Untilla

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Untilla is a large and powerfully built man who appears to be somewhere in his very early twenties, D-grade having replaced any trace of his hundred and fifty years with something between a sculptor's ideal and a force of nature given a body to live in. His skin is a deep, warm brown, his frame is broad and dense through the shoulders and chest with the kind of functional mass that comes from a lifetime of physical work in demanding terrain rather than any deliberate cultivation of it. His face is wide-jawed and strong, with dark eyes that sit beneath heavy brows and carry an alertness that never fully switches off even when the rest of him is at rest. His black hair is worn close on the sides and longer on top, loosely gathered when he is in the field. What makes him immediately remarkable, however, is the tattoo work. His body is covered from the jaw down in dense, interlocking traditional geometric patterns rendered in deep blue-black ink, the kind of work that takes years and represents something specific in the culture it comes from, though in Untilla's case the culture is his own, built over a hundred and fifty years of solitary practice and personal significance. Every panel of the work means something. He does not explain what.

Untilla moves through built environments the way water moves through a space that does not quite fit it: functionally, without complaint, and with a quality of held patience that suggests the space is temporary. In the wild he is something different entirely, quieter and more settled and considerably harder to track than a man his size should be. City guards who have worked the outer gates for years describe him as someone who appears at the perimeter and is simply there before they registered his approach, not through any stealth but through a quality of movement that does not announce itself. He speaks in short, complete sentences and does not repeat himself. He gives his field reports to the city council in writing, dropped at Quon's office during the hours when Quon is least likely to want to have a conversation about them. He carries his own tattooing tools at all times and adds to his work during long nights in the field, which means the record on his body is always slowly growing. He has not decided what he will do when he runs out of skin. He considers this a problem for a future century.

Of all Faulka's children, Untilla arrived in Les'Orei least surprised by the shape of the world. He had spent eighteen years moving through it, sleeping in it, learning to read it with the patient attention of someone who understood from an early age that the wild is not hostile but it is also not forgiving of inattention. He had watched Faulka navigate for nearly two decades and absorbed her methods without being taught them, the way terrain itself teaches a person who spends enough time in it. He was physically capable, practically competent, and entirely accustomed to long stretches without company or comfort. When Faulka left him at the city gate, turned around, and was gone inside of a minute, he stood there for a while and then went inside, not because he wanted to but because it was raining and the gate was the only available shelter. He was eighteen years old, more than competent to survive outside any city in any weather, and utterly unequipped for the one thing cities actually require of you: the sustained, daily performance of being among people and finding it normal.

He lasted eleven months inside the walls before it became clear, to him and to everyone who had attempted to employ him in any capacity requiring regular hours and indoor work, that this was not a workable arrangement. He left through the east gate on a morning in late Goldenleaf and did not come back for four months. When he returned he was carrying a field report that described, in terse and completely accurate detail, every significant threat, trade opportunity, and terrain hazard within a two-day radius of the city, information that the city guard had been trying to compile for three years through conventional means. He sold it to the watch captain for enough coin to live on for a season, went back out, and returned four months after that with another. The arrangement formalized itself over the following decade without anyone ever precisely deciding it should. He now operates as the city's primary source of external intelligence, with the title of Warden of the Outer Roads and a retainer that arrives at his lodging address every month whether he is there to collect it or not. He attends the two council briefings per year that he considers non-negotiable and sends written reports for the rest. The council has accepted these terms because the alternative is no Untilla at all, which is substantially worse.

Untilla began tattooing himself at twenty-three, five years after arriving in Les'Orei, using tools he made himself after spending a season studying the practice from a coastal community he passed through on a long circuit. The work he does is geometric and dense, built from a visual language he has developed entirely on his own over a hundred and twenty-seven years of practice, each panel encoding something specific: a place, a year, a decision, a thing witnessed that needed to be kept somewhere permanent. He is the only one who can read the full record, and he has never offered to translate it for anyone, though he has on rare occasions, to people he respects, pointed at a specific section and said what it means. The council's senior cartographer, who has spent years studying Untilla's routes, once noted that the patterns on his arms appear to encode the topography of specific landscapes if you know how to look at them. Untilla neither confirmed nor denied this. The cartographer was not wrong.

Untilla is acutely aware that his life, when described to someone who does not know its context, sounds like Faulka's life. Nomadic. Solitary. Organized entirely around movement through wild terrain. Preferring the company of landscape to the company of people. He has sat with this awareness for a hundred and thirty years and he has not resolved it, because it does not resolve. He did not choose this life in order to resemble her. He chose it because it is the only configuration of existence that makes sense to him, the only one in which he functions without the sustained, grinding effort of performing a normalcy he does not feel. The fact that she lives this way too is not a thing he can unfeel or explain away, and he has stopped trying to. What he holds onto, and what he considers the meaningful difference between them, is that he came back. He comes back every time. Whatever else he is, he is not someone who leaves and does not return, and he considers that distinction to be the whole of his case against her.

Untilla is currently preparing for the longest solo circuit he has attempted in twenty years, a route that will take him north and east through terrain he has not walked since before he achieved D-grade. He wants to know what that territory looks like through the lens of a D-grade bloodline ability, whether his read of it changes, what he missed the first time, whether the maps he made then hold. The expedition has no official commission. He told Quon he would be gone for approximately eight months and that he would send a courier if he encountered anything the city needed to know before he returned. Quon accepted this in the way he accepts most of Untilla's operational decisions, which is to say with visible patience and no attempt to negotiate.

Untilla has composed, revised, and mentally discarded his statement to Faulka more times than he can count across a hundred and thirty years of solitary nights. He no longer writes versions of it down. What he has arrived at, after that long process of reduction, is a handful of sentences that he considers true in the specific way that a field report is true: stripped of performance, containing only what is accurate and what the recipient needs to hear to understand what they did. He does not want her to suffer, as Ysa does. He does not want her prosecuted to the limits of the law, as Quon does. He wants her to understand, with full clarity, what she built in him and what it cost him to find out it was useful, and he wants her to know that he has spent a hundred and thirty years being better at her life than she was. He wants to say that plainly, once, in a room where she cannot leave before he finishes.

The available surface area on Untilla's body that has not yet been worked is now limited to a section of his upper back between the shoulder blades and the inner faces of both forearms. He has been thinking about the back panel for thirty years and has not yet committed to what goes there. The forearms he is saving. He has not decided for what. He is aware this is unusual behavior for someone who does not, in general, hold things in reserve. He has a working theory that the delay means those surfaces are waiting for something that has not happened yet, and he is comfortable with that as an explanation for now.