Klechevik

London - Pax Britannica -LPB- Walkers of the London Hedge

Sobriquet: Klechevik

Appearance: A pale Elven male, wearing a pure white tunic, his pale hair shaggy over his ears.

Behavior: Klechevik doesn't seem to be listening to anyone near him. He will respond to questions, but maybe not the questions people think they are asking.

History: Klechevik arrived the way bargains are always struck: in the dark breath between oaken boards and the first winter fog. A Viking, fingers blackened by iron and river-ice, took him from a burned izba in the north and ferried him across waves that smelled like amber and wolf. In that new shore he was given a name that tasted of smoke and knotwork, and the wooden bath-house took him in—he learned the salutations of steam and the secret maps of hearth-stones. He does not measure time the way mortals do; for him it is a braided thing, a coil of steam where a child's cry from a century ago can unfurl alongside the hiss of a new pipe. One day a wedding hymn and a century of soot can be the same warm pressure behind his ribs. That way of seeing kept him safe, kept him sharp: he whispered warnings through the stove when the wood was wrong, accepted black bread on the threshold, and, in return, spared the houses he liked from the cold and the fever.

Now the river that once fed his bath-house bears a different music, and though he hates the River Queen—her mist that swallows oaths, her long, patient teeth at the bank—he is forced to acknowledge her here; the new bricks were laid over her mouth and all the modern pipes drink from her veins. People come to these baths without leaving a crust of bread, with rubber sandals and hurried baths, and the old rites have been painted over with neon tiles. Klechevik feels himself thinning, a shadow that forgets its own contours; his jokes curdle into bitterness, and where once he could make a child sleep with a single, warm breath, now he only manages to rattle a loose flange or coax a hiccup from a towel-drenched man. He resents the River Queen for the ease with which she draws the world into her current, but more than that he resents the world that has learned not to notice him—he waits in the steam, bitterly certain that if someone remembers how to honor a bannik, even for a day, the coil of his time will swell and he will heave back into being.