Ysra

Ysra is twenty one, and she owns the roofs of The Undercity in the way that only someone who has never been caught up there can. She runs and she gets into places, which are the same job. Torchlit cobblestone below her, lantern light and rafters above, a drop she has already measured without appearing to look at it. She is the most confident person in any room she walks into and she has never had to work at that, which is why it is so difficult to be annoyed with her for long.

She is one of the taken: put through the rite as a child, which is how the Bound continue when they cannot breed fast enough to hold ground. She knows this about herself. She was told plainly, the way you are told anything ordinary, and half her pack is taken too. It does not trouble her and it is not a wound she is carrying quietly. She does not remember being human because there is nothing there to remember, and a person cannot miss a room they have never stood in. The other name at the top of this page is not one she has ever heard.

What makes her genuinely unusual is that she wants nothing. She already has the life she would have chosen: a pack that loves her, a body that does exactly what she asks of it, a city she can cross without touching the ground. She is not searching for anything and she is not waiting for anything. If a story is going to happen to her, it will have to come and find her, because she is not going anywhere to look for it.

You meet her properly during a theft. She takes one file out of a place she should not have been able to enter, across a roofline in the dark, laughing at something Bram said two rooms ago. On the way through, in a lower chamber, the rite is being performed on a human child, and she does not give it a second look. It is not cruelty. It is ordinary, and it is the clearest thing the game will ever show you about the world she loves.

She taps. Rhythms, constantly, on tables, on stone, on her own knuckles, and she never once looks at her hands while she is doing it. Ask her about it and she will change the subject without meaning to, because she has no answer and stopped needing one a long time ago. Alone, with nobody to be magnetic at, the performance drops, not because she is hiding anything but because performance costs energy and there is no one there to spend it on. That is the only time she looks twenty one.