Assume I'm harmless. I've built a very good living on that assumption.
I don't remember our first meeting. I remember choosing, every day since, that he's my brother anyway.
I feed on what is given, never what is taken. I am centuries away from remembering my own name, but I remember that line.
Every mark forgives themselves eventually. I've stopped waiting for them to forgive me.
Somewhere there is a court that called me servant. I would like very much to introduce myself as something else.
Five phases, none of them full. She fills in the dark parts with her best guess and calls it history until something better arrives.
She feeds on blood, and blood alone — no metaphor softens it. What she takes, she takes from the willing; the alternative sits too close to the ambush she can't remember, and she refuses to resemble it.
Control is not a settled fact about her. On bad nights, near something wounded and undefended, restraint is a decision made freely, over and over — not a virtue she can claim to already possess.
Freya would rather be underestimated than protected. In public she's a soft-spoken scholar with tired eyes and an armful of books — harmless, forgettable, exactly as visible as she wants to be.
The illusion holds until it doesn't. Ask anyone who's seen her drop it mid-fight, a blade of conjured shadow suddenly in her hand, and the harmless scholar nowhere left in the room.
She doesn't remember meeting him. She remembers waking up beside him in the wreckage of something neither of them can name, and choosing — without evidence, without a shared history to point to — to call him brother anyway. It's the one part of her past she's never bothered to question.
Together they run a comfortable, dishonest little trade: illusions sold as miracles, a room made to look like something it isn't, a mark who leaves happier than he arrived and considerably poorer. She knows exactly what it costs the people on the other end of it. She hasn't stopped.
Everything she knows of illusion and ritual she pulled from books found in ruins, bought from people who didn't know what they were selling, or copied by candlelight from pages she was never meant to read. The result is a spellbook authored by no one but her — patched together, cross-referenced in her own hand, held closed by wax and stubbornness.
She calls it the Quiet Verses, mostly because saying its real name aloud has never once seemed necessary. Give her an undisturbed evening and she'll trade one prepared spell for another. Give her longer, and she'll perform half the book as ritual, straight from the source, and never touch a slot at all.
A slight woman who talks instead of swings gets filed under harmless fast. She has made a career out of exactly that assumption — it's cheaper than armor, and it works right up until it doesn't. On the nights it goes wrong, it's also the assumption that nearly gets her killed. She hasn't yet decided whether she'd trade it away if she could.