GIDEON

"You don't dive to a wedding, Receiver. You walk."

Also known as "Gideon Three-Fingers," the Silt-Preacher serves as the spiritual leader of the Choir. A man in his sixties with a shaved head and a throat tattooed with concentric black circles, he claims to have maintained the sacred hymn for three generations.

Gideon asserts that the "Bride" (the Amber heart) has been waiting in her silo for two hundred seventeen years. He rejects the notion that the radiation of the post-Fall world is a poison, instead describing the merging of bomb and seed as a holy "marriage" that must be sung to, rather than cleansed.

"He is not merely a fanatic; he is a man who knows the hidden paths, including the pre-Splash maintenance tunnel to the upper chamber."