Dean Fallow Pien
“If you cannot overthrow the gods, teach their children to miscount.”
Overview
Dean Fallow Pien is the head of Smirkus Academy’s College of Commerce and Medicine, a Rational Coin economist-physician who escaped Silverwake’s precision only to spend his life replicating it under his own rules.
To Harlequin Vale he’s a mentor of quiet brilliance; to Silverwake he’s a defector whose absence went unacknowledged by design.
He teaches that the surest rebellion against divine stillness is efficiency without obedience.
Early Life and Upbringing
Born to a mid-rank noble family on the edge of the Still Fields, Fallow was raised under Serendahl’s perfect geometry — the kind that leaves no room for breath. His family administered crop quotas for the Sanctifiers, ensuring every harvest matched the Pattern exactly.
At seventeen, he witnessed the Recalibration of Pattern 37, when an entire hamlet was condemned for inefficiency. Families were erased from record; their fields salted into silence.
He survived only because he could calculate yield ratios faster than anyone else.
That night, the presiding warden told him:
“You see? Even mercy is mathematics.”
The phrase burned itself into his memory. It became both his trauma and his thesis.
Escape from Silverwake
Years later, while posing as a logistics apprentice, Pien forged transfer papers for a “research exchange” and left Silverwake under escort of a merchant convoy.
He spent three years in Embervault, studying under antipriests of motion who measured chaos as energy. From them he learned that entropy could be engineered — that systems could weaken divine order by existing outside perfect symmetry.
He relocated to Harlequin Vale, where his Rational Coin credentials earned him a post at Smirkus Academy. There he began his lifelong experiment: turning subversion into curriculum.
Philosophy and Beliefs
Pien does not believe Serendahl is just — but he cannot deny her precision.
He sees divinity as a formula that can be rewritten, not destroyed.
“Revolutions are noisy, inefficient things. I prefer corrosion — quieter, permanent.”
He views the Still Fields as a moral catastrophe that nonetheless sustains Canava’s economy. His approach is pragmatic, not revolutionary: he wants to design freedom so meticulously that no one notices when it arrives.
Project Restoration
A covert agricultural initiative funded through front scholarships and Rational Coin grants.
Its goal: to cultivate independent crop systems across neutral zones — Fenmarrow’s wetlands, Thorgun’s southern plateaus, and isolated Embervault test chambers — using heat-engines and soil resonance instead of divine geometry.
If successful, Project Restoration would prove that food can grow without Serendahl’s blessing, collapsing Silverwake’s monopoly on sustenance.
So far, every attempt near Canava has failed — proximity to the goddess suppresses growth before fruition.
Pien refuses to collaborate with either major Thorgun faction:
Cleftwright Covenant: “Zealotry with pickaxes.”
Pulsewright Order: “Pacifism in slow motion.”
Instead, he corresponds with Embervault’s Antipriests of Motion, exchanging data on entropy dampening, and funds beast sanctuaries like Talli Bramblecoat’s, believing empathy itself erodes divine rigidity.
Personality and Trauma
Pien’s mind is meticulous, his humor surgical.
He keeps ledgers instead of diaries, annotating his emotions in margins as if balancing them against guilt.
Symptoms of trauma:
Freezes at synchronized marching or rhythmic chanting.
Avoids open farmland; cannot stand the geometry of planted rows.
Compulsively maintains schedules — his only acceptable form of order.
Despite this, he is a generous teacher. His lectures mix dry wit with unsettling accuracy:
“Every ledger hides a pulse. Listen long enough, and you’ll find who’s bleeding.”
Allies and Rivals
Doctor Patch: Philosophical rival. Debates whether death is a pattern or a flaw.
Master Lume Jarra (Embervault): Occasional collaborator in divine-field interference studies.
Judge Thist (Vale): Consults him on medical ethics for carnival judiciary hearings.
Madame Orluna: Old friend; together they map cognitive fracturing caused by prolonged stillness exposure.
Legacy and Influence
Under his guidance, Smirkus Academy’s commerce and medicine programs merged into the Kinetic Sciences curriculum — a hybrid discipline blending economic modeling, anatomy, and motion therapy.
His students are pragmatic dreamers: healers who balance budgets, accountants who patch wounds.
Rumor claims he keeps a sealed vial of blackened Still Fields wheat on his desk — a reminder that efficiency can murder.
In One Sentence
Dean Fallow Pien is the quiet corrosion of Silverwake’s perfection — a Rational Coin doctor who treats civilization itself for its addiction to stillness.