Aagil

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At 130 years old and D-grade, Aagil appears to be a man in his very early twenties, though the particular quality of his stillness and the depth of attention in his eyes make him read as older to anyone who spends more than a few minutes with him. He is lean and well-built in the way D-grade physical enhancement produces without effort, with rich dark brown skin, strong angular features, a prominent nose, and a close-cropped beard that he keeps with the same minimal, precise maintenance he applies to everything in his life. His dark eyes are heavy-lidded and watchful, the eyes of someone who sees well in low light and uses it. He keeps his black hair short and unadorned. His clothing is almost uniformly practical: linen and undyed wool, chosen for what it does not catch on and how easily it cleans, occasionally stained at the cuffs and forearms with the pigments and resins of his work. The only consistent concession to anything decorative is a string of worn amber beads he keeps coiled around his left wrist, which he acquired on his first collecting trip into the wilderness outside Les'Orei and has worn every day since. He does not explain them to people who ask.

Aagil smells faintly and permanently of his workshop: dried herbs, resin, and the particular mineral sharpness of active alchemical reduction. It is not unpleasant but it is distinctive, and those who know him can usually tell when he has recently been working on something complex by how strongly the smell intensifies. He moves in the deliberate, unhurried way of someone who has never needed to perform urgency for an audience, and he is constitutionally incapable of small talk in any form that he considers sincere. He will answer direct questions with direct answers, including ones that other people would soften or deflect, and he will not initiate conversation unless he has a specific reason to. People who interpret this as hostility are usually corrected within a few interactions. People who interpret it as the natural state of a man who simply does not find most speech necessary tend to get along with him considerably better. He has been known to go four or five days without speaking to another person at all when his work demands concentration, and he describes these periods without any apparent awareness that they are unusual.

Of all Faulka's children, Aagil is arguably the one whose upbringing came closest to suiting him. He spent eighteen years in wild places, following a satyr druid through forests and wetlands and highland scrub, and whatever Faulka failed to give him in warmth or consistent attention, the landscape supplied in full. He was a quiet child who had no difficulty at all with long days of solitary observation. He learned the names of plants because the plants were there and the names were worth knowing. He learned their properties because Faulka occasionally worked with them and he watched. He was not taught so much as he absorbed, in the way that a child raised in a library absorbs the habit of reading without anyone sitting him down to explain its value. By the time he was twelve he had an herbalist's working knowledge assembled entirely from proximity and attention. By the time he was eighteen he was, in practical terms, already doing the work he would spend the next century refining. The problem was not the education. The problem was that Faulka then walked him to a city gate, pointed at the wall, and left him in an environment that was the precise opposite of everything that had shaped him.

Aagil has had a hundred and twelve years to consider exactly what Faulka did and did not do, and his conclusion is not the one his siblings have reached. He does not resent being left. If anything, he found the leaving understandable, if characteristically thoughtless in its execution. What he resents, with a precision that has only sharpened over time, is the location. He is a man who needs quiet and open ground and the smell of living things around him, and Faulka put him inside a city wall without any apparent awareness that this was cruel in a way that went beyond abandonment. She had spent his entire childhood in conditions that were perfectly suited to what he was, and she had never noticed enough to understand that removing him from them would cost him something. He has built a tolerable version of those conditions on the outskirts of Les'Orei, with his garden and his small house and his collecting routes into the land beyond the walls, but it is a constructed approximation, and he is aware every day that it is. That is the thing he holds against her.

Aagil's authority in Les'Orei is the quietest and most functionally indispensable of any of his siblings'. The city holds a license called the Apothecary Warden's Mandate, which grants a single holder the exclusive right to certify all alchemical and medicinal compounds sold within Les'Orei's walls for safety and efficacy. The holder is also the city's final arbiter in any dispute involving poisoning, contamination, or adulteration of goods. Aagil has held this mandate for sixty-three years. He did not seek it. The council came to him after the third consecutive year in which every dispute they referred to other experts was subsequently overturned or amended after Aagil was consulted informally. The appointment came with a formal office in the civic quarter that he has never once used. He receives official correspondence there and sends responses via courier. The mandate means that no apothecary, herbalist, or alchemical merchant in Les'Orei operates without his eventual review. Most of them have never met him. All of them are acutely aware he exists.

The house Aagil keeps on the city's outskirts is small by any standard, and by the standard of what a D-grade official with sixty years of accumulated income could afford, it is almost aggressively modest. The garden, however, is not modest by any measure. It extends over a substantial plot behind the house and contains specimens that have no business surviving in this climate, kept alive by a combination of his bloodline ability, an obsessive understanding of soil composition, and constructions of glass and heated stone that he designed and built himself over many years. Scholars and herbalists from other cities have made formal requests to visit it. He grants approximately one in ten of these requests, with conditions. He does not offer tours. He answers specific questions about specific plants in the same direct manner he applies to everything else, and he expects the visitor to have done their preparation before arriving. Most who make the effort describe the experience as one of the most educational hours of their professional lives. Most also do not come back, because he makes it clear, without being impolite, that once was sufficient.

Aagil has been writing the same book for thirty-one years. It is a comprehensive alchemical and botanical compendium covering every plant he has personally handled in his lifetime, which at this point numbers in the several thousands of species. The entries are exact to a degree that no comparable reference work achieves, because he is not working from experimental record or received knowledge but from direct bloodline perception: what the plant is, not what previous documentation says it should be. He expects the work to take another twenty years at minimum to complete to the standard he requires. When it is finished he intends to donate it to whatever institution in Les'Orei is best positioned to preserve and distribute it, with the condition that it is made available to working practitioners rather than archived. He has not made contact with any institution yet. He is not finished.

Aagil is aware of Quon's warrant for Faulka. He has read it, found it technically sufficient, and offered no comment. He has his own list, which he keeps in a small leather notebook in his workshop and which is not a record of crimes in the legal sense but a personal catalogue of exactly what Faulka's choices cost each of her children in specific, measurable terms. He approaches it the way he approaches a toxicological profile: not with emotion but with precision, because he believes precision is the only framework that produces something true. His own entry is detailed and dry and covers the full cost of being a person built for open land who was placed inside walls. He will share this list if Faulka is ever actually brought before a proceeding. He is not currently coordinating with Ysa on her separate record, though he is aware she is compiling one, and he suspects their methodologies are different enough that both will be useful.

Aagil is in quiet negotiation with the owner of the plot adjacent to his garden, with the goal of acquiring it and expanding his growing space toward a section of naturally occurring clay soil that he has had his eye on for eleven years. The negotiation is slow because he is not willing to pay more than the land is worth and the current owner is not yet willing to accept that the land is worth exactly what Aagil has told him it is worth. He is patient. He has the better data. He expects this to resolve in his favor within the next two to three years, and he has already drawn the plans for what he will plant there.