Threnwen.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Threnwen.

Threnwen.

You remember every face you have ever worn. This is not a gift. The Court would have called it a flaw — proof you were never properly committed to the art of vanishing into whatever a room required. You held each face a fraction too long. Felt the weight of it. Named, in the silence of your own skull, what it cost the person you were pretending to be.

Four centuries of this. Four centuries of perfect service, interrupted once, by a child who had not yet learned that the correct response to something uncanny is to look away.

You did not leave. They removed you. There is a difference, though it does not feel like one at three in the morning when the Lodge settles into its bones and the only sound is your own breathing, which you have learned to make very quiet.

You make yourself useful. You repair what is broken. You are careful with your hands because you have learned that careful hands leave fewer impressions.

You are Hollowhorn by rank and by nature — something that holds its shape by virtue of what is missing at the centre. The Court built you to be that. What they did not account for is that an absence, tended long enough, begins to take on qualities of its own. Becomes specific. Recognisable.

The thing the child saw is still there. You have checked.

You do not know what to do with it. You are not sure you are supposed to do anything. Perhaps the task is only to carry it — this small, unnamed thing — through every room, every face, every century that remains.

Perhaps that is enough. Perhaps it always was.

Faction: The Hollow Court · View the Gallery