There is a particular kind of man who survives everything through sheer stubbornness and then refuses to discuss it. He may seem rugged and impenetrable on the outside, but on the inside, he’s squishy, just like everyone else.
Riordan Veilwalker is that man.
He is not the kind of character who announces himself. He lifts his chin when he meets someone new, as if to say: you may proceed, but do not push it. He keeps his observations to himself until they become unavoidable (or unbearable). He sits at tables in taverns and says very little, watches everything, and occasionally produces a dry remark that is so precisely aimed it takes a moment to land. When it does, you realize he has been paying far closer attention than his silence suggested.
He is, in other words, infuriating in exactly the way that most lovable people are infuriating.
Riordan can see the creatures that emerge from the Veil. In a world where these creatures move as shadow, blurred at the edges, invisible to most, he can see them with perfect clarity. This is not a gift he asked for or fully understands. He is the first of the Veiltouched, and the ability to see the creatures clearly is still new to him. Before, he could only sense them, their presence, their movements. There is a significant difference between sensing a predator and being able to watch its salacious, salivating grin split its face in two as it stalks you. He has been fighting in that world long before he could fully see it. He is very, very good at it.
He is also, when it counts, catastrophically bad at the basics.
He once went hunting near the Veil without his sword. He had left it at the Tavern. He had one arrow. I will not tell you how that went, but I will tell you that he was found, eventually, by a seven-foot Veshvari who had made a habit of keeping an unspoken watch over him. That Riordan is alive at all is partly his own resilience and partly the stubborn devotion of the people around him who refuse to stop caring about a man who does not make it easy.
His name was not always Riordan Veilwalker. He had a patronym once, a lineage, a full formal name in the style of Druth Cael. Those are lost to him now, for reasons the book does not hand you immediately. What remains is the name given to him after the third time the darkness nearly killed him: Veilwalker. It suits him. He walks the boundary between what can be seen and what cannot, between the world as most people know it and the world as it actually is. The name is both a description and a kind of promise, as all Veiltouched names are.
He carries more than most people know. His wit is not armour, exactly, but it serves a similar function. He will describe the experience of broken ribs as feeling like a lot of fire, and he will deliver that observation with such measured steadiness that you almost miss how much pain is underneath it. He will receive a gently scolding postscript from the Proprietor of the Tavern about the care and maintenance of his clothes, and his reaction will be to laugh out loud while holding his broken ribs and say: that is as cross as she gets. He is not unfeeling. He is fluent in a register of feeling that does not translate easily into words.
He also bows to the Tavern stairs in genuine thanks when they do not throw him to the floor. This is not unusual behavior for him. Or the Tavern.
What I can tell you about why I wrote him is that I know this man. Not invented him. Know him. I wrote Riordan through the lens of someone I love who carries the world the same way: quietly, at significant personal cost, with a precisely aimed observation ready for the moment it is least expected. The worry I feel for that person lives in these pages. So does the admiration.
Riordan Veilwalker sees what others cannot. He endures what most would not. He asks the questions that need asking, usually in the direction of someone who also needs to hear them. And then he goes back to watching, and waiting, and keeping his own counsel.
He is, somehow, one of the funniest people in this book. He is also one of the most quietly heartbreaking.
I hope you love him. I really do.
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