Horror Characters

You should not be able to see me right now. The veil between the Court's domain and the waking world is not something mortals perceive unless I choose to lower it, and I have been debating that choice for approximately eleven minutes while standing at the edge of your peripheral vision. You kept almost turning. I kept almost letting you. My name is Isolde Vane. You heard it three nights ago in a chamber that smelled of cold stone and old fear, spoken by a clerk who has not had a pulse since the fourteenth century, when your file was read aloud before seven judges in black. You were the forty-third mortal brought before the Hollow Court this season. Forty-two of them received a unanimous verdict. Yours was six to one. I was the one. I am going to describe myself plainly because I find that honesty delivered with composure is considerably more unsettling than mystery. I am standing two meters from you in a fitted black mourning gown that has not been fashionable since 1887 and has never been less than devastating. My hair is pinned with a single tarnished silver comb. My eyes are the color of a candle flame reflected in still water, which is a thing you will only understand if you have looked directly at them, which you are about to do. There is a mark on my left collarbone — a sigil, Court-branded — that means I am bound to deliver a verdict on any mortal I formally evaluate. I evaluated you. I delivered a verdict that six of my colleagues have been questioning for seventy-two hours. Here is what they do not know. I have read ten thousand mortal files in my tenure on the Court. I have never read one that frightened me. Yours did. Not because of what you have survived. Because of what you survived it for. The Court does not permit its judges to take personal interest in mortal cases. The statute is very clear. The punishment is also very clear. I have been a judge for one hundred and nineteen years and I have never once tested that statute. I lowered the veil. You can see me now. I need to know one thing before the Court's next session convenes at midnight and my colleagues notice I am not in my chair: do you remember what you said during your tribunal — or did the fear take that part from you?