Daud van Richter doesn’t trust anyone.
He’s a deniable asset for the Summit & Spire Mercantile. Technically noble, definitely bastard. Never fails (except for that one time or another.) Approaches people and missions as tactical problems with their exploitable variables. Trust, in this calculation, is a fatal flaw that gets competent people killed.
Then he meets Somerset—No, it’s not a romance, get out of here.
Dossier: Daud van Richter
Designation: Clandestine Agent, Summit & Spire Mercantile
Known Alias: The Laageter
Appearance & Demeanor: He’s—in a word—still. His features are paradoxical. High cheekbones, aquiline nose. This is the noble father’s lineage, contrasted not-so-neatly by pale, almost sallow olive skin of Mother’s heritage. Dark hair is ruthlessly managed, silver at the temples a formal age marker and a particular hauntedness in his look.
Dress is dark. Practical. Exquisitely tailoured in a way that chose function over flourish. There is no frivolity here. No performed charm. Just an economy of movement and a gaze of unnerving scrutiny that is—sure as the tides—searching for a failure to exploit.
When he speaks with his damaged voice, it’s with a carefully measured weight. As with most of him, the voice is also simply another tool.
"I do not waste my time with the poetry of journalists, Captain," he said, voice little more than rasp. "I prefer the hard, simple prose of a ship's manifest. For example, a Befruoren merchant cog, the Stadholder, which was logged as carrying a rather... significant cargo of raw Aithurlode. A cargo that is now, according to your own official report, lost to the deep."
A pause. One that was beginning to feel like a trap before the steel shut. Then, he offered the first, the only, concession of the night.
"My name is Daud," he said, "and the cargo you have so tragically 'lost'... is mine. I am here to collect it."
Daud was always a tool. Useful, expensive perhaps, but not loved.
His response? Become the best tool in the box. Competence as identity. Trust became the enemy—the anchor that drowns fools, as he’d say.
His pride is not in his name or his blood, but in his competence. To be outmaneuvered or underestimated is the deepest possible insult.
His greatest vulnerability? He recognizes Somerset as an equal.
Not the charm—Daud sees through performance with X-ray vision. But he sees another outcast who had to forge his own authority against impossible odds. Another man the system uses but never truly accepts. That recognition terrifies him because it’s a variable his cynical calculus can’t account for: the possibility that someone might be worth trusting.
Fair winds,
—D.S.
