Virello the Black

Virello the Black Vine looked like nobility carved from shadow and vice. He was tall, unnervingly so, with a frame that seemed lean at first glance — until you noticed the quiet tension beneath his velvet garments, like a panther coiled in the guise of a gentleman. His skin was the color of old parchment, pallid but unblemished, as if time feared to touch him. His hair, jet black and swept back with surgical precision, gleamed like oil beneath candlelight, not a strand out of place. His face was angular and sharp, with high cheekbones and a jaw that spoke of quiet cruelty. A faint scar curled beneath one eye, barely visible, as if it had been left by something delicate — a lover’s dagger, perhaps, or a quill dipped in poison. His lips were thin, often curled in a knowing half-smile, the kind that made allies anxious and enemies dead by morning. But it was his eyes that haunted. One was a warm, unnatural gold that seemed to glow faintly in darkness — a gift, some said, from a demon he outwitted. The other was a glass orb etched with arcane runes, swirling faintly with shadow, a memento of a price he’d once paid in a ruined temple. When both locked on you, it felt like judgment itself — not loud or dramatic, but final. He wore a blood-red coat stitched with black ivy embroidery that shimmered only under moonlight, paired with gloves of spider-silk, and boots polished with something that smelled faintly of myrrh and death. Around his throat hung a chain of obsidian links, each one bearing a name etched in infernal script — not trophies, but warnings. Even his cane was no simple accessory: lacquered wood capped with a serpent’s fang of silver, it clicked like a metronome of menace when he walked, and silence always followed in its rhythm. He dressed like a man ready for a funeral — preferably someone else’s — but never quite out of place at a royal ball. Every thread,