Yvgrent — he goes by E, it's just easier — has never quite belonged anywhere. Born in a city with little patience for the strange, his amber skin, gold irises, and copper-bright hair marked him as other before he ever opened his mouth. He wasn't homeless, not exactly, but family was always a loose thing, a concept that applied to other people. He learned early to take up less space.

What he lacked in belonging, he made up for in reading people. While other kids found their crowd, E found the edges — the spaces between things, where you could watch without being watched. He had a gift for it: understanding what someone wanted to hear, what they were afraid of, what they were hiding. Not to exploit it, just to navigate it. To stay safe. To stay fed.

By his late teens that gift had become a trade. He ran papers through the wrong checkpoints, smoothed things over between merchants and officials who had no business talking to each other, and occasionally helped someone become briefly unrecognizable to people looking for them. Nothing that kept him up at night. Everyone got what they needed, and E got paid — not well, but enough.

He was good at it. Not famous — never famous — but useful, useful to people who preferred discretion, and that usefulness kept him fed.

Then the Ashwall fell.

Word traveled fast, even to the lower districts. A dead land opened overnight, and every ambitious soul with a sword or a scheme was pointed east. E felt something shift — not glory, not patriotism. Something simpler: this is the door.

Scraping coin from the same streets forever wasn't living. Last Lantern promised no safety, and he wasn't asking for any. He just wanted a bigger horizon and, if luck held, a payday worth the risk.