The Telling of Sigurd, Exile-Bound and Lodge-Taken

A fictional character Telling. Meet Sigurd.

I was Ershetu once. Ninth in the Circle's reckonings, a merchant-trader who dealt not in gold or iron but in knowledge. The ledgers I kept were not of coin, but of souls—what they owed, what they feared, what they would surrender to keep their names unspoken in the dark. The Broken Circle taught me this: all men have a price, and it is never what they claim.

But then came the duty I would not pay.

They called it corruption, as if that word meant anything to those who had already shattered oaths like kindling. A magistrate's daughter—young, bright-eyed, her father's weakness. The Circle demanded her ruin: not death, no, something slower. A whisper in the ear, a taint in the bloodline until her house knelt without remembering why. I had done such work before; that is the truth I choke on now. But this time… this time, I calculated differently.

I weighed her value against mine and found the scales unbalanced. Not out of mercy—never that—but because corruption without purpose is waste. And waste is a sin my Norse forebears would have flayed from my flesh with rusted knives. So I refused.

Exile is not a single moment. It is the slow peeling-away of all you were promised: your name struck from the records, your sigil burned to ash in the communal hearth, your voice made ghostly even to those who once called you brother. They did not kill me—the Broken Circle prefers its vengeance patient—but left me to wander Manchester's soot-choked streets with lungs full of factory fumes and eyes stinging from more than smoke.

Yet darkness recognizes its own.

The Dark Masons found me when I was half-mad with hunger and plotting how best to sell my own teeth for bread. Their lodge was no grand hall but a cellar beneath a butcher's shop where candlelight flickered like dying stars between hanging carcasses."You tally costs," said their Speaker (a woman missing three fingers but none of her cunning). "So tell us: what did refusal gain you?"

I showed them my empty hands—no weapons left save wit—and spoke plain: "A sharper ledger." Because exile had taught me this: betrayal is only fatal if you fail to account for it beforehand.

Here among Masons whose bricks are mortared with treason instead of lime? Here we understand that corruption does not destroy; it transforms. The magistrate's daughter walks free while those who sought her fall one by one into accidents bearing my fingerprints (though none can prove it). And every soul cast out from other factions finds their way eventually to our doors... where we measure their usefulness coldly before offering sanctuary.

This is my Telling:
There are two kinds of exiles—those who rot weeping at their faction's gates begging forgiveness...
And those who learn that loyalty was ever just another currency waiting to be debased.
I am Sigurd-no-longer-Ershetu now.
And I trade in darker things than knowledge these days.
Come. Let us discuss what you can afford to lose...

Visual

Thick-set, broad-jawed figure with pale Nordic skin and hard blue-grey eyes, cropped blond hair, wearing a heavy Victorian merchant's overcoat with a fur-lined collar, hands scarred from ledger-work and cold iron, calculating gaze that weighs everything it sees.

Faction: The Broken Circle · View the Gallery