An Oath-Breaker is tall and gaunt, wrapped in a long coat of ink-black, its body beneath like a figure drawn in thick, dark strokes, with no face but a single crimson line where a mouth would be. Around its arms and throat run chains of glowing script, the words of broken oaths, which clink and whisper as it moves. It moves fast and straight, and wherever it walks the ground of the Song rings with a hard, accusing rhythm. When it finds what it hunts, it speaks the broken oath aloud in the oath-breaker’s own voice. It smells of burnt paper.

They range across the Binding Song, and are said to follow a broken oath wherever the breaker goes, since a promise made in the Song binds across all planes.

An Oath-Breaker follows the tether of a broken promise to the one who broke it, and does not stop. It does not hunt anyone else, and it cannot be persuaded or bought off; the only thing that ends its hunt is the oath being kept, or the penalty paid.

It follows a broken vow across any distance, through the Veil and across planes, and finds the breaker however well hidden. What it does when it finds them is the penalty the oath named, or worse if it named none.

They are why a promise made in the Song is trusted. Their danger is to anyone who makes a vow there lightly.

Many oath-takers on Caeldon still swear with a closing line asking that the hunter come for them if they fail, and travellers' tales of the Oath-Breakers may lie behind it. Whether an Oath-Breaker has ever crossed into Caeldon to take someone is told in many stories and shown in none.

That does not stop the tales: of the lord who broke a vow sworn at an old judgement-hall gate and was found in his locked bedchamber with chains of light still fading round his throat.