Dhei Rysen

Dhei Rysen is by all accounts not a nice fellow.

Yes whilst Dhei may look like a girl we assure you he is male.

As with most members of his species, the Alary fae he maintains the flawless look of a child although his lusciously long and shiny white blonde hair is clearly the envy of many a woman. Being bird-winged with fair hair and skin those belonging to the Alary species are often mislabelled as angels or angel fairies when in reality the word Alary literally means ‘of or pertaining to wings’ and an angel Dhei certainly is not.

Standing a mere 4ft 8in tall, Dhei is blessed with levitation and has during his 40years of living cultured the unique and dangerous skill of remote empathy. By this, we do not mean he is empathic to anyone, quite the contrary he is one of the few people capable of gaining emotional control over others simply by thinking about doing it.

A dangerous talent indeed, so much so, that those schooled in it are branded by law with the purple sign you can see here stamped on Dhei’s forehead. It is purposefully placed on the forehead, in a large and quite distinctive pattern so that all who meet bearers of this talent know immediately what the person they are speaking to is capable of, unless of course said bearer wears a headscarf, like the one Dhei never normally removes.

Therefore as with Karyf’s interview we feel we must point out that any gushing love we express towards this man is probably a result of his influence and does not reflect the way we here at Black Wednesday’s truly feel.

Now Dhei does possess an odd allure and innocence that defies his true nature, right up to the point where he opens his mouth and a surprisingly deep voice bolts forward to demand, ‘what are you staring at?’ He doesn’t seem satisfied by our artist answering that she has to stare at him in order to sketch him but never utters a word in response. Not quite so much a mystery then when said artist collapses in paralytic fear, that Dhei has taken a disliking to the woman. Thankfully we have relief staff on hand who are, shall we say, not in the least relieved that we called upon them after we carefully explain how Dhei almost hospitalised the first sketch artist he decided he disliked. Lucky for the next illustrator our interviewer is able to keep Dhei’s glacial eyes firmly fixed on the questions at hand.

A sharp character then, Dhei is somewhat severe in his outlook, an openly mean and snide man whose greatest pleasure outside of manipulation appears to be arguing with others. His partner in life and in ‘business’ Karyf Aster fills this need to spit vitriolic words quite succinctly. As the interview progresses, we learn that the two met at a relatively young age and schooled in the separate yet unified disciplines of thought and emotion control. Their families were never close but the two bonded during study in the same way that oil and water like to play with ducks and sand. Their resulting unstable and somewhat sticky emulsion of personalities appears to work by the logic that if they wind each other up far enough things will tick along nicely.

Still we aren’t here to question the logic of their ice and fire type relationship. Although we do feel the need to point out that in translation his name means ‘Dusk Rising’ whilst hers reads, ‘Dawn of the heavens,’ which is almost as clichéd as if their names were day and night. Yet the reason they argue, aside from taking great pleasure in it, appears to be more about the fact they are incredibly similar to one another to the point of grating. Forthright, vicious and self-righteous are all words we used to describe Karyf, words that apply with equal measure to baby-faced Dhei.

Both work in the field as ‘covert specialised operatives’ and as a team have been charged by Lord Luk with dragging around young Naiad on their missions to give her some experience. Tutoring the ditzy damselfly it seems is one subject that Dhei and Karyf agree to be a true chore. In short, they hate having Naiad around. If Nai were more mature she would actually be a logical choice for a teammate, her superior healing skills, strength and physical agility would be of great benefit to the duo; a shame then that Nai apparently has as much brains as Karyf and Dhei have muscle.

Much to the distaste of Karyf and Dhei, we decided to have all three pose together for height comparison, partly as a means to point out how tiny these fae are and partly because we were quietly paranoid that Dhei is making us feel terrified on purpose.

Bearing in mind that Nai herself is only 5ft 3in tall you can see how precisely small and yet perfectly proportioned Karyf is, Dhei on the other hand refused to stand but he’s roughly an inch taller than Karyf so we’re sure you get the idea.

To be fair we’d probably look as miffed as Karyf and Dhei here if we were charged with babysitting a mentally unbalanced half-Fae like Naiad, getting her to stand still and stop drinking all the free wine was challenge enough for the time it took to capture this portrait.