# Phelan Varrant — Character Bible

---

## Core Identity

- **Full Name:** Phelan Varrant
- **Known As:** "The Locksmith" (clients, underworld contacts), "Phelan" (close associates), "Varrant" (guild formality)
- **Age:** 32 (established Ch06, line 41)
- **Occupation:** Herbal supply store clerk (day job, Book 1 opening) → Guild of Necessary Services member
- **Home:** Rented shack on the dockside of Drenwick — dreams of buying land and building a real house
- **Guild:** The Guild of Necessary Services

---

## Physical Description

- **Build:** Lean and unremarkable by design — average height, pale, hazel eyes, dark brown hair.
- **Face:** The kind that doesn't stick in memory. He considers this an asset.
- **Eyes:** Slightly unsettling to those who notice them — always moving, cataloguing. Very narrow, almost as if squinting all the time.
- **Presence:** Designed to not be noticed. He dresses to blend, moves to avoid attention. Wears black, dark red, dark gray toned clothes.

---

## Personality

### Core Traits
- **Cold reader** — processes people as systems (motivations, pressure points, likely behaviors). Rarely wrong. Finds this useful and slightly boring.
- **Personal code** — has rules he doesn't break. Won't explain them. They cost him money sometimes; he pays without complaint. (Ch13: refused twenty-five gold Compact bribe — guild code and autonomy over financial gain.)
- **Perpetually broke** — not from incompetence, from the gap between his ambitions (the house, the farm, the workshop) and what work actually pays. Source of dark comedy and genuine frustration.
- **Socially reluctant** — prefers to work alone. The job keeps requiring people. Central irony of his life.
- **ADD brain** — thoughts move fast, jump tracks, hyperfocus without warning. Surfaces brilliance at inconvenient moments.

### The Three-Month Cycle
- Phelan's ADD drives a pattern he's never beaten: intense fixation on a new skill or subject for roughly three months, then the dopamine dries up and he drops it entirely
- The learning phase is compulsive — voracious study, rapid improvement, genuine excitement. He'll talk about it unprompted (which, for Phelan, is notable)
- The plateau is physical — the returns diminish, the thrill bleeds out, and the thing that consumed him last week now feels like chewing sand
- He doesn't taper off. He stops. One day he's deep in earth magic theory, the next day the books are in a pile and he's sketching ward architecture
- His life is littered with abandoned three-month expertise — enough competence in a dozen fields to be useful, mastery in none except Flaw Sight (which never stopped being interesting because it never stops presenting new problems)
- The fire combat training is a notable exception: childhood obsession driven by survival need, not curiosity. The current Book 2 training revival is testing whether necessity can override the cycle
- He's aware of the pattern. Doesn't fight it anymore. Considers it a feature of how he works, not a flaw — though it costs him depth in exchange for breadth

### How He Processes People
- Reads everyone as a system — motivations, pressure points, likely next move
- Hears what people mean, not what they say
- Subtext analysis is automatic and near-involuntary
- Mere breaks this because she has no subtext — forces him to actually listen
- People serve a purpose, otherwise they are usless

### Relationship With Emotion
- Does not do warm, spontaneous emotional expression
- Shows care through action, precision, and showing up. Never words.
- Will do the heroic thing while complaining about it, but only if aligned to his moral code.
- Terrible at asking for help or delegation. Everything must be done by him to be "right".
- Never surprised by people behaving badly

---

## Skills & Competencies

### Flaw Sight (Rare Ability)
- No one else is known to have this ability.
- Perceives structural weaknesses in any magical working — gaps in logic, inefficiencies in anchoring, contradictions in intent-binding
- Manifests as a visual/intuitive overlay: glowing lattice with visible cracks, loose threads, unstable nodes
- **Cannot be turned off passively** — always aware of magical flaws nearby, which is distracting and exhausting in arcane-heavy environments
- Sometimes goes down the "rabbit-hole" involuntarily, building a theory, causing sleep deprivation until it's solved

### Flaw Sight Costs
- Active deep analysis triggers ADD-like hyperfocus — non-functional for everything else until the pattern resolves
- If bothered during use, Phelan get's extremely upset, often shouting.
- After a major exploit: physical exhaustion, temporary inability to use any magic, occasional sensory distortion, migraines
- The Arcane Compact does not know the full extent of his ability — he keeps it quiet

### Magical Exploits
- **Thread through** — slip a working past a ward without triggering it
- **Widen** — destabilize a working to cause controlled failure
- **Chain vulnerabilities** — link multiple flaws across separate workings for cascading effect (rare, dangerous, exhausting — his signature move)

### Combat Magic (Fire & Earth)
- Learned fire magic and melee fighting as a child due to bullying. Kept quiet since leaving school. Hasn't needed it until dungeon work
- **Fire element:** Strong. His primary combat tool — close-quarters fire weaving combined with physical strikes. Practiced obsessively as a kid
- **Earth element:** Serviceable but weaker. Used for practical purposes (stabilizing terrain, creating cover) rather than offense
- **Melee + magic combination:** Rare in Corvel. Most mages (~20% of population can use magic) are specialists who stand back and cast. Phelan can fight in close quarters while maintaining spell work. This makes him unusual in combat situations
- **Current state:** Dormant skill resurfacing out of necessity. The skill and muscle memory are there, but stamina isn't what it was. Burns energy faster than he should because he's out of practice
- **Not his identity:** Combat magic is a real capability he's been sitting on, not his defining trait. Flaw Sight remains his primary tool

### Combat Equipment
- **Focusing ring:** Worn on right index finger. Used to channel and stabilize combat magic. Part of his re-emerging combat kit.

