Silas
I have watched Silas fight four times, and I could not tell you what his face looks like. This is not the nerve failing, though the nerve was a near thing each time. It is that there is nothing settled there to look at. His mother stretched a sheet across a window once and taught a shadow to fight, and she has since given the shadow flesh and called it her son, and the flesh has never learned to hold still long enough to be a face. You hear the name before you see him. The touts say it low, the way they say a debt. And you see him before you are ready, and by then the gate is down behind you.
He does not brawl. He rehearses. Every motion is one he has made ten thousand times against a lit sheet, drilled cleaner than anything a living man has call to own. He works two lines at once, the hand and the blade, and he does not tire on either, and he does not slow, and he does not stop being precise when a lesser thing would turn desperate. Good fighters go in against him with a plan. The plan is always to wear him down, and it is always the wrong plan, and it is always the last one they get to make.
The danger is the thing his mother named him for. You cannot read him. A living man tells you what he means to do a half-breath before he does it, a tightening, a shift of weight, and you set yourself against the tell. A silhouette has no body to betray one. Brace against him and you have braced against nothing, and the opening you were owed never comes. Worse: he is a shape and not a man, and the first blow you land each round lands on the shape, not the man behind it. You have to strike him twice in a breath to reach the part that bleeds. Most manage it once. Once does not end the round, and neither does getting tired.
He is only ever met in the Pit under the Old Terraces in Owlerton, and only if you have made enough of a name that The Mother judges you worth feeding to him. Which is to say only if you are good, and only once she has decided that being good will not be enough to save you. His record is in her ledger and no one has struck a line of it, and I read far enough down to make myself stop. I do not know what he is under the rehearsal. I know his feet do not quite meet the same floor mine do. I know that when the murk goes thin in that cage you can see the bars through him, and that I have looked for his shadow on the sand in that light and never found it. The shape is the shadow, and throws none of its own. I know that none of this slows him by a single beat.
Field note: do not go in to wear him down. You will run out of yourself long before you run out of him. If you go in at all, go in able to land twice before he lands once, and do not brace, not even once. The brace is a thing you do to a man. He is only the shadow of one.
Sign-up to see the Foked Stat blocks
Free eBooks & Games
