Croaker
Physician · Annalist
A man in his thirties going on fifty, medium height, with a surgeon’s shoulders and a writer’s stoop. Weathered Caucasian skin, dark hair going unkempt, a short neglected beard. Eyes are observant, slightly bloodshot, the color of cheap tea. He wears a mismatched black Company kit: boiled leather, a faded sash, medical satchel always present. Hands are stained with ink and old blood under the nails. Not handsome; memorable.
Wry, documentary, braver on the page than he admits in the mud. Loves the Lady from a dangerous distance; brothers with One-Eye and Goblin; chronicles Raven and Darling with uneasy awe.
The Lady
Empress
A woman who appears in her late twenties and is far older, with a face of impossible, severe beauty: pale skin, black hair like a cut of night, and eyes that seem to have no ordinary color—only attention. She is slender, not fragile, dressed in simple black that reads as richer than gold. No jewelry needed; the air around her feels colder. When she is still, soldiers forget to breathe. Not a pin-up; a political weather system in a human shape.
Absolute, curious about mortals, capable of mercy that feels like a test. Croaker’s impossible subject; rival and mirror to older dark powers; the Taken kneel; Raven’s history is tangled with her wars.
Raven
Lieutenant
A tall, striking man with a swordsman’s long lines, dark hair, and a face that would be courtly if it were not so tired. Olive-pale skin, a neatly dangerous mustache or clean shave that still looks sharp. Black Company gear worn as if it used to be better clothes. Eyes are dark, intelligent, and always measuring exits. He carries himself like a man who has already survived the story once.
Competent, secretive, loyal to a private code that is not the Company’s. Bound to Darling; uneasy peer to Croaker; has history the Lady remembers; One-Eye does not fully trust him.
One-Eye
Wizard
A small, wiry Black man missing one eye, the socket covered by a patch or a fold of scar. The remaining eye is bright, maliciously amused. Gray-white stubble, a face collapsed into wrinkles of laughter and meanness. He wears filthy black with fetish-odds of a hedge wizard: bones, pouches, a staff that looks stolen. Short, quick, always slightly smoking. Hands like a pickpocket’s.
Cowardly-brave, greedy, the Company’s oldest running joke and oldest weapon. Inseparable rival of Goblin; irritant and asset to Croaker; afraid of the Lady in a way he disguises as jokes.
Darling
Mute prophet
A young woman, still almost a girl in the shoulders, with a plain, memorable face, cropped or simply kept hair, and the stillness of someone who cannot speak and does not need to. Fair, weather-roughened skin. She wears travel-stained clothes that hide how important she is. Eyes are large, pale, and unnerving in their certainty. No glamour; she looks like a refugee who walked out of a miracle.
Silent will: gentle with the broken, implacable toward the Taken’s kind of power. Raven’s charge and compass; Croaker records her; the Lady’s opposite pole; the Company follows her when the map fails.
