who the murderer was. He carried it to the censor, who buried it and let an innocent man go to the scaffold. Antoine opposed tyranny and chose freedom. This was the great refusal.

Founding a country capable of defying a god required more than conviction. He went looking for the man his order had condemned, and found the most dangerous creature in the world and Archon's most bitter enemy. He saw not a monster to destroy, but an ally: two rebels fleeing the same tyrant to build a new world.

Archon let the rebels go, for a price. Antoine believed these people could do better than the Ark: then he would watch them, and never intervene, and see their true nature for himself. Antoine disappeared to keep that wager, and Vlad Varanov was crowned king in his place.

He kept his human form and the divine gifts that let him turn invisible or take another face. He has been watching Cerberus ever since, a tortured witness to everything done by the people he bet on: Vlad's long reign and its madness, the massacres, the Council that replaced Vlad. He cannot lift a hand to stop any of it. One sentence would free him, and the bargain has no other end: the day he says he misses the Ark, Archon has won.

When Aldor killed Archon, the Partage and the planar seal fell with him. The wager did not. Antoine is a paladin, and he gave his word: he goes on watching, bound to a dead god, and there is no longer anyone to hear the sentence that would free him. No one knows he is there.