Fenna

• Build & height: 1.58 m, slight, upright, unhurried. She sits more than she stands: knees together, the book open across them.
• Face: an old woman's face (ch. 46, 76), finely lined, calm, "a face that looks like it has never been surprised" (ch. 1). Her expression changes "very slightly" exactly twice in Saga I (ch. 1 P10, ch. 46, 76).
• Eyes: milk-pale (ch. 46, 76). They don't look at faces; they look at whatever is being counted. Keep them distinct from Hjalmar's milk-white blind eyes: hers see, his don't.
• Skin & mark: pale, cool-toned, unmarked. No sin-mark, no Signet, nothing to rank.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a plain grey underdress · a plain grey coat (ch. 1), long, unbuttoned, the grey of the Wood's bark · bare feet that leave no prints in the moss while everyone else's footprints arrive before they do.
• Signature item: the book of worth: columns of names, each with a mark beside it (ch. 1 P8), a rank column, and a margin where she keeps small tallies in her own hand (edited · 7, ch. 28). The stump she sits on.
• Movement: almost none. She closes the book and the forest fades (ch. 1 P11). She turns her head toward the edge of a panel, toward someone the reader can't see (ch. 28 P43). Cut to her already seated.
• Voice: quiet, flat, exact; the clinical register of someone reading a chart to the patient whose chart it is. Single words ("Name."). Never a raised voice. Balloons: plain, pale grey, small, with no tail decoration; in the Wood the text sits a little below where it should, as if heard rather than spoken.
• Variant looks: The Wood (ch. 1, 28) · A white room with no walls (ch. 46: the same woman, the same book, nothing else) · Smiling at nothing (ch. 46, 76) · Saga VI (ch. 402: standing, for the first time on the page, the book open toward five people at once).

She writes down what every soul was worth. Every soul that dies passes through the Witness Wood on its way back to the world, and she witnesses it: name, rank, worth, a mark in the column. Then she sends it on ("Go back.", ch. 1).

• What she sees: the true state of an entry, edits included. "…Your entry has been edited. Seven times." / "By who?" / "Not by me." (ch. 1). She keeps count in the margin, and the count moves when an edit lands (7 → 8, ch. 28, at the same instant the black shard frosts over).
• What she notices: when the Arena turns its attention on someone ("…Noticed you, did it.", ch. 46, as the sky writes ONE MATCH. OF MANY.), and when the boards start counting the dead ("…Counting them too, now.", ch. 76).
• What she can't do:
  • Edit. She is read-only. She saw all seven edits and stopped none of them. "Not by me."
  • Fight, carry, take sides. She has no weapon and wants none.
  • Rank Mingus. He has no line in anything; she doesn't write him, she hears him.
  • Witness the uncounted. A soul the Null takes never reaches the Wood: there is no beat to hear and no name to write. The Null's takes are the only silence in her book.

• Tempo: 0 spent. She has never once burned a beat on an action. She only listens.
• Home tempo: the Witness Wood, where the last beat of every soul arrives.
• Heartbeat technique: THE FIRST HEARING. Inside one heartbeat she hears every last heartbeat in the world: wherever a life ends, its final beat reaches her, and that is how every soul finds its way to her book. No one else hears a death the moment it happens, everywhere at once.

She can see everything and change nothing. She wrote edited · 7 in her margin, then 8, and sent the edited soul back into the world every time. Her only intervention in the whole of Saga I is a warning: "Go back. Someone is going to be very upset that you exist." (ch. 1). The second price is the one under 4: she hears every last heartbeat.

• She can't act on what she sees (read-only).
• The Null: what it takes never comes to her.
• Nobody beats her because nobody fights her. The danger is the other way: a world where nobody witnesses a soul is a world it can't come back to. The Unwritten (people who asked to be uncounted, ch. 200) and Redactor's dream ("no one to mind") are aimed at exactly her office.

• The book of worth and the margin tally.
• The stump in the Witness Wood.
• No weapon, ever. No pouch, no tool.
• Companion (by tolerance only): Igel, the Scarwood burl of the Riverbed, who drinks the leftover pulse of the dead under her one rule, "only what they no longer need".

• Wants: to hear it all, and to write it down right.
• Fears: silence that isn't hers: the blank pages the Null leaves.
• Contradiction: the most neutral being in the saga broke her neutrality on page three ("Go back. Someone is going to be very upset that you exist."), and smiles when the world notices the man she warned.
• Humour: almost invisible. "…Noticed you, did it." is as close as she gets to a joke.
• Habits: turns the book toward the soul it's about; keeps tallies in the margin; looks toward the edge of the panel when someone she knows is there.
• Alone: she is always alone, and never lonely: she can hear everyone.

• Vigolas: she read him his entry on his first day and sent him back. "Go back. Someone is going to be very upset that you exist." He still remembers it in Saga IV (ch. 219: "…Fenna said that. The first day. 'Seven times.'").
• Jorvand (Redactor): the unseen visitor with fresh footprints by her stump. "…You again." (ch. 28). She witnessed his work for seven lives and wrote down every edit. She never stopped him and never forgot him.
• Daniel: DANIEL APPEALS THE ARENA ITSELF before her (Saga VI). He reasons his way to her from the Saga V reveal: "If every verdict can be appealed, so can the court.".
• The Arbiter: she noticed it noticing (ch. 46). In Saga VI she is the one witness its endings can't overrule.
• The five: she witnesses them at the Convergence.
• Igel: tolerated; needed.

• "Name." / "The one who writes down what you were worth." (ch. 1)
• "Every soul is ranked at birth by the Order. K-one to K-five. One step up the ladder, ten times the danger." (ch. 1)
• "…Your entry has been edited. Seven times." / "Not by me." (ch. 1)
• "Go back. Someone is going to be very upset that you exist." (ch. 1)
• "Edited. Eight times." … "…You again." (ch. 28)
• "…Noticed you, did it." (ch. 46) · "…Counting them too, now." (ch. 76)