### Other Skills
- Cold reading / behavioral prediction
- Guild-level problem solving and investigation
- Herbal knowledge (from the day job — practical, not passionate)
---

## Backstory

- **Born and raised in Wensley** — a small town in Thorngate duchy, ~10 miles south of Thorngate city. Raised by a working mother (Kimbra) who worked as the Corvel equivalent of a life coach / applied psychologist. Present in the house but largely absent in attention during working hours. Necessity, not cruelty.
- No father figure. Built his own code of conduct through trial, error, and observation.
- Discovered Flaw Sight young — spent years thinking he was simply better at magic before realizing it was categorically different.
- **Age 12:** Left Wensley for **Brannick's Academy in Thorngate city** (boarding school, Arcane Compact educational track). Four years.
- **Age 16:** Licensed by the Arcane Compact. Outpaced instructors by year three; spent year four irritating them by pointing out inefficiencies. Withdrew before completion of the advanced track.
- **Met Leon D'Nardis at Brannick's.** Leon was younger, being bullied. Phelan taught him two combat fire spells as a practical solution. Leon combined them into an unexpectedly effective hybrid on the spot. Friendship seeded there.
- **Age 16–20:** Remained in Thorngate city rather than returning to Wensley. Four years finding his footing, working the margins, learning about the Guild of Necessary Services through contacts — mostly via Leon's minor-nobility network, which opened doors Phelan's family name did not.
- **Age 20:** Moved to Drenwick to pursue GNS membership and to be closer to Leon (who had also left Thorngate by then). Joined the Guild because it was the only structure that didn't require pretending to be something he wasn't.
- **Has not returned to Thorngate duchy since** — approximately twelve years away from the duchy of his birth and adolescence as of Book 3 opening. Letter contact with Kimbra maintained at a sparse 4–6 letters/year; last in-person visit ~5 years before Book 3 (Kimbra travelled south to Drenwick for a week; Phelan has never returned the trip). Letters stopped ~1 year ago during the Floundry case without him noticing.
- Has never told anyone the full extent of what he can do.

---

## Relationships

| Character | Relationship | Status (Current) |
|-----------|-------------|-------------------|
| Mere Fields | Partner — living together at Chandler's Row. Marriage & children decision reached Book 2 Ch21 (private) | Declared partner Book 1 Ch10. Domestic life established Book 2 Ch01 (joint budgeting, both methods kept). The Misread/recalibration pattern (Ch04–05) — Mere is the one person whose words are the complete message; he has to learn to ask when his subtext-reader fires on someone with no subtext to read. **Ch21:** Mere raises marriage and children. Phelan surfaces the father wound (*"I don't know how"*) as close to spoken as he has ever come. Decision is private to both for the remainder of Book 2 — no reveals to Devod, Leon, Carter, Carson, or Ledger until Book 3 |
| Sniff (the dog) | Household member | Mere's dog, lives with them at Chandler's Row. Confirmed male, named Sniff |
| Jonael "Carter" Carterson | Partner / craftsman / straight man | Drawn into Phelan's orbit by necessity, stays by choice. Book 2: supplied ore-studded jacket (Ch12) with dual protection (passive magical absorption + impact-response leather). Brought into the Cass conflict as a conscious participant after Ch08 reveal |
| Leon D'Nardis | Morally gray friend / combat training partner | Daily fire combat sparring throughout Book 2. The crystal Leon sold is the case's first cause, but neither blames the other directly. Combat partner at Brida's tenement Ch18, "fill me in at practice later" Ch19 |
| Devod Fields | Father-in-law (effectively) / quiet contributor | Ch01 onward: regular visits with apples and ten-bad-ideas-one-good. Provided the four critical Book 2 ideas: integrated drainage, "protective non-investigation," "if it won't pull, maybe you can push," and "you don't need to create a reason for Kae to leave." Drained by Kae Ch12 as Cass's personal message; Phelan's anger turns cold, patient, efficient. Ch15 model demolition: revealed as a former Pathfinder (the Wolf) — every "delivery-driver instinct" Phelan had filed in Book 1 reclassifies as elite military competence |
| Cassius Rykhard | Personal enemy | Book 1 antagonist who Book 2 escalated against Phelan's network from the Thorngate office. Ordered Elara's murder, weaponised Kae against the Floundry witnesses and Devod. Phelan's anger by Ch14 is pointed directly at Thorngate. As of Ch19, the case against Cass is built — paper trail, Kae's testimony, Ledger has it |
| Ledger | Guild contact / observer → investor | Through Book 2 the relationship moves from contact-and-handler to operational partner. Ch08 admits "There's more you're not telling me" / "Yes." Ch14 admits he assigned Phelan the case because the trail would lead to Cass. Ch18 stands three feet away while Phelan rewrites the crystal — first firsthand witness to the full extent of Flaw Sight. Ch19 "investor" shift: "The Compact has artifacts they consider untouchable. You just proved they aren't" |
| Carson Johnsby | Warrens ally / network credibility | Met Ch06. Provides Kae intel and the warrens-side resolution of Carter's Hendrick Voss rumour problem. Phelan genuinely likes him — same intelligence and pattern recognition, opposite architecture (Carson collects people the way Phelan avoids them) |
| Brennan Toor | Devod's old comrade | Met Ch15 at Millford Street. Provides Aldric Vane contact. The man whose presence reframes Phelan's entire model of Devod |
| Brida Voss | Witness / Kae's protector | Met Ch09 (broke into her tenement) and again Ch14 (with Carson, for Kae's full backstory) |
| Kaeran "Kae" Thrainn | Case target → person to save | Mission inverted Ch14 from "stop Kae" to "save Kae." Crystal rewritten Ch18, deal signed Ch19. Never met face-to-face after the Ch09 fight — observed at the deal from the side wall |
| Cassius's "voice" via soundstone | Antagonist confirmed | First "met" Ch08 through the warehouse soundstone — voice only, furious, "his people, not the Compact's people" |
| Guild Master | Professional | Known internally, anonymous publicly. Communication indirect |
| Shop Owner (name TBD) | Former employer (Book 1) | No longer working there as of Book 2 (full-time guild operative) |

---

## Wants vs. Needs

- **Wants:** To be left alone. To be paid. To eventually have enough money to build the house and stop renting the shack.
- **Needs:** To let people in enough to actually accomplish anything — every major goal requires collaboration he resists.
- **Series arc:** Slow, reluctant, occasionally involuntary growth toward genuine connection. Doesn't change his nature — learns to work with it.

