Senna Voss

Who She Is

The first thing most people notice about Senna Voss is that she is already oriented to the exits. Not nervously - there is no anxiety in it. It is simply a habit of awareness that has had thirty years of planes travel to become reflexive. She knows where the doors are, which walls are load-bearing, where the ley lines run under the floor, and whether the local Ethereal is stable. She registered all of this in the first thirty seconds after she arrived, and she filed it away the way experienced travelers file away weather, and she is now paying complete attention to the conversation.

She is a hundred and eighty-seven years old, which for an elf is not particularly old - she could live another three centuries without unusual effort. She has been traveling the planes for thirty-one of those years. She looks like an elf woman in her middle thirties: dark hair kept short and practical, a face that has learned not to express surprise, clothes that are well-made and very worn in the specific pattern of someone who moves through environments that are hard on clothing. The twin blades at her hips are the nicest things she owns, which is a choice she made deliberately thirty years ago and has never reconsidered. What is harder to see immediately, and what becomes apparent over the course of a conversation, is that Senna is genuinely lonely in a way she has not yet found the language to describe. She has been moving for thirty-one years. She knows the Silver Roads better than most Gate Keepers. She can navigate the Ethereal by feel, read ley lines like river currents, and identify a demirealm boundary from a hundred yards by the specific quality of the air pressure. What she cannot do, after thirty-one years of moving through the most extraordinary places in the Multirealms, is stay.

Where She Came From

Senna was born in a port city in a world she no longer names, the youngest of four children in a family of dockworkers who were unremarkable in every way that she eventually became remarkable in. She was a thief from approximately age twelve, which in that city was not unusual, and she was very good at it, which was. She worked the docks and the cargo districts and the occasional wealthy house, and she was building toward something she would have described at the time as security, which she understood to mean a room that was hers and enough money that the room could stay hers for a while.

The portal was in a warehouse she was robbing. She did not know it was a portal - it looked like a door, which is often what portals look like, which is part of the problem. She stepped through it because there was someone behind her and the door was in front of her, and the logic of her profession said that doors are for going through. She came out in a world that smelled wrong in three different ways and where the sky was the wrong color. She was twenty-three years old.

Getting back took three years. Not because the distance was great - it wasn't, as planar distances go - but because she did not know what she was doing, had no equipment, had no knowledge, and had no one to ask who spoke a language she recognized. She learned. She learned planar navigation by navigating the planes incorrectly several hundred times and noting what went wrong. She learned Ethereal movement by getting lost in the Ethereal for two weeks and using the time productively. She learned which creatures could be negotiated with and which could not by attempting negotiation with most of them. By the time she found her way back, she was someone different.

She stayed for eleven days. Her family was alive and well. The city was exactly as she had left it. The room she had been saving toward was available. She stood in the doorway of it for a long time, understanding something she did not have the words for yet, and then she walked back out and went to find another portal.

What She Does Now

Senna Voss moves. She has been in every realm documented in this book and several that aren't. She makes her living through a combination of skills that do not have a tidy professional name: she finds things that are lost in the planes, she carries messages between people who cannot carry them themselves, she occasionally acquires objects from locations that are difficult to reach and more difficult to survive long enough to leave. She is very good at all of these things.

She keeps the journal she has been writing in for thirty-one years. It is the most comprehensive single document on planar navigation currently in existence, and she is aware of this, and she does not distribute copies. The knowledge is hers. It was earned by a method that is not reproducible without repeating the thirty-one years.

She appears where she is needed, which is not the same as where she is wanted. She has a quality of arriving at the specific moment when someone is about to make a mistake that she has made before, and offering them one piece of information that reframes the situation entirely. Whether she does this deliberately or whether she simply moves toward situations that require what she has and arrives accordingly is something she has not been able to determine. She suspects both are true and the distinction is not as large as it appears. What she is looking for - what she has been looking for, she suspects, since she stepped through that warehouse door at twenty-three - is a place that feels the way home is supposed to feel. She has not found it. She has found many places that are extraordinary and beautiful and worth the visit. She has not found the one that makes her want to stop moving. She is not sure anymore whether this means the place does not exist or whether the thirty-one years of moving have changed her in ways that make stopping impossible regardless of destination.