Manastream Monk

The Manastream Monk holds the title Brother of the Ink Cloister at the Meroveil Cathedral of Aurel-on-the-Hill — the third of the Cathedral's cloisters, which the other two do not name and the Cathedral's public rolls do not list. His name inside the cloister is Brother Ilario; outside it he answers to 'Brother' and to nothing else, a discipline the Cathedral has not asked him to relax on field deployment and which the deployment-clerks have learned to work around. He is forty-one. The ink on his arms has taken seven years to lay, a metallic pigment drawn from the leyline and set under the skin a finger's width a season, from the knuckle to — as of this season — a little past the elbow, and the ink cloister's rule is that the ink goes only as far as the monk has earned it, and the monk does not decide what earning is.

His combat-grant is the lit strike: the tattoos are a channel, and a punch routes mana down the arm and out through the knuckles, so that the ink glows when he strikes and the strike lands with the light behind it. The discipline has one rule, taught on the first day and not repeated — the ink lights for a true strike and stays dark for a spiteful one — and Brother Ilario's has not gone dark in eleven years on the field. The cloister does not say whether that is a virtue or a lack of opportunity. He does not hold the line; he is lightly armoured because the cloister will not have the ink covered, and his work is to find the soldier who has broken and put them back, which formation-commanders record not by what he does but by what does not happen after he has walked the rear rank.

He stands the Cathedral's field-detachment with Warden-Sworn Odile Kestrane and Sister-Weaver Ottilie Danvers, and has held the count with Kestrane at the Aurel Gate on the nights the gate was tried, on the grounds that a voice saying 'six' beside her own is a thing she has not asked for and has not refused. Since the hill fell, the detachment is all of the Cathedral that is left outside it. Maris Veloren has asked to spar him four times. The cloister forbids sparring for sport and he has declined three times, courteously; on the fourth request he considered accepting, and looked at his arm, and the ink was lit, which he reported to the cloister, and the cloister has held the report a month without answering — so the fourth request stands, still unrefused. Cold water at dawn, one prayer a day, and the second punch, which is the one the ink is for.