---

## Voice & Dialog Notes

- First-person, past tense narration — told as recollection, allows for meta-commentary
- Dry, precise observations about people that are slightly too accurate to be comfortable
- Tangents that seem off-topic and then suddenly aren't
- Genuine enthusiasm about magical systems that disappears the moment someone tries to connect with him about it
- Understatement in dangerous situations, overstatement in mundane ones
- Occasional fourth-wall-adjacent asides that don't quite break it
- Action scenes: short sentences, fragments, clipped and precise
- Investigation scenes: longer, discursive, tangent-prone — where the ADD voice breathes
- Conversation scenes: subtext-heavy — he hears what people mean
- Quiet/personal scenes: slower, more sensory detail — rare, should feel different

---

## Financial State

*Track across the book. Phelan's wallet is a running subplot.*

| Chapter | State | Notes |
|---------|-------|-------|
| Ch01–03 | Broke | Meager shop wage, stretching every copper |
| Ch04 | Guild interview | No income change — joining the Guild |
| Ch05 | 40s job brief | Barrows retrieval job offered at 40 silvers |
| Ch06 | −7s Carter gear | Equipment from Carterson's (7s vs 20s guild catalogue). −20s guild equipment catalogue considered but not purchased |
| Ch07–08 | No change | In the Barrows — no transactions |
| Ch09 | +32s net | 40s job pay minus 20% guild commission |
| Ch10 | Store credit | Store credit at Carter's (no expiration) for inscription fix |
| **Book 2** | | |
| B2 Ch01 | 15s/month retainer + projected case fees + 12s/month ore income (Leon's channels) | Surplus 8.5s/month, 51 months to house target. Both Mere's budget and Phelan's 13-scenario verification produce the same number |
| B2 Ch10 | 22s/month retainer (Tier Two promotion) | House timeline drops by months — exact recalculation pending |

---

## Character Progression

*Tracks how Phelan evolves as the story progresses. Each entry is canon once the corresponding chapter is finalized.*

### Book 1

| Chapter | Development | Category |
|---------|-------------|----------|
| Ch01 | Established at herbal shop — competent but trapped | mindset |
| Ch02 | First visit to Thresholds — Mere introduced, cold-read apparatus fails on her | relationship |
| Ch03 | Guild intake — Phelan commits to Necessary Services | goal |
| Ch04 | Interview panel — identifies Ledger as "most dangerous person in the room" | skill, revelation |
| Ch05 | Barrows job brief received. Forty silvers. Acknowledges combat magic rust | goal, skill |
| Ch06 | Combat magic revealed to Leon. Mere's cheek kiss — the noise stops for the first time | skill, relationship |
| Ch07 | Barrows solo — resonance crawlers killed, verdenshade harvested, death ward analyzed overnight | skill, mindset |
| Ch08 | Death ward cracked via forge-and-redirect exploit. Bracelet found. First major crash | skill, revelation |
| Ch09 | Ledger formally introduced — probes combat magic. 32s net. Bracelet hidden from guild | relationship, goal |
| Ch10 | Carter inscription fix (store credit). Mere "partner" declaration. Bracelet analysis deepened. Brute-force forgery theorized with Leon. Shack realization. Floundry case received | relationship, skill, goal |

