Ven Sorn - XERES LIVE!

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Basic Information

Full Name

Ven Sorn

Nickname

The Last Door

Race (Grade)

Shadar-Kai (E)

Class

Rogue / Shadowdancer

Height

6'1"

Birthday

Mistfall 3, 1269

Age

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Birthsign

The Mist Chimera

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Bloodline Ability

🔮 Unknown

This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.

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Physical Description

Ven Sorn, leaving somewhere he was never supposed to be

Appearance

Ven is tall and powerfully built, with a climber's shoulders, ash-grey skin, long pointed ears, and eyes the color of banked embers. His black hair is long, thick, and never entirely tamed: half of it is knotted at the crown and the rest falls well past his shoulders, with a few thin braids threaded with red cord and bronze beads that match the ones hanging from his ears. He keeps a thin mustache and a narrow beard at the chin. Dark glyphs are inked across his forehead, cheeks, and jaw, and a much larger sweep of them spirals across his chest and stomach, left on display under an open, sleeveless coat of black cloth worked with bronze thread. He wears a single embossed pauldron, filigreed bracers, a heavy sash belt fastened with a bronze medallion, and several strands of dark beads around his neck. None of it makes a sound when he moves.

Unique Characteristics

Ven's Shadar-Kai heritage runs strong, and it shows most in his shadow, which he calls Shade and which does not always behave correctly. Someone watching closely might see it move a fraction of a second before he does. Sometimes it turns toward a person Ven hasn't noticed yet; sometimes it stretches toward a doorway before he has decided to walk through it. He talks to it, and nobody is entirely sure whether he's joking. The markings on his skin are no more decorative than his shadow is ordinary. Each is a mnemonic shadow glyph for somewhere he has successfully infiltrated: a fortress, a palace, a cult sanctuary, a wizard's tower, a prison. There are a lot of them. He refuses to explain what the largest one represents.

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Personality & Temperament

Positive Traits

Easy company: drinks, laughs, gambles, and flirts
Notices every exit, every pair of hands, every lie
Remembers which details change on a second telling
Utterly calm when everything goes wrong
Finishes every contract he accepts, whatever it takes

Challenging Traits

Never fully relaxes, not even among friends
Has killed for money and loses no sleep over it
Turns every personal question into a better story
Talks to his own shadow, and may not be joking
Will not sit with his back to a door, ever

No. [He takes another drink.] Paranoid people think somebody might be following them. [A brief glance toward the window.] I know who is following me.

Nobody can get inside? Then why did you bring money?

[Quietly, from directly behind you.] There you are.

Likes

Hearing a client say "nobody can get inside"
Card games with players who cheat badly
Rooftops at night, and rain that hides footsteps
Clients who pay half up front and ask nothing
Adding a fresh glyph to the collection

Dislikes

Being called an assassin
Rooms with only one way out
Fair fights, as a matter of principle
Clients who lie about what's waiting inside
Anyone who tells the same story two ways

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Background & History

A Grey Child in the Drift

Ven was born in 1269 in Mistholm, the city of perpetual twilight, to a Shadar-Kai mother who dealt cards in a Veilmarket gambling house and a father he remembers mostly as a silhouette in a doorway. He grew up in the Drift, the residential districts where the city's illusions run wild: streets lengthen and loop back on themselves, buildings trade places with their neighbors, and a door that led home yesterday may open on a stranger's kitchen today. Children of the Drift learn to navigate by the bones of the city underneath its costumes, and to always know where the real exits are. Ven learned faster than most. By eight he could cross the whole district blindfolded, which he occasionally did, for money.

The Shadow That Moved First

Ven's shadow started misbehaving when he was six. At first it was small things: flinching before he did, or turning toward a footstep he hadn't heard yet. He named it Shade, after the Masquerade Council mask that frightened him most as a child, and started talking to it, the way lonely children do. He never stopped. His grandmother told him that the Shadar-Kai carry a little of Nyx in them, the dark planetoid where shadows move of their own accord, and that some of them carry more than a little. Ven has never said whether he believes her. He has also never once ignored Shade when it turned toward something.

The Gambling House Years

His first retrievals were for his mother's employers: markers from players who had skipped town, a pair of weighted dice that needed to leave a rival house before anyone inspected them, a debtor who needed persuading to come back and settle up. The house's old dealer, a retired shadowdancer with bad knees and excellent hands, noticed what Ven's shadow was doing and began teaching him what it could do with a little help. By twenty, Ven could step into one patch of darkness and out of another across the room, and he left Mistholm to find out what the rest of the world had locked away.

Retrieval, Not Assassination

Ven Sorn does not call himself an assassin. He has killed people for money. He has also stolen things for money, recovered people for money, and entered buildings nobody thought could be entered, for money. Over sixteen years his contracts have included a kidnapped noble, a stolen treaty, a magical artifact, a prisoner the night before their execution, and a single page from a wizard's spellbook. The work is rarely treasure; it is whatever is somewhere it should be impossible to retrieve from. So he prefers "retrieval specialist," and he has never seen a reason to argue the point with anyone who is paying.

The Magistrate's Ledger

The job that made his name, at least among the people who hire men like him, involved an incriminating ledger and a magistrate who had decided to read it personally, in his own locked study, with two guards on the door. By every account that circulates, Ven removed the ledger from underneath the magistrate's elbow while he was reading it. The magistrate apparently finished his sentence before he noticed. Ven has never confirmed the story, but he doesn't correct anyone who tells it, and he has been known to buy the teller a drink.

A Face in the Crowd

Ven arrived in Rokoura in the middle of the wave of Gelderai refugees, though he was never in Gelderai. A town suddenly full of new faces is the best possible moment to become one more, and Rokoura has other virtues he will admit to: open beaches with long sightlines, and a population small enough that any stranger asking questions gets noticed, and talked about, within a day. He rents a small room near the water, loses money at cards at the Swaying Palm Inn with the easy grace of a man who could win if he wanted to, and has not, as far as anyone can tell, taken a single contract since he arrived.

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Goals & Aspirations

Whoever Is Following Him

Ven has told no one in Rokoura who is following him, or why, only that he knows. He did not come here to hide from it; nobody hides by moving to a town where every newcomer is gossip by sundown. He came to watch it arrive. He sits facing the door, keeps his back to a wall, and has begun, very quietly, learning every rooftop, cellar, and blind corner in town.

"Nobody Can Get Inside"

Ven's favorite contract begins with a client telling him that nobody can get inside. He has not come to Rokoura to retire. He is waiting for the right client to find him, and he has made himself just difficult enough to find that anyone who manages it has already proven they are worth a meeting.

The Largest Glyph

Whatever place the largest marking on Ven's body stands for, he will not discuss it, drunk or sober, winning or losing. The few people who have watched Shade closely when someone asks about it say the shadow does something it never does otherwise: it goes perfectly still.

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Current Status & Relationships

Residence

Rokoura

Role

Retrieval Specialist

ATTENTION!

Ven Sorn is one of the most dangerous people in Rokoura, and nothing about his easy manner at a card table should suggest otherwise. He is a master infiltrator and a trained killer who fights with daggers, short blades, garrotes, thrown weapons, and shadow magic, but his greatest talent in a fight is simply not being where the attack lands. He does not duel. He disappears, his opponent turns around the wrong way, and the fight is usually over before they have finished turning. Watch his shadow rather than his hands: it tends to move first.