Nharvoss the Hollow Shade

Nharvoss the Hollow Shade is reported most clearly by absence. A sentry's bootprints stop before the watch fire. A scout's report loses the paragraph that mattered. A household remembers locking a door but not whom it meant to keep out. Nhalgrin gives such emptiness a homeland, for its roads know how weather can erase guilt and how shelter can become dominion once the lamps are counted by someone else. Nharvoss smells, when he smells at all, of extinguished wick, old snow, wet stone, and air left too long in a sealed room. Armies fear him badly because he does not simply kill. He edits confidence from the world, leaving men to discover that darkness is not a condition around them but a hand already inside the tent.