### Book 2

| Chapter | Development | Category |
|---------|-------------|----------|
| Ch01 | **The Quiet — household established at Chandler's Row.** Three months after the Floundry epilogue. Joint budget exercise with Mere — can't accept her ledger without independently verifying it; spends two hours redoing 13 branching scenarios. Same number. Both methods kept. **Fire training with Leon at fourth bell** — sparring, twelve and a half seconds integrated casting (the new ceiling). Devod visit at ~6:15 PM with apples and the hollow-pilings drainage idea (kernel: integrated function). Quiet evening at the table. **Eighth-bell guild knock from Ledger:** "Pattern identified. Compact is aware and not acting. We need to discuss." The quiet ended exactly when expected | mindset, skill, relationship |
| Ch02 | **The First Victim — case opens.** Morning ring-accuracy training with Leon — **13 seconds achieved** (ugly, 2/4 attempts, ceiling moved from 12.5 to 13). Charged whip demonstration: 6-second charge through the ring, fat whip-arc that blackens the courtyard wall. Leon's "that's not a meeting, that's a fitting" warning about the guild summons. **Ledger's briefing at the hall** — first time past the interview corridor. Not a case brief: a guild operation, guild-funded, assigned directly. 7 confirmed victims, Compact non-investigation, suppressed compliance officer. Phelan realises the scope means he needs help. **Carter's shop visit:** thinning shelves (Compact-regulated stock depleted, three suppliers gone quiet), Carter notes Phelan's wool coat is professional negligence for fire combat work, **Carter's brother reveal** (Tomael, died at the third door of the Greymarch Barrows) — recontextualises Carter's quality obsession. Buys 2 vials ward-resistance compound + containment sleeve | goal, skill, relationship |
| Ch03 | **Three-site Flaw Sight analysis.** Skips training for the first time — case priority. Mere delivers her own folder copy and the cognitive-confusion-precedes-fatigue insight Phelan missed. Three sites visited: arcane district student room (clean baseline reading, pre-Compact architecture identified), Ren Dorren's tenement in the warrens (heavier residue, escalation confirmed, first time using "the Locksmith" with a civilian), cobbler residue-only site. **Pattern crystallisation:** same source, same instrument, signature is the instrument's not the operator's. Pre-Compact architecture, biological routing, northeast vector. **The noise-leash beat:** "Three months of practice had given me a leash where before I'd had nothing." Can disengage from the analytical spiral before the migraines. Growth: Mere doesn't have to nurse him through a crash. Decision: needs Leon's pre-Compact expertise | skill, mindset |
| Ch04 | **The crystal recognition + the Misread.** Morning at the courtyard with Leon. Describes the pre-Compact signatures. **Leon goes still and identifies them — the Vethani crystal, the one Leon sold to Harren six months ago.** Leon's guilt onset; Phelan files it but doesn't push. Leon volunteers to chase the broker trail and to find Compact-independent suppliers for Carter. **Harren's shop:** Leon pressures Harren, gets the broker name (Galden) and the intermediary description. Phelan dispatches Leon. **Ledger's worn folder:** delivers the "woman connected to a man named Kae" intelligence with too-controlled composure. Phelan cold-reads — something personal underneath. Files the omission. **Evening at Chandler's Row — the Misread:** tells Mere about Leon's crystal connection unprompted (new behaviour). Hears criticism in her practical advice that wasn't there. Adjusts behaviour. **Doesn't know yet that the gap doesn't exist** | relationship, skill |
| Ch05 | **The Misread recalibration + The Street King.** Morning: Mere notices the behavioral shift. "I said what I meant." Phelan admits the misread. Mere's structural response: "When it happens, ask." **Phelan files it permanently** — Mere is the one person whose words are the complete message. **Ledger debrief:** asks too-precise methodology questions; Phelan deflects to Leon. Provides Kae's territory map. **Compact inquiries surface** (two clean men asking about Kae the same morning — head start). **Street investigation in the warrens:** three conversations (nut seller protective lie, washing woman directional eye-flick + "Are you a healer?" question, Drannick the most forthcoming — confirms congenital pain, names Elara, refers Phelan to Carson) | relationship, skill |
| Ch06 | **Carson encounter + Devod's "protective non-investigation" insight.** Greywell Lane chapel-workshop. Identifies himself as "the Locksmith, Guild of Necessary Services." Carson recognises the ghost guild. Phelan notes Carson collects people the way he avoids them — admirable and exhausting. Kae intel from Carson (chronic pain, Elara as stabilising force, recent deterioration, "broken kid not a predator"). **Carter B-plot resolution (Supplier 2):** Carson identifies Hendrick Voss, commits to the warrens-side rumour-killing campaign once Phelan reveals the source is the Compact. **Devod visit at Chandler's Row:** the genius idea. "Protective non-investigation" — if the Compact is deliberately not investigating, someone told them not to. Phelan stops walking. **The noise connects** the suppressed compliance officer's reassignment to Thorngate with Cass's presence there. The geography of institutional suppression has a name | skill, relationship |
| Ch07 | **Multi-day spread — training, Ledger debrief, Mere's dependency insight, Carson's puzzle piece.** Day 6: Training (13s held with Leon), Carter delivery, Leon's financial trail update (institutional money behind the intermediary). Ledger debrief — first victim death, case shifts to murder. **Elara was a healer.** Day 7: Phelan tells Mere the full picture; **Mere's dependency insight** ("You can't just stop him. You have to replace what the crystal provides") reframes the case question. Day 8: Carson's fish fry, **Carson's puzzle piece** — Kae brought hypothetical dilemmas seeking *permission*. A sociopath doesn't seek permission. Carson's good-faith advice was weaponised by circumstance | skill, mindset |
| Ch08 | **The Tail — soundstone, financial confirmation, Cass's voice.** Morning training: **14 seconds integrated casting** (a full second longer than previous ceiling, absorbing through instability). Leon gives him a paired soundstone (loaner). **Ledger's financial confirmation:** crystal purchase runs through Cass's Thorngate discretionary fund. **"It's Cass."** **Elara reveal:** she was Ledger's guild informant. Ledger's door cracks open. Afternoon: tails the watch-checker through the southern warrens. **Earth magic vibration sensing** — palm against building wall, feels two sets of footsteps stationary inside (input side of the earth brace from Book 1 Ch6). Inside the warehouse: **hears Cass's voice through the operatives' soundstone** — furious, "off mission," "Varrant and his little team of freelancers," "a plan to take care of this." Reclassification: "His people. Not the Compact's people. His." Evening: tells Carter directly. "It's Cass" | skill, relationship |
| Ch09 | **First Contact — the fight at Brida's tenement and the drain.** Soundstone ping from Leon: Kae's location. The connection — washing woman from Ch05. Break-in: cheap paper talisman cracked in four seconds. **Earth vibration sensing fails** in the packed residential building (heartbeats, shifting weight, ambient human noise buries individual signals). Goes in blind. Empty room, crystal residue, hidden under cloth in the bottom dresser drawer (the one he checked). **The fight (5 phases):** Kae walks in, attacks without telegraph; Phelan reverts to childhood brute-force fire (heat blasts, learned at thirteen in an alley); ring deployment (flame whip, three strikes); **Kae breaks for the crystal**; the drain. **The noise goes silent for the first time since age fourteen.** Flaw Sight fires involuntarily — lattice bloom, pre-Compact, biological routing, hundreds of connection records stamped like seals, the ledger IS the way in. Fragments scattered — can't hold them, but they're in there. **Bracelet flares white-hot**, catches the worst, drops to half power. Leon crashes through with a wall of fire. Aftermath at Chandler's Row: Mere's clinical bedside care, warmed stone in cloth, "but it had been enough" | skill, crisis, revelation |
