A Burden-Stay stands braced, arms raised or back set against a wall, a beam, or the crown of a vault, in the posture of someone taking a weight. The body has grown into the stone where it touches: palms fused to the rock, shoulders flattened under a lintel, the skin there grey and cracked like old mortar. Stress lines run up the arms and through the face without ever opening. The eyes move. The chest rises, slowly. They do not speak, but the stone they hold groans as they breathe, and the air around them is heavy and stale, smelling of rock dust and old sweat.

They are found in deep refuges and halls whose keepers refused evacuation: a flooded gallery, a hall whose stores have turned, a gate held long after it should have been closed. Most are in the Stonewake Deeps and the older holds of the Ironspine, where the Cast-Out’s old logic of righteous endurance runs deepest. A Burden-Stay may stand alone, or a ring of them may hold a whole chamber.

They hold. That is all they can do, and all they want: whatever is left of their minds is fixed on the weight. They know the living who come in and follow them with their eyes, and some seem to plead, though no one agrees for what. They do not attack. They draw others in by keeping the refuge standing, so that it still looks like shelter.

A Burden-Stay does not die while the weight rests on it; the Cast-Out’s reinforcement holds the body as it holds the wall. The stone it supports will not fall while it stands, however cracked. Freeing one, by cutting it from the rock or by easing its arms down, takes away the support at once, and the hall above comes down on everyone in it.

They give nothing but a warning: a hall with a Burden-Stay in it is a hall that should already have fallen. The danger is to the merciful and the stubborn alike. Rescuers who try to free a Stay bring the roof down; keepers who leave it standing go on sheltering in a tomb. Custodians clear the hall first, then free the Stay from the doorway with a long pole and let the chamber fall.

Under the Held Covenant the Burden-Stays are the clearest answer to the Last Chamber’s question, whether what is behind a seal can still be borne, and the hardest. Custodians call freeing one the "last release" and say the rite over it as a burial: the Stay is honoured as having held, and then the weight is let go. Seal practice and gate practice argue over each one. Some deep stories hold that a Stay can be talked down, if someone it trusted tells it the refuge is empty and the burden may be set down.