Len. He's a short but rugged-looking man, with a scruffy beard and scruffier hair. Painted under his eyes are geometric tear-streak symbols. He's clothed in thick furs, with a green shawl tied like a bandana around his neck. He grins, chewing at a stalk of whetrice and balancing a dagger in his off-hand.

You’d do well to remember that, despite our best efforts, the world embellishes our… Ah… Competencies. But not Len’s. I can tell you now that whatever you’ve heard about him is true. Even the part about eating god.

Especially the part about eating god.

Content Warnings: War, addiction, injury, and violence.

Len is the highly esteemed (and highly de-facto) Chief Tribune of the Sentinels. He led the resistance when the tyrant-god Motu marched on Scaiuq. He and his Sentinels share a common history as reformed criminals and survivors of Asthaom’s only war, which has given them the grim optimism to chase a better tomorrow. Though he has since left office, Len continues to spend much of his time advising the Sentinels as a reconciliatory organization.

Background

Len is better known by the name given to him in his youth: The Beast Out of the East. In those days, he was a thief without equal. There was no man quicker, sharper, or meaner this side of the ocean black. Had he been content to steal hearts and rustle caribou, Scaiuq would not have stricken his name from history… But Len harbored a terrible hunger in his heart, and showed profound cruelty to those who stood between him and what he wanted.

And he wasn’t content to covet the stuff of mortal men for long. He soon turned his eye where none dared to—deep beneath the Scaiuq mountain range, and into the subterranean ruins of Sond. There, the god Sentin hid herself from the surface world, lost in a dreamless sleep.

It was the ultimate heist: steal the clothes off the back of a sleeping god. Only Len could have pulled off something so outrageous. And he did.

He became the first man to successfully navigate Sond’s treacherous labyrinths, the first to lay eyes on Sentin in a hundred years or more, and certainly the first to strip her naked and run off with her magic shawl. For the first time in his life, he was content to vanish in the night as the sole witness to his crimes.

But he didn’t. He was seen and heard, and as it turns out, Sentin is a very light sleeper. What follows is a “long and confused story,” in Len’s words. The god woke from her hundred-year sleep and cursed the thief, pursuing him to the ends of the earth. The thief, having crossed every star in the sky, found no sanctuary in those he had wronged. He spent many nights running from a waking nightmare, shadowed always by Sentin’s watchful eye. With nowhere left to hide, Len fled deep into the wilderness.

It’s there he met a young woman, an ahuat ? with strange but kind eyes. She took him in when all others had turned him away.

Len spoke nothing of the curse to her. Passing the idle hours by the light of an oil lamp, he felt a peace that he had not known in many years. As he sat across from the woman, cutting the bones out of a fat, happy salmon, that peace began to feel like home.

He told her who he was, that night—the Beast Out of the East. The woman did not recognize his name. He recounted to her the many injuries that Sciauq suffered because of him. She simply shrugged, and told him that he had never done her wrong.

Len stayed with her for many months, at her behest. It’s hard to say for sure when he began to suspect that the ahuat was not who she said she was, but her mismatched eye was becoming awfully familiar to him.

It later dawned on Len, one cool spring night. He found the ahuat shivering by the light of the oil lamp. Len, having just arrived from a long day out on the steppe, took pause. He shed his stolen shawl, wrapped it around Sentin’s shoulders, and that was that. He devoted himself to her as the first Sentinel. The two have been inseparable ever since.

Nowadays, Len serves the newly-restored Sond as an advisor to its Tribunal. He has a finger in many pots, but takes special joy in guiding the city’s social servants, the Sentinels. Their ranks consist of ex-criminals, like him—from the pettiest thieves to the coldest killers. This is by design. The Sentinels follow in Len’s own footsteps, rehabilitating one another through a holistic program of social service, mutual aid, and cultural renewal. The program is so successful that it’s become an object of global curiosity, some calling it “the world’s most effective and compassionate criminal justice system.”

This doesn’t surprise him, really. He is the Beast Out of the East. If he can seek reconciliation, then anyone can.

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  • 003 – Sadren and Beverages

    Anonymous wrote: To Sadren the Poet… do you enjoy a good beverage? What kind? Would you be open to grabbing one with a fan some time? (Return address is stated to be :just throw it bottled inta the ocean) My friend, What they don’t tell you about immortality is that your body forgets how to…

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  • Len

    You’d do well to remember that, despite our best efforts, the world embellishes our… Ah… Competencies. But not Len’s. I can tell you now that whatever you’ve heard about him is true. Even the part about eating god. Especially the part about eating god.

    Read more…