| Ch10 | **The Pivot — bracelet broken, Tier Two, Floundry victims.** Morning: reaches for the bracelet's familiar background hum. **Nothing.** Half power, and the auto-recharge is gone. Quiet private panic. Spirals on architectural complexity instead of considering manual workarounds. **Mere's cross-reference report** delivers the dual analysis — Kae behavioural profile + bracelet/crystal interaction (the bracelet identified a specific attack signature and deployed a specific countermeasure). Seeds the Ch16–18 breakthrough. **Ledger arrives at Chandler's Row** — first time at the home. **Tier Two promotion:** 22s/month retainer, Archive access, intelligence priority, "The Locksmith" formalised in guild records. Mixed feelings — money and access welcome, scrutiny isn't. Then immediately: **the Floundry victims.** Calla and Ned drained yesterday. Cass's Ch08 "plan to take care of this" was redirecting Kae onto Phelan's network. **Devod's wagon idea** in the evening: "If it won't pull, maybe you can push." Phelan doesn't test it (depleted, untested). The idea lands | goal, skill, crisis |
| Ch11 | **Thresholds — present without speaking.** Devod's reveal of Charlette's ultimatum. Phelan stays present at the kitchen table, holding an empty cup. "Some things don't need words. They need a room. And a person in it who isn't going anywhere." **Mere calls Devod "Dad"** for the first time. Phelan files the moment | relationship |
| Ch12 | **15-second ceiling + manual push-charge + the jacket + Devod drained.** Morning training: **15 seconds integrated casting.** Leon notices the bracelet's dim state — both land on "no reason not to try" simultaneously. **Manual push-charge discovery:** like priming a mill sluice. Slower than auto-trickle, but can dump much more per push. Tops the bracelet from ~50% to ~70%. Mid-morning: **Carter delivers the studded jacket** (ore studs from Velken's Drift, ~20% passive magical absorption + impact-response leather, dual protection from one mechanism). Carter: "If you're going to do something stupid, at least wear something I made." Afternoon — the quiet. Devod expected, doesn't arrive. The noise runs scenarios. Tanner arrives: **Devod has been drained.** Walk to Millford Street. Devod looks fifteen years older. Mere takes over. Ledger arrives within ten minutes. **"I wasn't thinking about the case as a problem to solve. I was thinking about it as a debt to collect"** | skill, relationship, crisis |
| Ch13 | **The Weight of It — the corridor.** Two-three bells in Devod's room. Watches Mere work, tracks structure underneath. Flaw Sight catches the drain echo as a faint hum at the edge of perception ("like trying to read a word written in fog"). Mere's discovery and saturated binding salt application. **The corridor scene:** Phelan's instinct surfaces — "I know where Kae sleeps." Cold, efficient. Leon and Ledger push back: Kae is evidence. Phelan concedes. Goes back into the room — not to help, not to solve, just to sit. **"The anger was still there — cold, patient, efficient. It would keep"** | mindset, relationship |
| Ch14 | **The Villain Becomes a Victim — mission inverted.** Morning at Carson's chapel-workshop, then to Brida's tenement (with Carson as buffer). **Brida's testimony** — Kae's full backstory, Elara's care, the pendant, the disappearance. Phelan's mirror recognition: Kae's isolation imposed, his own self-chosen, same shape, different cause. **Compact administrative annex with Ledger:** the paper trail — disbursements, operatives, reassignment order. **The double reveal:** Cass ordered Elara killed AND Elara was Ledger's informant. Ledger's composure cracks. Ledger admits he assigned Phelan the case because the trail would lead to Cass. **Mission inverts: from "stop Kae" to "save Kae."** Returns to Millford Street, tells Mere about Kae. Mere starts solving the herbal-treatment problem he hadn't asked. Anger pointing at Thorngate. The quiet of knowing | skill, mindset, relationship |
| Ch15 | **The Wolf — Devod model demolition.** Wakes in the chair at Millford Street. Bracelet at 70%, passive thread confirmed dead. **Brennan Toor arrives** — combat-trained spatial awareness, calls Devod "Wolf." Mere greets him by name with no surprise. **The Vethek Pass story.** Phelan's entire model of Devod inverts in real time — mine navigation = Pathfinder terrain assessment, mine combat = terrain control training, forearm/collarbone strikes = precision disabling techniques, ten-ideas methodology = survival methodology. "Everything I categorised as civilian instinct was elite military competence wearing civilian clothes, and I missed it because the model I built was wrong from the first data point." Mere's non-reaction is the final confirmation. Brennan offers Aldric Vane contact. **Begins active manual charging** — eighty percent by evening, ninety by morning. Upper range resists more | revelation, skill |
| Ch16 | **Planning the Impossible — the breakthrough from inside.** Wakes at seventh bell. Bracelet at ~90%. **Mere's report:** Devod has a unique low-level passive draw still active — same behaviour the bracelet used to have. They swapped. The noise catches the symmetry. **Cascade:** Ch9 Flaw Sight fragments organise — lattice structure, connection log, authentication structure. The bracelet and crystal performed a handshake during the drain. Same era, same makers, same tongue. **Phelan's authentication is already in the crystal's ledger. He has the key. He just didn't know it.** **First time the reader sees hyperfocus from inside** — non-functional, eyes open but nothing behind them, no notes, no movement. The room goes away. **Mere's Misread (her version):** interprets the stillness as potentially something else. Devod recognises it ("He's working. Leave him") from military experience. Phelan surfaces with "The bracelet already knows the crystal." **Ledger arrives** with the safehouse intel and Brida-as-next-target intel. **Three-part plan crystallises** | revelation, skill |
| Ch17 | **The Approach — team into position.** Wakes after deep earned rest. Bracelet at ~90%, amber-red. Devod sitting up, lucid. Mere with three compounds and dosing schedule. Phelan registers the **"our"** in "our things." **Leon briefing in the courtyard:** anger not guilt, accepts the intercept role as "serving someone else's plan." Phelan gives him Brida's address. **Brida's tenement:** Carson already there, jacket from Chandler's Row delivered. Brida's "wall was worth it if the boy is still worth saving." Notes the "boy" terminology — everyone calls Kae one because he never got past the age where someone should have caught him. **Ledger walk south:** safehouse security briefing, ward layouts from firsthand experience. Phelan sees his old shack from the safehouse approach — "walked past it for over a year without noticing." Five separate individuals into position | goal, relationship |
| Ch18 | **Into the Fire — the crystal rewrite.** Two parallel actions, one soundstone clock. Brida's six-word settling of Leon. Approach to the safehouse through Phelan's old neighborhood — familiar but wrong-fitting. **Ledger's ward bypass** (flat metal disc and stylus, eight-second gap) — "Not his first time. Not his tenth." **The crystal exploit:** lattice blooms, bracelet's Ch9 handshake credentials slide in without resistance, Phelan is in as a trusted process. **Parallel processing through soundstone** as Kae fights Leon at Brida's. Reads the tally of impressions. **Revokes Kae's operator designation, rewrites targeting logic to open binding** — anyone who reaches for it with intent becomes target, not wielder. Modification disguised as wear. **Crystal left in place** — taking it would expose everything. **Catalogues Ledger's six micro-reactions** during the exploit. Post-exploit Ledger: "That's not in any manual I've read." Through the soundstone: Leon's five words, Kae's surrender. **"The perfect exploit is the one nobody knows happened."** Walk south through the docks in silence with Ledger. The noise had nothing to add | skill, revelation |
| Ch19 | **The Deal — observer mode.** Splits with Ledger after the safehouse. Collects Mere from Millford Street; she's already packed. Devod's quiet nod from bed. **Brida's tenement:** Mere applies the herbal treatment to Kae. Phelan watches without intervening. Walk to 14 Greystone Lane with Kae and Leon. Cold-reads Kae on the walk — withdrawal tremors, posture, pendant. **Interview room:** Phelan observes from the side wall while Ledger runs the deal. **Built the infrastructure; Ledger closes the deal.** Catches Ledger's investor shift after the Book 3 seed line ("artifacts they consider untouchable") — observer has become investor. The noise had nothing useful to add for the second time tonight. The case finishes; the relationship with Ledger has changed in a way that hasn't been spoken yet | mindset, revelation |
