Borrowed Face
Borrowed Face. Borrowed Face is the exile's gift among their own kind. Among the exiled — the displaced, the renamed, the deliberately forgotten — the exile may take any name and any past, and it will be confirmed by those who ought to know. A deserter will swear the exile served in their old company. A smuggler will vouch for a shared run across the southern border. A disgraced priest will remember the exile as a fellow defrocked brother. The lie holds not because the witnesses are bribed, but because the community of the discarded has agreed, in some unspoken compact, to be each other's alibis. The exile has walked into garrisons, guildhalls, and temples under names that were not theirs, and walked out again unchallenged. The gift does not work among the respectable. It is a tool of the margins.