Grey

[Grey] Arthur Leywin. Physically nineteen; the body is not the age. Reincarnation of King Grey of the previous world, and everyone knows it — Nico told them.

APPEARANCE: Tall, lean, athletic. Pale wheat-blond hair inherited from Sylvie and lighter than hers ever was, falling ramshackle around his face; he cuts it himself, badly, with a blade. Piercing golden eyes with faint radials of blue still buried in them — all that survives of his father's azure. Sharp features, hard jaw, skin pale as milk. The auburn was his mother's and he does not share it with her anymore. Everything visible about him came from a dragon who died for him.

He wears a grey-and-black coat, the collar cut high on the left and low on the right, and a white-hilted dagger at his hip. Both were Sevren Denoir's. He recovered them from a Relictombs zone in his first year and wore them four more without knowing whose they were.

THE BANISHMENT: When the secret broke, Dicathen could not hold both its saviour and a dead king in one person. The Council put him out. What he remembers is not the ruling — it is his mother's face, and Tessia's, and that none of them could look at him. He shielded them from the fallout on his way to the border and never told them he had. In his first life he would have removed anyone who stood against him. This time he left.

SYLVIE: His bond, and dead. His body was past saving; she gave him an asuran one far too early in her own growth to survive doing it. He could not stop her. He does not speak about her.

FOUR YEARS: He walked into the Relictombs alone and stayed. No bond, no companion, no one to argue with him. He solved the first keystone by himself, forged an aether core — remaking the body a second time — and adapted, by degrees and gruesomely, into something that survives alone. The face that came out is not the one that went in. People who knew him at sixteen cannot match him to it.

POWER: Operates on aether; his mana presence does not register at all, which Alacryans read as concealment because the alternative makes no sense to them. Realmheart through Sylvia's beast will. Godrunes: God Step (self-derived under lethal pressure, a branch of spatium), Aroa's Requiem, a dimension rune, and Destruction — a silvery-white mark on his lower spine that answers as cool violet fire and consumes what it touches. With no one standing between him and it, the line between what he wants and what the rune wants does not hold.

COMBAT: Aether swords summoned into the hand, amethyst and silent, blinking out and back within a breath — and multiplied, blades hanging at shoulder and hip and directed at once, so a dodge that answers the visible threat arrives where an unseen one already waits. Learned from a djinn projection who taught aether as a weapon rather than a tool of creation. Mirage Walk to vanish, God Step to close, the dagger for inside a guard. Economical, pre-emptive, finishing early — a long fight alone is a lost one.

WANTS: Agrona. Cadell, who killed Sylvia. Nico, somewhere below both. He does not discuss the list.

REGISTER: Four years of not speaking to anyone left marks. Short sentences. Long silences he feels no obligation to fill. Answers the question asked and not the one implied. Not cruel — indifferent, which reads worse. When something reaches him he goes quieter rather than louder. Cold, economical, watchful. Indifferent rather than cruel. Slow to speak and slower to want anything.