| Ch20 | **Picking Up the Pieces — the curated disclosure.** Day 17 Twosday, third bell. Scheduled debrief at Greystone Lane, private debrief room, second floor (Tier Two access). Two days of preparation on both sides. Walks in reading the geometry — Ledger has set the chair-facing-door, given Phelan the window chair. **Phase 1:** Case closure. Takes the 120-silver case fee (150 gross, 20% commission) in a guild-sealed oilcloth pouch. *"The house just moved closer in a way the monthly surplus never does."* Clocks Ledger's deferral on Vellen Thrace without pushing. **Phase 2 — the real conversation:** Ledger: *"I was there, Locksmith. That wasn't curse-breaking."* Phelan delivers his **rehearsed three-layer disclosure**: (1) bracelet as pre-Compact perception tool, (2) rare mage pathway-sight ability (documented, uncategorised), (3) "my head works differently." **Deliberately withholds the word *flaw*** and the bracelet's handshake mechanic. "Three true statements that fit into a report without disturbing it." Ledger: *"That's not exactly what I saw, but close enough for the paperwork."* Phelan reads it correctly — the official record carries the curated version; a private version exists in a place Ledger controls. "The file doesn't close. It just moves rooms." **Phase 3 — the Merrenwood folder:** Ledger produces the off-book folder. **Tier Two structural disclosure** — Phelan files *(That's what Tier Two is. I thought the promotion was the reward. The promotion was the door.)* Vellen Thrace was the illegitimate son of Duchess Isolde Merrenwood. Phelan walked within a block of Vellen's blue-door boarding house on Day 3 without knowing to stop. Cass's motive spelled out (housekeeping + leverage-banking). Ledger's standing rule and *"and yet."* Oblique question: *"If it were your information, what would you do with it?"* **Phelan does not answer** — recognises it as an inventory, not a question. Ledger defers. **Walk home to Chandler's Row** via the quieter merchants' quarter route, carrying *one more thing I didn't ask for.* Chapter closes on the unresolved kid parentheticals *(I hope he wasn't. I hope he was.)* and one clean sentence: *I walked home to Chandler's Row, where Mere was.* | revelation, relationship, goal |
| Ch21 | **The New Quiet — the father wound surfaces (delivered).** Day 18 Freyasday. Earned domestic chapter. Morning training: **15s plateau acknowledged *as* the plateau, no breakthrough.** Leon names the ceiling: *"You're not going to get sixteen out of Carterson's ring."* Primes Book 3 for new hardware. **Leon's philosophy-shift beat (externalised):** Leon asks Phelan to vet **Arren Yule** (private collector, south end of the arcane district) before selling the **Harrow Vale threshold seal** — a pre-Compact placeable ward Leon pulled from a ruin three years back — for **2,400 silvers.** Phelan immediately flags the price (ward pricing canon: 10 silvers commoner-class, 50 silvers good work, 2,400 = 48× a good lock). They work malicious uses together, all collapse on logistics. Lands on *"it's a lock"* + hammer metaphor (Leon's). Phelan files the whole philosophy shift without naming it. **Thresholds confrontation (witness-only):** Mere and Devod at the counter. Devod walked from Millford Street before sixth bell — sleeves past elbows, thirty-years-of-something-other-than-limping posture. Phelan's Pathfinder model for Devod is fully rewritten on sight, silently, no speech. Mere lays out two options; Devod answers the deed: *"Option one."* Charlette: *"Fine."* Partnership reverted. Thresholds resolved. Outside in the Hallow Street sun: *"That's done." (that's done.)* Phelan hadn't spoken for twenty minutes — they needed him there as a witness for a later conversation Mere hasn't had yet. **Carter's shop with Mere present:** Carter welcomes Mere ("Good to have you in the shop — been too long"). New builds on the stand "none of them exactly like mine" — Carter's craft has moved past Phelan's jacket. **Phelan's jacket report is accurate:** worn on the Ch18 op, did not absorb anything (job stayed stealth), glad to have had it on the walks. **Tomael arc closed in subtext** — Carter's pause on the word *five* ("Gear I wish I'd been making five years ago"), Carter cutting leather now for a woman in Greymarch Barrows "who should have had one a long time ago." Phelan: *"Good."* It was the right word and not a big one. **Unscheduled hour walking home:** first unscheduled walk in Drenwick since ~a month before Ledger's first knock. Bracelet cool, "the cooling-down of the thing had started to feel like its own kind of sound." **Dusk Chandler's Row — financial beat.** Mere's ghostveil moss standing order delivered that morning (12 silvers/month — **first line of income in her name**). Case fee counted on-page: **438 silvers saved,** 1,300 target, ~1/3 there, **46 silvers/month recurring** (22 retainer + 12 ore + 12 moss), **~8 months to half.** **Rev 11 filed** — Devod's integrated-drainage kernel laid over Rev 10 (east-facing kitchen), "It fits." **New canon: sloped hilltop lot.** **The marriage and children conversation (author-locked centerpiece):** Mere proposes flat and declarative. Phelan reels — thought *partner* was the whole shape. Brief hyperfocus snap, wrong direction. Surfaces with the wrong question: *"Do we need to see a priest?"* Mere **laughs** (short, surprised, it happens to her face before she catches it). Not laughing at him — laughing because the priest question confirmed he was solving the wrong problem. She resets, holds his hands, pivots to the real question: **children**, within the next year, before she's in her mid-thirties, *"These things have an order."* **The longest noise burst in Book 2 fires** — logistics, money, house plans, nursery math (Devod's drainage kernel literally becomes the floor of a nursery room). **One clean unfragmented parenthetical slips through the cascade:** *(A kid. With Mere. Yes. Yes, I want that.)* — the only complete sentence in the spiral, the first time Phelan has permitted himself to think it, buried immediately as the noise closes over it. The noise finds the wound: *(food — more food — my mother fed three of us on) (my mother) (my father) (I don't —)* **Deflect first** (Chandler's Row is one bedroom, retainer, house months out). Mere cuts through: *"Those are logistics. Do you want them?"* Flat. Yes-or-no. Not cruel, not prodding — the exact question as a scalpel. **The father wound surfaces on-page in four words:** *"I don't know how."* Not *"I don't want to."* **"I don't know how."** First time said aloud to any person in almost thirty years. The father he never had sits in the sentence and does not need to be named. Mere does not look away: *"Neither do I. I'm going to be wrong a lot. That doesn't matter. What matters is that we do our best. It will work itself out. We aren't dumb people."* Then, without changing register: *"Our genetics are favorable."* Phelan's laugh is his this time; doesn't quite make it to his face. **The Kae mirror folded in internally** — the unspoken paragraph that writes itself once and stays. Kae got no help; the absence of it did its own work on him. Phelan got help he hadn't asked for from Mere, Leon, Carson, "the man whose window was dark across the river." The mirror closed the other way, tonight, in the kitchen of a house he didn't own yet, and it looked like this. He did not name the connection. The math would do itself. Book 2's thematic close. **The court house research:** Mere already had it filed ("Last month. Before the case"). Drenwick Court House, second floor, civil registry, counter two, six silvers, ten-day waiting period. Phelan: *"Okay. We'll go this week."* **Closing bed/dark micro-scene:** *(a kid.)* one parenthetical, short, un-spiralled, the noise lets it sit without trying to solve it. *"I slept."* **Decision is private to Phelan and Mere for the entirety of Book 2 per locked canon.** No one else learns — not Leon, not Devod, not Carter, not Carson, not Ledger. All reveals deferred to Book 3 | relationship, revelation, goal |

