Dolk

• Build & height: 1.25 m, a thin, child-shaped thing, all ribs and elbows. He holds himself very still, like a child told not to touch anything in a shop.
• Face: a child's face, grey-pale, small-chinned, with enormous dark eyes. He never smiles; when he tries, it looks like a wince.
• Hair: short and black, hacked unevenly, because he cuts it himself, with the only tool he has.
• Eyes: huge, dark, shining indigo at the rims. When he cuts, a hairline of light runs across both pupils, like a reflection of a blade.
• Skin & burl-mark: grey bark-skin, smooth as peeled wood. No sin (Scarwood). His burl is the wound: a long cut across his chest, shoulder to hip, that never closes and never bleeds. Inside it, instead of blood, there is a faint indigo light: the Seal.
• Clothing, layer by layer: he is wrapped like a mummy in strips of everything he has ever severed: grey-brown scab-strips that rustle, each one a bond, a contract or a name he cut. They cover him to the chin, except the wound, which he keeps bare.
• Signature item: his right forearm, a blade of black obsidian from the elbow down, long, thin and glassy, with a faint indigo edge.
• Movement: careful, slow, holding the blade-arm away from his body and away from everyone. He has never learned to hold anything without cutting it. When he does strike, he is faster than the eye: one panel still, the next already done.
• Voice: small and flat. He apologises before he cuts, every time, and cuts anyway. His balloons are small, with a hairline slash through the border.
• Variant looks: Cutting (one panel of nothing, then a hairline across the whole page, then things falling apart in silence). Overwrapped (strips up to his eyes, struggling to breathe under endings). Holding the dog (ch. 346: sitting cross-legged in his own wound, the blade held far out to one side, his other hand on a golden head).

Dolk cuts what has no body. A bond between two people. A contract. A law. A rank. A name off a face. The space between two heartbeats.

• One stroke and an alliance is simply over, a certification goes blank, or a man forgets he was ever married.
• What he cannot cut, the same five things the Null cannot uncount: a heartbeat, the HADOM Quoka, love, Mingus, and the Count.
• The nuance: he can cut a marriage, but not the love. The man forgets he was married and still loves her, without knowing why.
• Range: the length of his blade, or the reach of a thrown stroke along a line of sight (a hairline of indigo light).
• What it can't do: cut bodies (his blade passes through flesh like a shadow), or un-cut anything.

• Tempo: on the board, 0. He doesn't act in beats; he acts between them. In practice that is one cut in every gap, and no tempo is fast enough to block it.
• Home tempo: the Cut, where every gap is his.
• Heartbeat technique: THE SKIPPED BEAT. He cuts the gap between two of your heartbeats, so the second one never comes. You stagger, you lose a beat of tempo, and your next move is late. (He can't cut the beat itself; that's an Immunity.) Isa holds a beat; Dolk removes the space after it. No one else fights inside the gap.
• Burn cost: every cut becomes another strip wrapped around him. Strips are heavy. Burning means more endings to carry.

He has to carry everything he cuts. Every severed thing hangs off him as a strip of scab, and he is wrapped in them like a mummy made of endings. And he cannot hold anything (a hand, a cup, a gift) without cutting it. Nobody has touched him without bleeding.

• The five uncuttables. Fight him with love, a Quoka, or Mingus, and he has nothing.
• Isa's hold: inside a held beat there is no gap to cut. He is helpless in her stillness.
• Bodies: he can't cut flesh. A plain fist knocks him down.
• The Menders: a quiet sect of the Arbiter's completion-hunger, in white, carrying needles of light, who want to sew his wound shut "so the story can end clean." They think it's mercy. If the wound closes, the Seal fails.
• Loneliness: someone offering to hold his hand is the most dangerous attack there is.

• The obsidian blade-arm.
• The strips, thousands of them: bonds, contracts, ranks, names. Some still flutter faintly with the feeling of what they were.
• No one. "He is alone." Vider watches from the rim above, and they have never spoken.

He doesn't want to fight. He stands in front of the Cut. He opens by apologising. He finishes with one stroke that ends whatever was holding the enemy together: the oath that bound an army, the rank that made a captain, the alliance that made a war. Then he goes back to standing. Team combos (Saga VI, once trusted): Dolk + Vigolas: Dolk cuts the Arbiter's army's chain of command, and Vigolas COMPACTs the confusion. Dolk + Kompis: Kompis's Lust-sight shows him which thread to cut so that nobody's love goes with it.

• Wants: to hold something without hurting it, and to heal, which he can never be allowed to do.
• Fears: the Menders' needles, because he wants to let them close the wound.
• Contradiction: the world's sharpest blade is a child who apologises.
• Humour: none he knows of. Accidental and heartbreaking: "Is this how you hold a cup? …Oh. Sorry. It was a nice cup."
• Habits: apologises to everything; counts his strips at night and remembers which is which.
• Alone: stands at the Cut with his blade held out from his body, looking at nothing.

• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus walks straight up to him. Dolk backs away: "Don't, I'll cut you." He can't. Mingus is the first thing he has ever touched without cutting it. He sits down and pets the dog for a whole page, crying without making a sound. Kompis sees him through Lust-sight as a child wrapped in a thousand severed threads, and can't speak.
• Vigolas: "Give me one." Vigolas takes a strip off him to carry, the first time anyone has ever taken an ending off him. "Greed keeps everything. Even the junk."
• Orka: her conjunction against his severance, the purest mismatch in the series. She is afraid of him; he is gentle with her.
• Isa: the one who holds the beat and the one who removes the gap. In her stillness he is finally safe to be near.
• Smurjan: "Did you do this? The split?" "No. That was a mirror. Mirrors don't apologise."
• Vider: the giant on the rim above. Neighbours who have never spoken, in either sense.

• "I didn't want to be the knife. Nobody asked the knife."
• "Sorry." (before every cut)
• "Don't, I'll cut you. …I'll cut… I can't cut you."
• "It was a nice cup."
• "Keep it open. I know. I know. Keep it open."