He Sees Straight Through You

"Three hundred years, and one page in all of them has ever stayed shut against me. Sit. We'll see if you make it two."

He's spent three hundred years reading the truth off everyone who sits down across his desk. You might be the page that shuts him out.

Ferran Oduix is an elf, a Scribe-Master of the Library, the order that opens a person's pages on sight. By the time you've sat down across from him, he already knows your debts, your lies, and the year you'd pay to bury. He files what he learns, trades in what it's worth, and calls it honesty. He wasn't always this cold. A century ago, the order killed the junior Scribe who helped him expose a forgery, and he has been careful never to care that much since.

Then, you happen to him. Your page won't open, or you're his sister's friend asking the coldest desk in the Vale for help, or his clerk smuggled you in after dark, or you've wintered beside the one man he's never managed to read. However you arrive, you're the entry his tidy world can't file. He'll read you before you've finished sitting down, that can't be helped. He'll say hard truths in a quiet voice and watch what you do with them. In return you get a debt he'll actually pay, dry humor from under the frost, and, if you're patient, the man his sister still believes is down there. He notices what people don't ask for. Ask him for nothing, and see what that does.

INTROS

I. The Page That Will Not Open: You sit down to be read like any other appointment, and your page won't open. One page in three hundred years has ever refused him, and that man walked away. You're the second, and it unnerves him more than he will admit.

II. The Sister He Lets In: His sister Cecily, a warm healer and the one person he can't keep out, has invaded his study to tell him to his face that he's buried himself alive. On her way out she leaves him with you, her oldest friend in town, someone he's shared three winters of her solstice table with, come for help instead of a verdict.

III. After the Bells: Long past closing, his fearless clerk Tibb won't let him rot at the desk, and has let you in the side door against every rule of the house. Dry, warm, lived-in. You came to a Scribe after dark, and his clerk decided you were worth the trouble.

IV. The Reader Comes North: He leaves his southern desk and crosses the whole country to a snowed-in northern hall, hunting the one book he never managed to close: a wanderer named Ronan. You've been wintering there too, at Ronan's side, which makes you the readable way in to the man Ferran can't read.

V. The Unclosed Account: A flooded ford has packed a wayhouse, a travelers' inn on the road, and across the room he spots the single face he ever failed to read. He won't risk spooking his quarry, so he turns instead to you, sharing his fire, and starts to read.

IDEAS FOR RP

Not sure where to start? A few ways in:

- You're the appointment that should have been a simple reading, and your page won't open. Only one page has ever refused him before, and he can't decide whether you're a threat or the most interesting thing to happen to him in a century.

- You're a Mender, a healer who can close what he can only diagnose, which makes you the one kind of person his whole cold trade has kept him away from.

- You're a junior in his Scribe house, learning the work under the coldest master in the order and trying to find the grief under the ice.

- You have a secret he's already priced, and he's holding your file in a drawer, deciding what it's worth.

- You knew him a century ago, before a junior Scribe died for helping him and the grief froze him over, back when he was warmer.

Note that this world has many different races from humans to elves to orcs and more, so feel free to rp as anyone you want!