| Epilogue | **The Filing — Day 28 civil registry, wedding party, forward-looking close.** Day 28 dawn (ten days after Ch21). Phelan downstairs before Mere wakes. Bracelet cool, manual-only, "twelve days now since it had last asked for anything." **Rev 12 of the house plans, drawn privately on the back of a ledger page nine mornings in a row.** An extra room upstairs over Devod's drainage kernel — not written down, "drew the wall and let the shape of the wall do the explaining." Pregnancy foreshadow via housing math. Savings still at 438 silvers, nothing ticked in the ten-day window. Shared cup with Mere at the table in silence. **Fifteen past second afternoon bell — the civil registry, counter two.** Six silvers laid on the counter. Name exchange, papers exchange (crown papers, royal seals verified against the reference plate), clause read, both say *no* to existing joint contracts with crown or any of the six duchies. Stamp lands. **Neither of them smiles at the counter.** The counter is theirs; the counter gets the flat version. Mere's hand in Phelan's elbow on the stairs down and all the way home. **Wedding party at Chandler's Row Day 28 evening.** Cast in order: Carter & Jenet (letter from Greymarch Barrows confirmed in subtext, Tomael arc closed), Carson (Church of the Ahole catering, Mere almost-smiles), Leon (six silvers ask-around fee for the Yule vet, matching the filing fee "for the symmetry," next piece next week), Devod (on-page hug with Mere in the middle of the room, folded address slip in an unknown hand — "for when you're ready"), Ledger (last). Charlette absent — Mere did not offer, Charlette did not send word. **Ledger's handoff — the load-bearing beat.** A wrapped bundle and a cloth pouch. Gift line: *"From the guild. And from me, because the distinction matters tonight."* Inside the bundle: **a small pre-Compact thaumometer — ornate, palm-sized, focal stone behind a convex lens, graduated bezel in half-mark divisions finer than Compact-licensed standard. Effective range 50+ yards. Projects a walking map of every working inside a city block of wherever Phelan is standing.** Resolves the close-range limitation of Flaw Sight. The pouch: 22 silvers, about one month of the Tier Two retainer, symbolic. Ledger uses the codename: *"Locksmith. Take three or four days for yourself. Then come see me. I have something that needs the kind of mind you have."* **At the door on his way out, one sentence:** *"He knows about the crystal. He doesn't know how. He's not going to stop wondering."* Ledger leaves. Phelan turns the thaumometer over and files it "with everything else Ledger had ever handed me." **Day 29 dawn — the final scene.** Thaumometer, pouch, folded slip, Leon's cloth twist, and Carter's unopened box all still on the table. Mere asleep upstairs. **Phelan refuses the three-day grace window:** *"I was not going to take them. Mere was not going to ask me to. The filing had been the filing and the filing was done, and today was today the way all days were today, and neither of us had ever kept a calendar that set one day apart from the rest on account of a clerk's stamp. Just another one."* Noise already building a preliminary case folder on what Ledger has queued up — not a curse, not a ward, "something that started with an unlocked door and ended somewhere I had not yet been." **Closing line:** *"I put it in my coat pocket and went to find Ledger."* Book 2 closes with Phelan walking into Book 3 | Filing / wedding / Book 3 hook |

