Tillman grew up poor, one mouth too many in a family that had run out of options. Old enough to fend for himself, he was sent out not out of cruelty but out of pure arithmetic, fewer mouths meant the rest survived. He landed in the City Watch young, drawn less by any sense of duty than by the promise of a meal and a copper wage. It was enough. At first.

That was five years ago. He has spent all of them on the same stretch of north parapet, watching the same treeline that never changes, filing the same uneventful reports. He is not a bad watchman, he is actually quite thorough, but he does it with a flute tucked in his belt and a melody running behind his eyes at all hours. He learned to play young and the instrument became his closest companion on the wall, a low wandering tune that his fellow guards stopped noticing long ago.

What defines Tillman is not raw power but range. He is short, and he will never be the strongest man in a room, but he has put in the hours with a blade and it shows. Fighting with a sword in each hand feels as natural to him as drawing breath, nearly as good as playing the flute, and those two things together tell you most of what you need to know about who he is. He can also read a room, time his words perfectly, and say the thing that quietly reframes a situation before anyone realises he did it. Five years of talking down drunk merchants at the gate and navigating the petty politics of Watch barracks will sharpen a man that way.

He is not bitter yet, but he is coiled. He knows the shape of the life he does not want, and it looks exactly like this parapet. He sends what he can home. He plays his flute into the cold wind. And he waits for the thing, whatever it is, that finally gives him a reason to walk off this wall and not come back.