Rex and Tann Rookfell — The Mercenary Sisters

Rex and Tann Rookfell did not come from anywhere in particular, and they would be the first to tell you that this was an advantage, not a loss. Their past was a rumour even to themselves, a half-remembered childhood drifting between waystations, trade posts, caravan camps, and border skirmishes. Wherever their parents had come from, whatever trade or trouble had shaped their early years, the Rookfell sisters learned only one lesson that mattered: survival belongs to the quick, the clever, and the ruthless.

They took that lesson to heart.

As identical twins, they grew into a single reputation shared between two bodies — beautiful and lethal in equal measure. By their late teens they were already hiring out as caravan guards along the rougher eastern trade routes, startling merchants with how easily they dismantled drunken labourers twice their size. By their twenties they had drifted into more dangerous, better-paying work: bounty retrieval, strong-arm enforcement, quiet disappearances, and escort duty for nobles who valued competence over pedigree.

They had no loyalty to nations, Churches, or causes.
Coin was coin.
A job was a job.
Everything else was someone else’s problem.

Despite their uncanny similarity — the same sharp cheekbones, the same angular jaws, the same athletic frames honed by constant conflict — the sisters shaped their appearances deliberately apart. Rex kept her natural blonde hair, chopping it short when a job required discretion and letting it grow long when intimidation served her better. She favoured black leathers, tight-fitting and practical, the better to vanish into woodland shadows or city alleyways.

Tann, on the other hand, dyed her hair a glossy pitch-black, the strands falling over her eyes like an ink spill. She dressed in deep crimson, a colour that drew attention rather than deflected it, a deliberate contrast to her sister. Where Rex moved silently, Tann moved like a threat you could see coming and still fail to stop.

Their fighting style was unmistakable.
Both preferred the visceral certainty of fists over blades — the crunch of bone beneath a hardened gauntlet, the thud of impact when a jaw met knuckle. Each sister wore a pair of thick leather gauntlets studded with dark metal spikes, custom-made and lovingly maintained. Daggers rested at their hips, but these were tools of necessity, not preference. A knife was for finishing a fight. A fist was for winning one.

The sisters lived by a code as simple as it was precise:

• Finish every job you take.
• Take no job that smells of suicide.
• Leave the cause to those foolish enough to believe in it.
• If a client becomes a liability, walk away.
• If walking away becomes impossible, kill the problem and walk anyway.

It was this code — and Kial Mayers’s coin — that brought them into the orbit of the Briar.

The sisters met Kial in a roadside tavern where he was speaking with a small Knot of followers, his red hood casting a shadow over eyes that seemed to burn even in the dim light. At first they dismissed him as just another charismatic revolutionary doomed to be dead within a season. But when he offered them payment, substantial payment, to act as his bodyguards, they accepted without hesitation. His ideology meant nothing to them, but his purse spoke fluently.

From the moment they joined the Root, the Rookfells treated the Briar exactly as they treated every job: with professional detachment and a flicker of amused contempt. They stood behind Kial during his speeches, arms folded, eyes scanning crowds for threats. They nodded solemnly at his proclamations, murmured agreements when he preached about destiny, and even raised clenched fists when the more fervent Knots began chanting. It was all a performance.

They believed none of it.

They found Kial’s conviction entertaining, in its way — admirable in its intensity, foolish in its purpose. They recognised madness when they saw it, but as long as madness paid well and pointed them at enemies worth bruising, they were content. They knew they could outrun the Briar’s eventual collapse; they always did. They told themselves they wouldn’t get attached.

And yet, loyalty — or something approximating it — developed in the cracks between coin and convenience. Not loyalty to Kial’s revolution, certainly, but to the people who travelled beside them. Rex found a sharp respect for Sahira Quen’Tal’s quiet power; Tann, a wary fascination with Jareth Calwen’s erratic brilliance. Lilah they protected out of instinct rather than obligation, perhaps recognising in the frightened alchemist something of the girl they might have been in another life.

Only Xix unsettled them.
The demon’s presence prickled along their skin in ways they could not explain. When Xix was near, the twins felt watched, measured, weighed.

Still, they stayed.
The pay remained excellent, and the work remained dangerous in the way they preferred — just shy of suicidal, just bold enough to keep their blood running hot. They told themselves they would leave when the wind shifted, when Kial’s delusions demanded too much, when the Briar’s violence grew too large to step aside from.

They had cut and run before.
They would do it again.
They always survived.

But Xix had its own designs on the Rookfell sisters, and destiny — or whatever twisted echo of it Kial lived by — had a habit of pulling them deeper into the Briar’s shadow than either twin intended.