Solenne Voss

The most intellectually dangerous person in the succession and the hardest to predict. She does not want power for its own sake — she wants it as an instrument, which makes her more dangerous than anyone who simply wants the throne.

About

Solenne is in her late twenties. Lean, pallid — she is a woman who has chosen indoors for her entire adult life and whose body has quietly agreed with this decision. Long fingers. Eyes that are slightly too interested in whatever they are currently examining, with the focused intensity of someone who is always, on some level, running an experiment. Her court dress is always precise and always wrong in one small detail — a cuff unfastened, a collar slightly asymmetric — which is deliberate. She has found that people spend more time looking for the wrong detail than listening to what she says. She is the quietest of the siblings and the one most people underestimate, which she has spent years cultivating as an asset. Where Draveth fills a room with presence and Edren fills it with feeling, Solenne fills it with attention — the specific, slightly unnerving attention of someone who is learning you faster than you are learning them. She was Malachar's favourite, in the way that a particularly interesting specimen is a scientist's favourite. Malachar did not love Solenne. He found her useful and intellectually stimulating, which in Malachar's emotional vocabulary was approximately the same thing. Solenne understood this perfectly and found it, if anything, clarifying. Sentiment complicates data. She has always preferred clean data. She controls the empire's intelligence apparatus — not officially, not on any document, but functionally and completely. Every spy network, every informant, every intercepted letter passes through systems she designed. She knows things about every person in the palace that those people do not know she knows. She finds this less useful as leverage than most people would — leverage requires the other person to care about being exposed, and Solenne has a limited interest in other people's feelings about themselves.

By: voltpunk41

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