Chaplain Bréanainn Ó Sé

Bréanainn Ó Sé is a Ridgemoot chaplain of the Celtic Union who keeps Saint Aoife's devotion and serves Threshold Station under the Union's devotional chaplaincy. The record holds one paper of his, written jointly with the Survey Archive's reconciliation desk, and his part in it is a single caution, offered in his own name and binding no one.

The paper is the Warm-Edge Correlation. After the Dock Seven failure of Mid-Autumn 2831 UCSD, the reconciliation desk laid the warm, iterating signature that Rook-7's non-standard arrays had logged at the point of closure beside every profile in the boundary-decay record and found no match; then beside Brother Daire's fourteen-century-old account of a thorn well that ran warm for three days, and found one. The instrument signature is the same. The correlation is real, the identification is not, and the file stays open.

Known History

• Ridgemoot chaplain keeping Aoife's devotion; serving Threshold Station under the Celtic Union devotional chaplaincy at the time of the paper. The Warm-Edge Correlation, circulated as an unnumbered working paper after Mid-Autumn 2831 UCSD; a copy is held in the reconciliation binders beside the Dock Seven incident file.
• His caution: the devotion he keeps has every reason to want the warm edge to mean mercy, and that wanting is precisely why the devotion must not be the one to say it does. A devotion that decided on Line Captain Shepherd's behalf that a levril at her boundary was a saint sent to save her would be turning a woman still becoming into a meaning, and closing a file that is not hers to close.
• His further precision, which he asked to stand in the record: even the word divine settles nothing, because in this cosmology it has no fixed referent, so to call the warm edge "divine mercy" is to claim a precision the setting itself does not have. A levril is a levril.
• More than one Ridgemoot chaplain is on record with the Union's prevailing position, that a thirteenth-century (AD) holy woman and a twenty-ninth-century (UCSD) Cascade taxonomist were never answering the same question; whether Ó Sé is among them the record does not say.

Character Notes

The paper calls his second point "characteristic of him", and the first bears it out. He argues from the devotion's own inheritance: Aoife's discipline of saying what was seen, keeping what does not fit, and letting the ambiguity stand in the record rather than smoothing it for anyone's comfort, the devotion's own included. The reconciliation desk's contribution is shorter; his is longer because the devotion has more to lose by being wrong.

The record places him at the Ridgemoot and at Threshold Station and nowhere else. His age, his clan, his valley, how a Ridgemoot chaplain came to serve a Solar System shore station, and whether he first had Aoife from a ship-telling or a reader-school are not on file. The paper is the whole of what the record holds of him.

See also

• The Warm-Edge Correlation
• Saint Aoife, Aoife (character profile) and The Life of Saint Aoife
• Sen Lovax — the reconciliation desk he wrote beside
• Levrils: Dragons and Constraint Literacy
• Dock Seven Night Watch Addendum — Day 52
• Aethelrock — the Ridgemoot