You want to know what I sound like.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Vukašin.

You want to know what I sound like.

Everyone does, eventually. They sit across from me and wait for me to slip — to use some voice they haven't heard before, something that might be mine. They think they can catch it if they're patient enough.

They can't. I don't slip. That is the entire skill.

What I can tell you is what the voice does. You hear your name in your mother's mouth and your body responds before your mind does. Every door has a sound that opens it — a specific tone, a specific rhythm, a word weighted the right way. I collect those sounds. I have been collecting them for a very long time. There is not a lock I have found that doesn't have one.

The Hollow Court taught me the theory. I already knew the practice. What they gave me was permission to use it fully, and a rank, and work that suited my particular patience for stillness.

I am very good at stillness. I can stand in a shadow for six hours and not shift my weight. I can be in a room with you and you will not register me as present. The dagger is the last resort — if I am close enough to use it, something has already gone wrong. I prefer the voice at a distance, the right word in the right ear, the door that opens from inside because someone inside chose to open it.

People find this more disturbing than the blade, for some reason.

I find it more interesting.

Visual

Dark-skinned elf woman, silver-white hair pulled back tight, sharp angular fae features, pale eyes that register everything. Layered medieval Slavic clothing — rough wool, worn leather, tarnished silver clasps — dissolving at the edges into shadow. Figure half-merged with darkness, present but uncertain. Dagger held between her teeth, blade catching a sliver of candlelight. Crouched, coiled, utterly still.

Faction: The Hollow Court · View the Gallery