Hope - The Impossible Child | The Lost Histories

[Character Art Coming Soon]
A child the Historian calls impossible
Her face is for the tale to show

First Appears

The Lost Histories — The Sin of Mercy

Name

Hope—a name that is also a promise

Called

The Impossible Child

Bound To

Rynn, the Stubborn Heart, and Azrael, the Fallen Guardian

Setting

Oakhaven and the Dark Forest

The Question She Embodies

Whether choice matters more than nature

Her Story

The Sin of Mercy—and the Historian's later accounts

The Child at the Heart of the Sin of Mercy

Three figures stand at the centre of The Sin of Mercy: Azrael, the Fallen Guardian; Rynn, the Stubborn Heart; and Hope, the Impossible Child. Of the three, Hope is the one the Historian's published chapter has not yet shown. She does not appear in the Weathered Willow Inn, or on the forest path where a lantern shatters and a dark stranger crashes out of the night. She belongs to the tale's later movement, and the World Guide will not take her from it.

What can be said is this. Her name is Hope, and the tale gives it to her as a promise rather than a description. She is called impossible because her very existence poses the question that The Sin of Mercy exists to ask—the question Tanneus G'Raja puts in his own words in the account's preface: "What does it mean to show mercy to those who seem undeserving? How do we judge actions taken in impossible circumstances? And when the divine walks among us, scarred by choices we cannot fathom, do we have the wisdom to recognize grace beneath the guilt?"

Her story is bound to a god cast from heaven for choosing mercy over divine law, and to a tavern girl who refused to believe in monsters. Whether choice matters more than nature—whether a child can be what she is chosen to be rather than what her blood demands—is the wager the tale makes upon her. What she is, where she came from, and who raised her, are the subject of The Sin of Mercy; what she became is the subject of the Historian's accounts that follow it.

I publish this account not because I've found all the answers, but because the questions themselves deserve better than children's rhymes and comfortable lies.

— Tanneus G'Raja, Author's Note to The Sin of Mercy

The Heart That Chooses

Choice versus nature is the question the tale stakes on Hope. The guide records the shape of the question and leaves the answer to the tale.

Impossible

The writing calls her the Impossible Child. Why she should not exist, and why she does, is the tale's to tell.

Named for a Promise

Hope: the tale sets that name against its own darkest chapters, and against the children's rhyme about the demon in the woods.

Choice Over Nature

"Just because somethin' seems wild or dangerous don't mean it can't choose to be good," Rynn says, in the tale's own summary. Hope is the child on whom that belief is staked.

Beyond the Forest

The Sin of Mercy is not the last the Historian has to say of her. Her later life is the subject of the accounts that follow it.

Why This Page Is Brief

Only the first chapter of The Sin of Mercy is currently online, and Hope does not appear in it. Everything else the World Guide could say about her—her nature, her parentage, her powers, and the road she walks after the Dark Forest—would give away the turns of a tale the Historian took three years and a great deal of blood to uncover. Read the story; then come back.

Because sometimes what we name as demons are simply those who choose mercy in a world that counts it as sin.

— Tanneus G'Raja, Author's Note to The Sin of Mercy

Bonds That Transcend Blood

Hope's bonds are the bonds of the tale she belongs to: the Fallen Guardian, the Stubborn Heart, the village that sings about demons, and the scholar who followed a children's rhyme to a blood-stained cabin.

Living Proof of Chosen Grace

Hope is the third figure of The Sin of Mercy, the one the writing calls the Impossible Child. She stands with Azrael, the god of guardian angels cast from heaven for choosing mercy over divine law, and with Rynn, the tavern girl of Oakhaven who refused to believe that the stranger in the Dark Forest was a monster—and she is the child on whom the tale's central wager is staked: whether choice matters more than nature.

The World Guide keeps her secrets. Her existence, her name and the question she embodies are enough to say here; the rest belongs to the account the Historian found written in blood on a cabin floor, and to the accounts that come after it, in which the Impossible Child walks a longer road than the forest.

Meet the Impossible Child

Hope's story begins in the Dark Forest, with a lantern, a beast, and a stranger who will not give his name. Read The Sin of Mercy from its first chapter.

Read The Sin of Mercy Explore the Series World Guide