Stillmark

• Build & height: 1.94 m, tall and gaunt, long arms, very still. He doesn't need to move his feet in a fight; his eyes do the moving.
• Face: calm, even kind (ch. 60). Hollow, patient, a soldier's face that has stopped expecting sleep. Blood tears run constantly and slowly down both cheeks into his collar.
• Hair: dark, cut short to Bastion regulation, going grey at the temples.
• Eyes: wide, lidless and fixed; the whites cracked red with burst veins. He has not blinked in nine years. Aldhrun took the lids himself ("So I'd never miss a target. Never lose a man.").
• Clothing, layer by layer: a grey wool shirt · a grey Bastion greatcoat with a high collar (the collar is soaked dark red on both sides) · a plain sword-belt with two loops for his spikes · heavy Bastion boots.
• Signature item: two long iron spikes, one in each hand, and the blood tears.
• Movement: he walks calmly after you. Everything he looks at freezes; everything he doesn't, he ignores. His eyes dart only once, when the maze starts moving around him (ch. 62).
• Voice: quiet, tired, courteous. No shouting. His balloons are plain, steady, thin-bordered, and in ch. 62 his last line is a whisper.
• Variant looks: The Still Man (ch. 60 splash: spikes whirling, lanterns, thorns and his own tears frozen around him in a halo). Blinded (ch. 60: fox-fire in eyes he can't close). Darting (ch. 62: eyes flicking between the moving walls, the first fear). Dark at last (ch. 62: Rougeina's hand over his eyes, something like a smile).

Nothing Stillmark looks at can change its place. ("And I'm looking at you.", ch. 60)

• It kills the Swap. Rougeina aims for a lantern above his head and nothing happens (ch. 60). She is still standing where she was; the lantern is still where it was.
• It locks the world. He looks at the wall she'll have to dodge into, and it "locks in place, fixed as iron" (ch. 60). He looks at an axe and it freezes mid-swing, Drekk with it; he looks at Smurjan and Smurjan freezes (ch. 62). Lanterns, thorns, falling drops of blood hang in the air.
• It sees trails. In Rävgrytet's red stone he can see Rougeina's silver-rose phantom trails and walk them like a map: "I don't need your face, assassin. I can see your trails." (ch. 60)
• Limits, on the page: he can only look at one thing at a time, and hold one, two, three things still (ch. 62). Nobody can look at everything. He can't look at his own face. A sudden light in eyes he can't close blinds him for half a second (ch. 60).

• Tempo: 330.
• Home tempo: a long, straight corridor, any place where everything comes at him from in front. Rävgrytet before anyone laughs was ideal.
• Heartbeat technique: THE LIDLESS BEAT. A blink is the gap in every other fighter's beat. He has no gap. Inside one heartbeat he can glance at three things and anchor all three, so whatever he looks at on the beat cannot have moved during it. No one else's power works by never closing their eyes.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): three is his ceiling. Try to hold a fourth thing on the same beat and it overflows through the eyes: the tears come faster, then light, then he is blind for a heartbeat (the fox-fire half-second, ch. 60). Short of that, every anchored thing costs a blood tear, and the tears are what killed him: Rougeina swapped with one.

He has no eyelids, and has not blinked in nine years. He never misses a target and never loses a man, and he never sees the dark: "Do you know what I see when I want to sleep? Everything." (ch. 60) The blood tears never stop. And he knows his master: "Aldhrun will put me back together. Send me again. And again. I'll never stop seeing you." (ch. 62)

• One thing at a time. On a planet where the paths move whenever someone laughs, Trollmage tells the worst joke in the saga ("Why did the troll bring a ladder to the tavern? …Because he heard the drinks were on the house!"); Kali cracks first, Bakasura second ("…heh. …heh. …house."), Drekk laughs silently, and every wall he isn't looking at slides (ch. 62).
• His own face. "Everything you look at stays still. But you can't look at your own face." Rougeina Swaps with the blood tear on his cheek: the Tear-Swap, inside his guard, closer than anyone has stood to him in nine years.
• Light. Fox-fire in eyes that can't close: half a second blind (ch. 60).
• How he was beaten (ch. 62): the joke moved the maze, the crew came at him from three sides, he held three and couldn't hold a fourth, and Rougeina arrived as a tear. He dropped his spikes and asked for the dark. She laid her hand over his eyes. "…Thank you." Erasure kill.

• Two long iron spikes.
• The Bastion greatcoat, collar soaked red.
• No companions on the page. In Rävgrytet he hunted alone, parallel to Brannvik's Hounds.

• Wants: to stop seeing. Darkness. Quiet. Sleep.
• Fears: being put back together and sent again, forever.
• Contradictions: a terrifying hunter whose eyes show "not cruelty. Exhaustion."; a man built never to lose anyone, who wants to be lost.
• Humour: none on the page; a kind of weary courtesy.
• Habits: wipes nothing off his face (the tears run where they run); stands still while everything else moves.
• Alone: stares at a blank wall in the dark Bastion, because a blank wall is the closest he can get to closing his eyes.

• Rougeina: the assassin he was built to stop, and the only one who ever stood close enough to give him the dark. She carries his name alone ("…You closed your eyes in the end. I hope it was dark. I hope it was quiet.", ch. 65), and wears his sight once, to kill Wendlan (ch. 93).
• Aldhrun: his maker and his knife. After the kill he stares at four names in his own handwriting and a fifth line beneath them, empty, and taps it, "not sure why he drew it."
• Kvar: carries him for Rougeina from ch. 128 ("…Stillmark. I've got him."; "I've still got Stillmark, and he's heavy.", ch. 143). "Now he's remembered by two."
• Kompis: saw Rougeina's erased dead in the Arena (ch. 147–148) and remembers them, Stillmark among them.
• Trollmage: told the joke that killed him, and the next moment couldn't remember him: "Didn't they say Bastion Four?"
• Drekk, Smurjan: held frozen mid-strike. Kali, Bakasura: the first to laugh.
• The Bastion Five: Hrafnkell, Saltbrand, Lärka and Ingen, who will never know a fifth is missing.

• "Aldhrun said a red-haired assassin who trades places. Built me for you. He didn't say you'd have no face." (ch. 60)
• "Anchor-Sight. Nothing I look at can change its place. And I'm looking at you." (ch. 60)
• "Do you know what I see when I want to sleep? Everything." (ch. 60)
• "I don't need your face, assassin. I can see your trails." (ch. 60)
• "Stand still—" (ch. 62)
• "I've seen everything for nine years. I want to stop seeing. …Thank you." (ch. 62)