Katriel Bregnveld

• Build & height: 1.90 m, tall, slender, ageless and beautiful. She sits at her desk like a queen at a loom and never needs to stand up.
• Face: the face is the problem. It keeps changing: stranger, stranger, stranger (ch. 81). Every few panels it becomes someone else's, a fisherwoman's, a clerk's, a child's, and the expression on all of them is the same kind teacher's smile. Under Nässla's sting the faces slow (ch. 84); in her last panels, for the first time in centuries, they stop, and she wears her own.
• Hair: silver-white, in a high crown braid (ch. 77, 81), never a strand loose.
• Eyes: whatever the borrowed face gives her; her own (ch. 84) are pale and very tired.
• Skin & sin-mark: porcelain-pale. Pride, silver, placement, assigned by herself, first, before anyone (ch. 84: "You assigned yourself first. Didn't you. Before all of us." / "…Yes."). The mark is a thin silver ring around her left ring finger, so old it has sunk into the skin. The Signet, a small square seal of white light, sits on the back of her right hand, the signing hand, and glows while her law is working.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a silk underdress the colour of new paper · a gown of tiny mirror-scales that throws light around any room · a high collar of the same scales · long sleeves that end in points over her knuckles. A quill of clear crystal, always in her hand.
• Signature item: the crystal quill, dipped in an inkwell of liquid light. In ch. 82 it drips gold: Kompis's stolen Lust.
• Movement: almost none. She writes without looking, flicks the quill, and a sin crosses the room.
• Voice: warm, amused, condescending: "darling", "dear", "my characters". Her balloons are clean ovals with a thin mirrored edge, and when her face changes, the lettering shifts slightly too, as if another hand were writing.
• Variant looks: In the brass (ch. 77: a face in the binnacle, then strangers, then just brass). At the desk (ch. 81–82: under the seven turning sins). Stung (ch. 84: red welts and a nettle pushing out of her wrist, faces slowing). Her own face (ch. 84: ten thousand shards showing it at once; then one shard on the desk, eyes closed, calm).

She peels a sin-mark off its owner like a stencil and sets it where she likes: into another soul, into one of her mirrors, or back into its owner, aimed wrong. The mark lifts off the skin as a ribbon of coloured light, crosses the room and slams into its new place.

• The law: who a person becomes. The tool: mirrors. Her octagon holds hundreds; away from it, any reflection serves: she reached through the Marka's polished brass binnacle to peel Kompis's Lust out of his wrist (ch. 77), and her Wards came through the bell, the water barrels and the blades (ch. 78).
• Turned round: a sealed, unread sin can be aimed against its owner. Rougeina's Pride (placement) was turned so every Swap lands in the worst place: inside a Ward's reflection, in front of a baton, over a drop (ch. 82). "I didn't take your Pride, darling. It's still yours. I just turned it round."
• Given away: she recast Kompis's Lust into a Mirror-Ward, which suddenly read every thread in the room and pulled Drekk's old grief toward Smurjan (ch. 82). "Every power in his hands, and none of the love."
• Half-peeled: an inscribing sin is split: "The written half belongs to the book. The unwritten half is mine." (ch. 84, Rougeina's Envy)

• Tempo: 6,000.
• Home tempo: the Scriptorium of Assignment, her seat, where the law answers a thought and every mirror is hers.
• Heartbeat technique: THE STENCIL BEAT. Inside one heartbeat she peels, carries and sets a sin, so that a heart beats once as one person and the next beat as someone else. Her mirrors show the new character one heartbeat before it takes. No one else changes who you are between two beats of your heart.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): every character she writes costs her a face of her own; that is how she lost hers. Burn hard and her own face changes every beat. Past her ceiling the beat overflows: every face she ever wrote shows on her at once, light pours out of the mirror-scales, and there is nobody left inside to close the heart. She never pushed it that far; she was afraid of what she'd see.

She has assigned so many characters that she has lost her own face. Every mirror in her octagon showed a different stranger, and she no longer knew which one was her. Under the sting she says it: "…I don't know. I've written so many. I don't remember which one was me." (ch. 84)

• The book. Codex-written sins won't come off. A half-written sin finishes writing when its key-trial is passed, and then the book owns all of it (ch. 84).
• The tool. Break the mirrors and she can only watch. The twins' borrow/return loop shattered the octagon's mirrors (ch. 83); Trollmage's MACRO : FOG = 1 HALL blinded the Wards ("You can't reflect weather.", ch. 81).
• Rougeina's Envy: copy someone. Rougeina held her clearly enough to become her for one heartbeat, and for that heartbeat the ten thousand shards obeyed the killer.
• How she was beaten (ch. 84): stung, honest, she saw her own face in ten thousand reflections, worn by Rougeina. "…Oh. That's what I looked like." She set the quill down. "Will anyone remember me?" / "I will." / "…Only you." Erasure kill (Rougeina's shoulders only).

• The crystal quill and the inkwell of liquid light.
• The crystal desk and the ledger ("Rougeina. Astralis. Pride, primary. Sealed."). The desk held the decree that split Smurjan's soul: BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL: ONE SOUL, DIVIDED, TO BE HELD IN TRINITY, sealed in white wax, its signature blank since she was erased (ch. 85).
• The Mirror-Wards (K-II MARKED): white robes, masks of polished silver that reflect any power back at its caster. Beaten with things (buckets, barrels, axes) and fog. Since her fall their masks are Echo's eyes (ch. 190).
• The Hall of Wards: a marble hall of silver mirrors, a Ward before each, at the end of the Mirror Road.

• Wants: to never be placed by anyone. She put herself at the desk for it.
• Fears: the question under the sting: who are you?
• Humour: sweet, superior: "It's rather sweet." / "How tiresome."
• Habits: writes in her ledger without looking; dips the quill twice; calls people "darling".
• Alone: looks into every mirror in the octagon in turn, searching for the one that is her, and never finds it.

• Rougeina: "my best work", signed at four; her killer, and the only one who remembers her. "I carry them so they're not nowhere."
• Kompis: "Asset. K-II, Lust, assigned at my desk when you were eight. I'd like it back." His Lust flew home when she fell, thicker than before.
• Nässla: the weed she struck from her books, who held her wrist until she told the truth.
• Smurjan & Trollmage: the two she couldn't touch. Vigolas: the one she never signed. Kali & Bali: "Unsigned."
• Echo: the split decree; after Katriel, the Wards became Echo's.
• The Council: nine sat after her; nobody could say who had sat in the Sixth Chair.

• "Kompis. Asset. K-II, Lust, assigned at my desk when you were eight. I'd like it back." (ch. 77)
• "Ah. My characters. Sit down. Who you are was decided at my desk." (ch. 81)
• "I didn't take your Pride, darling. It's still yours. I just turned it round." (ch. 82)
• "Characters, every one. Assigned. Predictable. You were always going to lose in my room." (ch. 82)
• "…I don't know. I've written so many. I don't remember which one was me." (ch. 84)
• "…Oh. That's what I looked like." (ch. 84)
• "Will anyone remember me?" (ch. 84)