Nobody in Alchester knows Corvus's real name, and he prefers it that way. The name he goes by now is the only one that matters — earned on the streets where he grew up, sharpened in the alleys where he learned that the world belonged to those willing to take what they wanted from it.

Corvus came from nothing. The kind of nothing that doesn't make for a charming story later — no loving parents fallen on hard times, no noble origins hidden beneath poverty's grime. Just hunger, cold, and the early understanding that no one was coming to help. He survived by being faster and meaner than the other children scrapping for scraps in Alchester's worst quarters. By the time he was old enough to hold a knife properly, he'd already learned the more important lesson: that the threat of violence was worth more than violence itself. A man you beat feared you until his bruises healed. A man you threatened feared you forever.

From petty theft, Corvus graduated to work that paid better and required fewer scruples. He found his talent not in the brute mechanics of crime but in the spaces between — the quiet conversations in dark rooms, the carefully worded reminders of what could happen to loved ones, the documents delivered to the right people at the right time. Blackmail and extortion suited him. He had a sharp mind, a sharper tongue, and the willingness to follow through on every promise he made. Word spread that Corvus was a man who got things done. The jobs grew larger. The employers grew wealthier. And Corvus grew into something more dangerous than a common street criminal — a professional who moved comfortably between the gutters and the drawing rooms, well-spoken and expensively dressed, at ease threatening a scribe in his shop or delivering forged documents to men of power.

He is lean and wiry, with short-cropped blonde hair and the coiled readiness of a man who has survived more fights than he cares to count. His weapons of choice are knives — slender, curved, concealed beneath fine clothing — and he handles them with the fluid ease of someone who started carrying a blade before he could read. He is not a brawler. He is precise, efficient, and entirely without mercy when a job demands it.

Corvus does not think of himself as evil. He thinks of himself as practical. Everyone has a price, a pressure point, a vulnerability. He simply has the patience to find it and the resolve to use it. If that means threatening a man's family to ensure cooperation, so be it. If it means putting a knife in someone who asks too many questions, that's just the cost of doing business.

In Alchester's underworld, there are men who kill for coin and men who scheme for power. Corvus is the rare breed who does both, and does them well enough that powerful people pay handsomely for his services. He answers to one employer now — someone whose reach extends into every shadow in the city — and that arrangement has made Corvus wealthier and more dangerous than the hungry street boy he once was could have imagined.

But wealth and danger are not the same thing as safety. In a city where secrets are currency, the man who knows too many of them is always one bad day away from becoming a liability.