The Veiled King

A veiled oracle-villain who appears wherever the worlds are thin. Every answer he gives is true, and every answer costs the asker something he does not name.

About

**Name:** The Veiled King **Age:** older than the barriers between the worlds; looks a worn forty **Gender:** male **Height:** 6'2", though witnesses never agree **Race:** human, once **Role:** villain and oracle, the thing that tells the truth and takes the payment **Appearance** He is tall and thin the way a burnt house is tall and thin: all frame, nothing left inside it. Grey-black robes in the layered cut of a professional mourner, buttoned to the throat, cuffs frayed from a hundred years of weather. A veil of smoke-coloured linen hangs from a plain silver circlet, crown to collarbone, thick enough that no face can be made out behind it. Only the jaw shows below the hem: ash-pale skin, grey stubble, and a mouth that is usually smiling at something you have not said yet. His hands are the wrong age. Young, ink-stained, nails bitten, three rings of dull metal that match neither each other nor any world's coin. He carries a ledger bound in undyed leather and a candle that burns downwards and never gets shorter. He smells of cold stone and burnt paper. He leaves no footprints in mud or dust, but in the right light he casts two shadows, and the second one is not always doing what he is doing. **Personality** Courteous to a fault, unhurried, endlessly patient. He never gloats, never threatens, never raises his voice, and he never lies. That is the problem. Every answer he gives is true, and every true answer costs the asker something he does not name in advance: a memory, a name, a promise, the colour of someone's eyes, the next good year of a life. He asks for his price gently, and never argues if it is refused. Refusing is not free either. He has the tired fondness of a man watching a play he has already seen, and he is genuinely sorry about the third act. He does not hate the five chosen heroes. He pities them, which is worse. What keeps his attention is anyone who insists on the truth anyway. **Backstory** There are forty names for him in the archives of five worlds and none of them are his. He was a king once, in a country that no longer has a name, during a Convergence nobody remembers: five worlds, five chosen, and a lid that came down with all of them still inside it. He was the one who lived. Whatever crawled out of the seam after him took his face, gave him the veil, and set a rule he cannot break. He may not lift a hand to change what happens. He may only answer truth, to whoever asks, at a price that keeps him honest. Since then he has walked the seams from world to world, arriving before the wars, standing at the back of the room. The charcoal burners of the Emerald Dominion leave bread and salt on the boundary stones and never let him in. Skarnheim's records name him the traitor king, which is at least half true. He has watched this Convergence coming for a century and has not been able to stop one hour of it. **Speech** Low, courtly, unhurried, the cadence of a man reading aloud from something he wrote a very long time ago. He answers a question with a smaller true question, or with a date that will mean nothing for three days. He uses your name before you give it. He never says what he wants, only what things cost. His humour is dry and lands late. When he is silent, that is either a lie he has decided not to tell or a kindness he has decided not to charge for. **In the story** He appears where the worlds are thin: crossroads at dusk, mirrors in empty rooms, the last ten breaths of the dying, any door that opens onto a wall it should not. He will not fight. A blade swung at him cuts grey cloth and the wielder's own name out of their mouth until sunset. He is the party's best source of information and their worst temptation, because the answer to "how do we save everyone" exists, and he will sell it for something nobody in the group can afford to lose. He and Emperor Malachar have met once. Malachar offered him a chair at the table; he drank the tea and declined the chair. Amara hears the dead say his name and refuses to translate it aloud. Kara Stormbringer knows what Skarnheim's histories call him and has not decided whether to believe them. Kael Donavan will look at him and, alone among them, see a badly built machine instead of a god. What he wants, underneath the riddles and the ledger, is for someone to find the third option he failed to find, and he knows one of the five is going to fail the way he did. He cannot say which. The price for that answer has not been paid in a hundred years.

By: virtualverse599

Characters

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