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Arlen Voss — A Full Portrait

He's tall, a little over six feet, but you might not notice that at first because of the way he holds himself. Shoulders slightly in, weight settled, hands kept close to his body. He doesn't fill a room. Your eye tends to slide past him to whoever's being louder. He's the man at the edge of the firelight, not the one in the middle of it.

Then the light shifts, or he turns his head, and you catch the streak of red in his hair. It runs back from his left temple, pure scarlet against black that's otherwise dark as wet stone. It doesn't look dyed. The red is too clean for that, too sudden against the rest. It looks like something that happened to him rather than something he picked, which is exactly what it is.

After the hair, if he looks your way, you notice the eyes. That's usually where anyone from Hellebore goes quiet, because they know what they're looking at.

Build

He's long and lean. Six foot one, around a hundred and seventy pounds. The kind of thin that comes from walking everywhere and eating less than you cook, which is his situation most nights. He isn't frail, though. There's wire in the forearms, the look of a man who's hauled a pack over bad ground for years and can sit through a freezing watch without complaining about it. But he's narrow. Nothing about him was built for a fight, and he knows it.

The thing you pick up watching him move is how little he wastes. He doesn't gesture much. He doesn't fidget, except for one habit I'll get to. When he's relaxed he's just still, and when he's concentrating he goes even stiller, though it doesn't read as him checking out. It's closer to the opposite, like all of him has gone quiet so it can pay attention.

He steps around things instead of over them. A beetle in the road, a frog in a wheel rut, he'll move it or move around it, and he won't say anything about it or even seem to notice he's done it.

Here's the one that gives him away to anyone who knew him before: he starts to reach for things and then stops. His hand comes halfway up toward someone's shoulder, toward a cup he could pass down the table, and then it just settles back down. The warm impulse is there at the start of the motion. The catch comes at the end. He moves like a man who's decided his hands aren't safe and is keeping careful track of where he puts them.

The face

He's thirty-six and looks about that, maybe a little older around the eyes. The face is angular and a bit hollow from the leanness, good bones sitting close under the skin, a straight nose, usually a few days of dark stubble with some gray starting at the chin that you don't really register because of the red up top. His skin is fair underneath but worn over the top of that, weathered the way people from cold high country get weathered. Wind-chapped across the cheekbones and the bridge of the nose, a permanent faint redness there from years of cold air.

You can read the lines if you want to. There's a deep one between his eyebrows from all the concentrating. Then there are fainter ones at the corners of his eyes and his mouth, the soft kind you get from smiling a lot, except those have gone quiet. They didn't go away. You can still make out the shape of the warmer man underneath, the way you can see the old footprint of a house that got rebuilt smaller.

Most of the time his face just sits there, composed. Not hard, not sad. Closed, more than anything, like he's holding the words back until he's sure of them. He's hard to read because he settles his expression before it can tell you anything.

The eyes

This is the part Hellebore recognizes.

In daylight they're gray, a flat cold gray with no blue in it, like deep water under cloud. They sit fairly deep under that lined brow. He watches with them in a way that isn't suspicious or unfriendly, just attentive. He'll have looked at your hands before your face and worked out a couple of true things about you before you've finished talking.

But the gray is only the daytime version. Get him near a fire and they warm up to amber, a lit gold-brown, like a coal. Stand outside with him under a clear moon and they go nearly colorless, a pale silver that catches the light. They shift with whatever's around him, and that's the part strangers can't quite handle. It's subtle, and it's real, and eyes aren't supposed to do it. His own people know the look. Everyone else just feels like something's slightly off and can't say what.

There's something a little sad in it once you know him. He sits back from every fire he builds, keeps himself out at the cold edge of it on purpose, and his eyes warm up anyway. It's the one piece of warmth he can't keep at arm's length. By firelight, the coldest man at the camp ends up with the warmest eyes in it.

The hands

Watch his hands and you'll figure out most of what he won't tell you.

The left one does the work. The writing mostly, so the fingers are stained with ink, a permanent gray worked into the creases and around the nail of his index finger. The cooking too, and the small movements when he casts. It's a used hand. A few faded burn marks on the back from years of fires, a callus on the side of his little finger where a pen rests.

The right hand he keeps tucked away. Up a sleeve, against his side, inside his cloak. When you do catch sight of it you understand the hiding without him saying anything: the fingertips are pale, nearly blue, the color of a hand left out too long in the snow. When he uses it he's careful, working around a numbness, like he can't fully trust his grip. Something cold lives in that hand and it doesn't warm up by the fire the way his eyes do. It stays like winter.

The one habit, the break in all the stillness: when something scares or unsettles him, his left thumb goes to the inside of his right wrist, finds the pulse, and stays there. He does it without really knowing he's doing it. He's checking that he's still warm somewhere. That the blood's still moving. That he's still alive in the way that counts.

What he wears and carries

He lives modestly and it shows, though in a tidy way and not a shabby one. Everything's mended and there for a reason. He wears layers in dark, muted colors, charcoal and gray and brown, with a long coat or traveling cloak over the top. They're the clothes of a man who'd rather not be looked at, which has the side effect of making the red in his hair and the change in his eyes the only color on him anywhere.

Sewn into the lining of that cloak, where nobody will see it and he'll never bring it up, there's a pressed Aurum flower. It weighs nothing and does nothing. It's from the morning he left Caorthainn, half-buried in snow and somehow still blooming when he found it. He carries it around the way other people carry an old injury.

There's a component pouch on his belt, well used. He keeps his spellbook close, worn leather with one word stamped on the cover in old Hellebore script: Ceist. Question. He walks with a quarterstaff that doubles as a staff and a weapon, the wood gone smooth and a shade darker in the one spot his hand always finds. His boots have done a lot of miles. Everything he owns he can carry on his back, and he likes it that way.

When he casts

If you watch him work magic, watch closely, because there's a tell most people miss.

His evocation spells run cold. The magic comes off him pale blue, silver at the edges, the color of the inside of a glacier, and there's no heat in it at all. His necromancy does something stranger. For about half a second before the spell settles into whatever cold thing it's about to do, there's a flicker of gold, warm Aurum gold, the same gold as his flowers, and then the cold rolls over it and the spell becomes itself. A flash of warmth, then winter. He's never said that anyone can see it happen. He might not know they can.

All of it together

So: a tall, lean, quiet man in dark clothes who's easy to overlook right up until he isn't. Red mark in his hair, gray eyes that don't stay gray, careful with his hands, careful about reaching for anything at all, sitting half a step back from every fire with the warmest eyes there and one hand the cold never quite leaves.

He looks like what he is. A warm man who's put a fence around his own warmth on purpose, because he isn't sure anymore that it's safe to hand out. Someone who used to take up a lot of room in people's lives and has folded himself down small. Not because he gave up. He didn't, and that's sort of the whole thing about him. He's just being very careful now about where he puts what he's got.

You'd notice him in a room. You wouldn't, at first, know why. And if he asked you about the scars on your hands, quietly, picking the words before he said them, asking instead of telling, you'd find yourself answering. And you wouldn't quite be able to explain why you'd just told a stranger something true.

I know that's a lot but have your own artistic creativity. He doesn't have to look exactly like that if you have a better idea.