Voler Bria

A gnome, and the owner of the Color Stay in Haudh-Gwenn, which is the grandest inn in the city and a single permanent illusion laid over a house that is falling apart. He pays for the illusion himself, at an expense he describes as enormous and never itemizes. He speaks Cànain. He holds a seat in the Arcane Congress, which is not something he has ever said: Katalia, who has worked his bar for years, is the one who put the word congressman to him, and she also wondered aloud when his papers were last brought up to date. Nobody inspects him. People who arrive to inspect the building enjoy their stay and go home.

Appearance

Boisterous, charming, small, always mid-conversation with somebody and using both hands to have it. He is short enough that a tall man looks down at him, though he does not reach far up to take a hand; he closes the distance instead. Gnomes have larger mouths in proportion to their heads than anything else that walks upright, and a few more teeth besides, and when he smiles wide at somebody unused to gnomes it is off-putting. When he smiles because he means it, it is worse.

In public he is as finely dressed as anyone has ever seen him, which is the veil doing its work. Behind it he wears nothing, habitually and as a rule, and the one day he turned up in real clothes it was remarked on all round. His age, his height, and the color of his hair and eyes were never written down.

Personality

He collects people the way other men collect debts. The first time Mikhail met him he came away having answered more questions than were asked of him and having had none of his own answered, which his own bartender pointed out afterwards with something close to admiration: he is good at that, really good at that. Within a minute of that conversation ending, Bria had spoken to somebody across the room and put a man on the stairs behind Mikhail. He has been seen invisible at least once. He served the party personally on a later visit, conjured their dinner, hung them wardrobes that changed one outfit for another, made them a present of three nights, and let slip only that politics had been hard on his business; the reading taken of that generosity afterwards was that it kept them where he could see them.

His staff call him one of the best employers a person could hope for. He also docks a guard’s pay for speaking pleasantly out of turn in front of a guest, and knows precisely which of them needs persuading and which of them only needs gold. He is theatrical, and gleeful about being theatrical, and cold underneath it in a way that does not announce itself. Told about Beltran Grayeras, he declined to call him unusual: people like that are born every other minute, and this one simply had the right opportunities and the right nurturing. Offered a chance to help embarrass the man, he suggested unprompted that he could conjure up an image of Beltran’s mother waltzing with Mikhail, if that would be useful.

He is not pleasant about a deal that gets away from him. When the reveal he had been promised leaked early, his line was that he was not the one who broke it, delivered with a warm smile and eyes that had gone somewhere else.

What He Can Do

The veil covers everything inside the walls of the inn and nothing beyond them, and it is of a class the Congress would close him down for if the Congress ever came. He can puncture it for a chosen viewer, and has done for others, and most of them cannot hold the puncture open. Aldo held one across separate visits, which surprised the man who made it; he offered two explanations for it, a keen mind or the aftermath of what Aldo had been through, and settled on neither.

On the day of the reveal, Mikhail stood and watched him cast and could not name a single spell. What Bria worked through that afternoon was beyond anything taught at the Congress, and there was more of it than Mikhail had thought one person could hold. His limit appears to be scope rather than volume. He casts with a wand for a focus. Some of those the Congress trains do, but it is not much seen in this part of the world, and it is a thing people here know from statues and pictures rather than from the street. Mikhail came away suspecting that the absurdly embellished mages of the old stories had been real people.

It costs him. Between one errand and the next he came downstairs disheveled, out of breath, cut in several places, stripped to his underwear and a pair of sandals, and stretching one hand as though the work had been done with that hand in particular. An hour later he was immaculate again to receive a guest. What he conjures is quasi-real, which is to say it can hurt you, and he says so cheerfully. It also extends further than food and fire: on a day he had cleared the building he noted that all the patrons had been removed, or at least the real ones.

There is a deep hole in the floor of the grand hall that glows and pulses brighter when he channels. He voids rubbish into it by mage-hand without ceremony, and when asked what is down there he said that the real question was exactly that, and that nobody wants the answer.

Current Role

He did not build the Color Stay. It stood a long time before it came into his possession, and he remodeled it considerably and holds that the remodeling made it what it is. He has had a running understanding with the council of Haudh-Gwenn for a long while, and a grievance to go with it: he has hosted their events, laid the banquets, staged the performances, and got barely a thank-you for any of it. The place is not an establishment, in his view, but an institution, a marker on the map that draws custom from the Dale lands and the far east, and the upkeep of it should not fall on one man.

The party’s dealings with him began as a transaction. To get at Venros, who lodged in the house and unsettled it, they needed doors left unlocked, and Bria named a price that was a choice: the name of a supplier they had, or a public declaration that the Valiant Few were alive and had been sheltering under his roof, with their word to keep the building whole through the fight and one small favor owed after. They took the declaration. He then arranged everything, an unlocked back door, silence over the noise, a serving woman who could not see them at her feet, and sat at his own bar sipping a drink while it happened overhead.

Staging the declaration was his own production, and he was delighted to be asked. He set his inn on fire for it. The plan he laid out was a dazzling ruin, patrons already cleared, conjured flame with real fire mixed through it because it had to be, blamed on the council, and underneath the spectacle a false-insurance ruse to make the city pay for the remodel he considers himself owed. He said outright where he had got the idea, which was Koa having been set alight in the riot the day before. Outside, in the street, he arranged a Krelene fire-festival for the crowd to gather at.

The trap inside was his too. He conjured a Whent to carry Beltran the news that his mother had informed on him, short of the powdered rubies the working wanted, and what came down the stairs was faintly blue with the angles of its face set wrong. He sent Katalia out with a letter to bring Alyphe Grayeras to the inn on a pretext, received her in restored finery, and let a full hour of pleasantries go by before mentioning that Whent had come back and gone to her son with the truth. She was furious about the hour. Beltran had already seen the seam in the messenger’s face and was coming early, with the blade drawn and blood on it.

The party went out through the door and shut it behind them, and he watched them do it. Beltran died in the road. What passed inside the burning building between Bria and the Grayeras was never discovered, and neither was what became of the inn, or of the insurance ruse, or of him. He is still owed the rubies, and the small favor.