Sienna Blackwood

She can make a building forget how to stand, and she keeps a room full of models she has chosen not to touch.

Who she is

Late twenties, dark green hair in a practical bun, work clothes that have seen work, and gloves that never come off even when she is alone. Eyes "green like bottle glass. Beautiful. And completely empty of everything except hunger" (ch. 8).

She lives in Ironhold, "a city built on the bones of older cities", called the City of Progress. Blook called it loud.

What she does

Not destruction. Acceleration.

Her touch gives a thing all the time it was ever going to get, at once. Marble weeps and cracks. Paint peels. Metal rusts in blooms. Wood becomes driftwood. She calls it honest:

"That's decades of weather in seconds. Centuries of erosion in minutes. I'm not destroying you, I'm just, speeding up the inevitable." (ch. 8)

At full strength, with both gloves off and both palms on a pillar, the Harmony Theatre "experienced geological time. Stone became sediment became dust became memory." It did not collapse. It dissolved.

Her father

Marcus Blackwood, master architect. Cathedrals, a bridge between two kingdoms, Ironhold's greatest monuments. His clippings are on her workshop wall, and underneath them the smaller ones: mysterious structural failures, a century-old library collapsing without warning, engineers baffled.

Blook's summary is two words: "Daddy issues."

She touched his models as a child and watched them crumble, and he thought her clumsy and destructive, a disappointment. Her answer took years:

"I wasn't destroying anything. I was just, revealing what was always true. That everything he built was already broken. Already falling. I just helped it fall faster." (ch. 8)

The gallery of restraint

The detail that makes her, and the reason her sin is not simple. Her workshop holds dozens of architectural models, all perfect, all untouched. Blook reads it exactly:

"The ultimate temptation. A gift that could level cities, and she builds dollhouses just to feel the power of not using it." (ch. 8)

The title

BLK: The Sin of Ruin.

Blook notes she is "not just human vice made manifest, but something deeper. Power twisted into philosophy. An awakened gift that had become a calling. And loneliness that had become a theology."

She talks constantly and hears nothing, because she is not listening for anyone. She never notices him.

The duchess of destruction

She is the only one of the Fourteen who sees Blook while dying, and the only one he gives a second name to.

SNA: You gonna stand there... and mock me before I die. BLK: Mocking the duchess of destruction would be a grave mistake. SNA: Duchess, huh... I like that name.

Blook's note on it: "That's exactly what mortals will whisper when they speak your name in hushed tones around midnight fires" (ch. 21).

She never heard him in ch. 8. Ch. 21 explains why she can now: "near-death has a peculiar way of sharpening human perception, making people see through veils that normally obscure the supernatural from mortal sight."

She is there afterwards

Ch. 74, three centuries after ch. 21 kills her under a cathedral keystone. She meets Matta on Aquila's behalf, gloved, and impatient with the theatrics:

SIE: Honestly. Making things harder than they need to be. Cryptic messages and mysterious meetings when a simple instruction would suffice.

Her gift came with her. She peels off the gloves to take the card, and her bare hands "seemed to shimmer slightly in the fading light, as if they weren't entirely solid". The card does not burn or tear. It stops existing, "its essence flowing into her skin like water absorbed by sand."

Her word for it: "Waste removal, no need for useless cards."

The Sin of Ruin, filed down into an office task. See aquila.md.

Open questions

• What "the Awakened" means. It is used as a known category in engineering circles, and nothing explains it.
• Whether she ever learns she was chosen, or meets her father again.
• Whether the theatre had anyone in it.

What Blook keeps of her

He remembered Sienna's garden, watered the morning before everything ended. (ch. 235)