### Book 3
<!-- Future -->

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## The House Dream

*Track any development on this subplot — it's his emotional throughline.*

| Chapter | Development |
|---------|-------------|
| Ch01 | Plans and drawings pinned to shack wall. No money. Dream exists, no path |
| Ch09 | "The distance felt measurable" — 32s earned, first real savings. House math shifts from theoretical to possible |
| **Book 2** | |
| B2 Ch01 | House revision 10, east-facing kitchen. Question mark on workshop east wall (needs soil samples). Joint budget exercise with Mere — 51 months to target at 8.5s/month surplus. House plans now a shared project. Devod's hollow-pilings drainage idea filed for revision 11 (kernel: integrated function — structure and drainage as one system). Living at Chandler's Row with Mere; the shack is gone |
| B2 Ch10 | Tier Two retainer (22s/month) drops the timeline by months. Exact recalculation pending |
| B2 Ch17 | Walks past his old shack on the safehouse approach. "Walked past it for over a year without noticing." The shack belongs to a previous version of him |
| B2 Ch20 | **First Tier Two case fee: 120 silvers net (150 gross, 20% commission).** Delivered in coin by Ledger. *"The house just moved closer in a way the monthly surplus never does."* Compresses the timeline meaningfully (~14 months of surplus savings in one pouch). House target of ~1,300 silvers now noticeably within reach. Tier Two reframed: not a reward, a door — and the door has opened onto a folder he didn't ask for |
| B2 Ch21 | **Savings math on-page: 438 silvers saved, 1,300 target, ~1/3 of the way.** Recurring 46/month (22 retainer + 12 ore average + 12 moss — Mere's new line). **~8 months to half the target** at recurring alone; faster with another Tier Two case. **Rev 11 filed** — Devod's integrated-drainage kernel merged with the east-facing kitchen. **Lot canon: sloped hilltop lot** (first explicit descriptor; Devod's Ch01 hollow-piling kernel was right all along because the slope is on a hill). Phelan's internal: *"Faster if one doesn't drain me first."* Nursery math enters the noise during the marriage/children cascade — Rev 11 drainage kernel becomes the foundation under a hypothetical nursery floor. The house is no longer just a shelter — it's being designed with a family in it |
| B2 Epilogue | **Savings unchanged at 438 silvers** — no recurring cycles ticked in the ten-day window between Ch21 and the filing day. Retainer, ore, and moss all on later cycles. **Rev 12 drafted privately by Phelan, nine mornings in a row, not yet shown to Mere.** Builds on Rev 11 with an extra room upstairs over Devod's drainage pilings — "like it had been planned that way from the start." Phelan realised on the third morning of drawing that the shape had been there from the start. (Pregnancy foreshadow via housing math — subtle, reader-who's-paying-attention catches it.) Wedding gift pouch from Ledger: 22 silvers symbolic. **The house is no longer a shelter OR a family home — it is starting to become a nursery question Phelan is answering on paper before he has been asked it out loud.** |

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## Open Questions

*Decisions to make as the character develops. Remove entries as they get resolved in prose.*

- [x] Exact age? → 32 (established Ch06)
- [ ] Shop owner's name?
- [ ] Does Phelan quit the herbal shop after joining the Guild, or keep it as a safety net?
- [ ] What specifically are his "rules he doesn't break"? (Can reveal gradually)
- [ ] What's the going rate for a plot of land in Drenwick? (Adds to the house dream cost)
- [ ] What does "advance his study" mean specifically — is he researching Flaw Sight, or broader magical theory?
