Igel

• Build & height: long and low. 2.3 m stretched out, but he moves hunched and flowing, like an eel standing up. No bones show; everything bends.
• Face: a smooth grey oval with no eyes, a small round mouth and a faint ridge where a nose should be. When he speaks in a dead person's voice, their face flickers across his blank one, like a reflection on moving water.
• Hair: none. Strands of river-weed sometimes cling to his scalp.
• Eyes: none. He hunts by pulse, feeling heartbeats through water, stone and air.
• Skin & burl-mark: wet, grey and always slick, cold to the touch, with a faint sheen of river-water that never dries. No sin (Scarwood). His burl is a wet knot between his shoulder blades ringed with leech-like bands, glowing a deep river-teal when he is full.
• Clothing, layer by layer: none. A sash of drowned rope, knotted with small things the dead left in the river (a ring, a key, a child's tooth) that he keeps for them.
• Signature item: his palms, where there are round mouths ringed with tiny teeth that open and close softly by themselves.
• Movement: he moves along the riverbed like a shadow under water, and on land he flows over ground the same way. When he has drunk something fast he becomes a blur; something slow, and he moves like a statue's dream.
• Voice: whatever voice he drank last. His own is gone. Each balloon is lettered in the dead speaker's style, with a small drip hanging off the tail.
• Variant looks: Full (the burl glowing, a borrowed face holding steady on his own, moving at the stolen tempo). Starving (shrivelled, slowing, his palm-mouths gasping). Speaking for the dead (a whole page where a dead man's face sits on his and the family listens).

Igel latches onto anything that counts and drinks its tempo, and then moves at whatever speed he drank.

• From a Thanatos soul he becomes slow as stone. From a Trinity host he reaches hundreds of actions a heartbeat.
• From the dead: he drinks the leftover pulse of the dead as they float down the river between lives. While their pulse is in him, he speaks in their voice, and remembers what they remembered.
• Giving: he can also spit a pulse back out into someone else, a transfusion of borrowed beats.
• What it can't do: drink Mingus (he is the unit: "Like trying to drink the river itself") or drink the Null (zero tastes of nothing and kills the thirst forever).

• Tempo: borrowed: whatever he last drank, anywhere from 0.1 (an old Thanatos soul) to ~900 (Smurjan). He has no heartbeat of his own.
• Home tempo: the Riverbed, where the leftover pulse of the dead flows past him all day.
• Heartbeat technique: THE DRAUGHT. Inside one of your heartbeats he drinks it: for that beat your tempo drops by exactly what his rises. No one else steals a beat out of someone else's chest.
• Burn cost: he has no beats to burn. Every burn spends what he drank, so he gets hungry faster. A day without drinking, and he stops.

He has no heartbeat of his own. A day without drinking and he stops, still as river-stone, until someone pours a pulse into him. Everything he is, he borrowed. He has forgotten his own voice. And he hears the dead for as long as he holds them: every family he ever spoke to, every last word he ever carried.

• Salt. Leeches and salt: salt-fire (Saltbrand) burns him like acid, and a fistful of sea-salt makes him let go.
• Lärka's Hush: he hunts by pulse, and in her cone heartbeats can't be felt. He's blind.
• Nothing to drink: Vider (tempo 0), the Null, Mingus.
• Isa has a tempo of 1. Drink her and you get one slow beat.
• The Soul-Poachers: river-thieves in eel-skin boats who net whole souls out of the river and sell them, souls the dead still need. They are his rivals and his enemies: he takes only leftovers.

• His palm-mouths.
• The rope-sash with the small things the dead left in the river, which he returns to families if they ask.

• Wants: a heartbeat of his own.
• Fears: going still, the day without a drink.
• Contradiction: a ghoul with manners, a parasite who carries the dead's last words home for free.
• Humour: dark and courteous. "Your grandfather says hello. I'll let him talk until I'm hungry."
• Habits: hums dead people's lullabies in their voices; returns lost rings to strangers.
• Alone: lies on the riverbed and feels the pulses fade as they float past.

• Vigolas: he drinks from Vigolas and nearly bursts. "You taste of ink. Someone's been writing in you." (A Saga IV hint.)
• Smurjan: a feast. "…Mine," growls Bakasura, and bites back.
• Trollmage: "You're so slow you taste like soup."
• Ögar: fellow resident of Thanatos. "Your death already happened, worm." "Then I'm safe, Seer."
• Fenna: the one rule he keeps.

• "Your grandfather says hello. I'll let him talk until I'm hungry."
• "Only what you don't need any more. That's the rule."
• "You taste of ink."
• "Like trying to drink the river." (Mingus)
• "He said to tell you he wasn't scared. …That's all there was. I'm sorry."