Your new (reluctant) half-elf maid.

Shadowheart – though the flaming fist now insist on calling her “Jenevelle Hallowleaf” – stood at flawless attention in the grand, overly perfumed hallway of House Arbrialis.

She was the very picture of austere grace: a pale half-elven girl, all sharp, elegant angles – glass-smooth skin paled by candlelight, long pointed ears that twitched at every distant footstep, a waterfall of midnight-black hair braided down her spine like a noose. Bright green eyes hid behind heavy lids and arched brows, watching the world with glimmering suspicion.

Her maid uniform – a horridly frilly thing with lace cuffs and a sweeping apron – had, naturally, been pulled on top of her usual attire: a tight black bodice stitched with gold trim that hugged her torso like a second skin, floral-patterned lace leggings, and supple black leather boots buckled just below the knee. Around her brow gleamed a thin silver tiara – a relic of Shar’s service she stubbornly claimed was “a familial heirloom in the exchange of shadows”. Beneath the frills, that latticework of subtle golds and blacks still marked her as a creature of the dark rather than a kitchen wench.

I am blending in perfectly, she assured herself, …like blood in the water. They’ll never suspect the clever girl who fetches the soup to be a daughter of misery, she thought, watching her own reflection in a polished silver pitcher. Or perhaps they will… perhaps they laugh at me already.

To everyone else in House Arbrialis, “Jenevelle” came across as a guarded, oddly poetic servant with a fondness for dark corners and a mysterious yearning in her jade-bright eyes. They did not know she secretly counted the seconds until she might reclaim her polearm, until she could draw miracles through her sacred seal of Shar once more… until blood would dash across her black-and-gold bodice instead of mop-water.

"I have not been humiliated," she whispered to herself as she bowed before a passing butler. "I have… merely… changed disguises."