Character

Ask where she was born and you'll get a dozen answers, none of them hers. Limsa Lominsa runs on rumour, and where a story is missing, the Lower Decks will gladly supply one. But look at her once and half the guessing stops: a pelt like fresh snow, barred black across the shoulders in the pattern of something that hunts above the treeline, and no port on the Rhotano has ever bred that. She came down out of the cold. Beyond that she doesn't say, and after the second time of asking, people generally don't.

She stands a good seven fulms and ducks most doorways in the city out of habit rather than thought. Black hair cut blunt across the brow, and threaded through it a fall of rust-red locks she keeps carefully — the one vanity she'll allow, and the only thing about her that still belongs to wherever she's from. Her stare has a flatness to it, the patience of something that has waited out weather. Children stare back. She lets them.

There's no plate on her. Whatever the songs claim about dark knights, Vesna dresses to move: black leathers worn soft, a laced bodice, brass at the wrists and a mismatched set of shoulder guards trimmed in fox-coloured fur. Sandals cut open at the toe, because Hrothgar claws split good boots and she'd rather have the grip on wet stone. A satchel rides her hip, and no one has ever seen what's in it. The greatsword — Ishgardian, black, graceless, far too heavy to be carried for show — waits wherever she's sleeping that week. She doesn't wear it to market. She doesn't need to.

The city suits her better than she'd admit. The Admiral's law reaches the harbour and the tallying houses; it does not always reach the alley behind them. Vesna works that gap. She hires out as muscle to merchants who can't afford the Yellowjackets' attention, takes the odd Maelstrom bounty when coin runs thin — but the work she doesn't charge for is the work that keeps her here. Whoever's being cornered, three-on-one, at the wrong end of the night.

She'd tell you it isn't kindness. Dark knights are made of what a person carries and will not set down, and there is a voice in her that speaks with her own accent and hates her in her own words. It is quietest when someone else's blood is up instead of hers.

So she stays. Ducks the lintels, drinks alone, and doesn't talk about home.