Darrow's uncle, the Lambda crew's drunken headTalk and last surviving brother of Darrow's hanged father.
Narol is Darrow's uncle and the headTalk of the two-hundred-strong Lambda drilling crew, thirty-five and worn old before his time by grendel swill. To Darrow he is a weak, cautious drunk, a pale shadow of the executed father he loved. Yet it is Narol who insists on calling a scanCrew for the gas pocket Darrow would have blithely drilled, and Narol who once taught the boy the zither and the forbidden dance in the old tunnels, hitting his ankles with a switch until he pirouetted clean.
At the Laureltide feast he and Darrow trade blows across the table over the Laurel, but he still keeps a kind word for Eo. His caution masks a fear whose source Darrow cannot fathom.
Thirty-five but aged and worn, big-framed, with long hard blinks as if it pains him to open his eyes; smells of grendel swill. Plays a metal-stringed zither slung at his hips.
HeadTalk of the Lambda drilling crew; Darrow's uncle and reluctant guardian.