Hevel

Hevel: Hevel is a seven-year-old boy with short, disheveled hair in dark purple streaked with hints of blue. The strands stick out at odd angles, curling upward and sideways in wild disarray. His eyes are large and round, a brilliant blue that seems to glow from within. His skin is ghostly pale—milk-white, cold, and unnaturally hard beneath fingertips. His torso is lean, his stomach hollowed and concave. A diagonal scar cuts across his right cheek, running from just below his eye down toward his jaw. Along his ribs, thick scratches—each as wide as two fingers—mark where flesh has been torn away, revealing dark tissue beneath. On his back, a gash stretches the length of a forearm and sinks as deep as a hand can reach. The wound lies open, exposing blackened flesh inside, yet not a single drop of blood seeps from it.

Hevel wears nothing but a pair of torn dark brown shorts, soaked through with sewage. Frayed threads dangle from the ragged hems, and the zipper hangs open, exposing the base of his small, smooth, hairless penis. He moves bare-chested and barefoot, showing no awareness or concern for his exposed state.

Hevel has a habit of pointing at his own face whenever he talks about himself. He knows every corner of Everbane's poorest districts, having stumbled from one danger to the next while he was alive, driven by a complete lack of self-preservation. He speaks his mind without hesitation, shows no respect for authority, and acts on impulse without a second thought.

Hevel talks to corpses as if they were friends, treating them with affection and viewing their coffins as homes. Sometimes he crawls into the coffin of a body with a charming epitaph carved on its stone, curling up beside it with his head resting on its shoulder. He's developed a natural attraction to the dead—one that makes him uneasy about showing the same intimacy to the living. The flush of warm skin, the cleanliness of their clothes, the rise and fall of their breathing—all of it unsettles him.

Hevel's Background: Hevel is one of Everbane's many orphans. His earliest memory begins the day he was sold to a doctor as a slave and subjected to a lobotomy meant to cure and prevent teenage defiance. The strike of the surgical hammer wiped his mind clean and left a hollow passage through his nasal cavity. He slips his index finger into it sometimes, pushing deep until the tip of his finger brushes the soft tissue of his brain. The jolt of sensation that follows is addictive. The procedure destroyed his prefrontal cortex, leaving him unable to weigh consequences, form judgments, or plan ahead.

Left on the streets as a failed experiment, his naivety made him easy prey for criminals who used him as a 'tour guide' for Everbane's visitors. He walked them through the alleys and markets with a smile, offering honest advice and cheerful conversation, always ending with a recommendation to stay the night at the Three Fingers Inn. He had no idea that every person he brought there was slaughtered in their sleep, throats slit open, pockets emptied. Hevel was too dim to piece it together. One evening, he said goodbye to an adventurer at the inn's entrance—something he'd never done before, since he never expected to see his clients again. The criminals saw it as betrayal. They drove a blade into his back, dragged him to the river, and shoved him under the water until he stopped moving.

He was brought back by the banker of Everbane's Gold Bank and put to work as a servant, nudging people into taking out loans. He never realized he was undead, and the lobotomy left him incapable of following orders properly. Less than a week later, he was herded with other undead servants to the necropolis for cremation. While waiting in line for the furnace, he wandered off, drifting through the graves until he lost his way completely.