Galŵs an Anams. Watcher of souls.
Some time after Caldara's motherly revelation and Maedwen's mad one, after bearing the title on her shoulders and her soul for wearying weeks, she comes to think that no-one who had been a "Watcher" could ever have decided to call themselves that.
To be sure, she sees what a soul has done in its past, but she also hears in those memories – and feels, and smells, and tastes. (If only she didn't smell or taste; that one villager who had lived three lives as a xaurip has a lot to answer for. To Wael with the madness of fractured spirits and the intrusions of her Awakening past: if anything's going to send her to a Sanitarium cell, it'll be those memories).
As to seeing the souls themselves, well – what colour do you think a soul is meant to be? Tell her that. What shape, if it has worn a thousand different bodies as it passes back and forth through the Shroud, if it has fractured and mingled with others and their own myriad of physical lives? A soul is nothing so concrete, so damned simple, as anyone who hears the word "Watcher" seems to imagine. If they took the time to think about it – if the soul just had the shape of its body, how would she be able to tell what anyone had done in the soul-memories of their past selves? You don't pass down your face with your soul, else the whole crop of Admeth Hadret's spirit-children would look like blood-children too, and Defiance Bay would never have needed a ducal portrait except its first.
A soul is … life. Like life, it has no colour, no shape, no texture, no flavour, no sound – or it has so many parts to it that they are impossible to sense. A soul is a seed sown by the gods and, whatever nonsense people come up with about her retaining "sight" from beyond the Shroud, she's no god (and far less like gods are all these idiots who haven't ever delved into a soul's depths, and yet call it "Watching").
She perceives each individual soul, and everything that defines that soul as itself, by a sense that has no name: not in Hylspeak or Eld Aedyran or any other language of Eora, because no-one has either cared or been able to explain the sense to those without. She just understands that within the flesh of this scarred aumaua bandit is a life just the same as that which once dwelt in a dragon of night-dark scales when he swooped over the ashy, black shores of the Deadfire Archipelago, and also in a pale and sickly elf girl who shivered herself to death in the sunlit night of the White That Wends, and there is no contradiction in this. The soul's essence is clearly and obviously the same, readily told apart from any other. The body, the physical, and everything that goes with it, is unimportant to the sense of souls – or cannot be important, else there would be no such thing as a soul in the first place.
As her "Watching" time has worn on, it has taken less and less effort to put aside flesh and turn to the truth beneath. I know you, Aloth, she says. I know you, Aloth and Iselmyr and Axlitl and Gréf Sau and every one of you who all together are just a single one, a single you. I know you there, Thaos, however hidden you think you are. I know you, all you souls, who wear bodies and names as cloaks and masks over yourselves. I am not blinded by sight; I know you and I am not deceived.
It unnerves almost everyone she speaks to, this blatant disregard of appearance. A Watcher, they think, should have eyes so keen that they see through to the soul, not half-lidded, wandering, as if she has begun to forget how to use them. "You expect her to be the sort that never drops eye contact," Edér says, thinking she can't hear him, around one night's campfire. "That really damn uncomfortable sort, who seems like she can see all your secrets when she stares hard enough." But feeling laid bare without the sharp eyes or anything to explain the sensation is much more unsettling to them. Even the maimed or grotesque seem to resent it, because she doesn't forgive or accept or praise their ugliness, but fails to see it at all.
As to Edér and all the rest around that fire – "Watching" is a label given by the blind to colour and, just as every other before her, she struggles and fails to describe music to her deaf companions. As much as (ages of weeks ago) she herself was once senseless, and as guilty of arrogance as she feels, she can't help but despair and pity at the lack in her friends. It amazes her that they can still do what they do with their souls, still fumble and stumble their way into power by what seems like sheerest coincidence. Each clumsily handles their own spirit in their own way, and tries to cram her sense into that crude measure when they talk with her about it, as if a smell could be called "soft", or a taste "white". Durance feels out his soul in heat – the divine fire, god-granted and god-killing. Edér's too is physical, but in bruising pressure – the thump of a blade on his shield, and careworn memories of his brother's playful fist into his shoulder. Kana and the Grieving Mother are of sound – they find themselves in a thunderous chant rolling like waves on the black seas and in quiet chimes settled around a quiet wrist. Sagani and Itumaak share scent like their souls – prey hunted over the tundra by claw and bow, cub-children left behind, but each other above all.
Very well, then. They're comrades, not students. The how of what she does is immaterial: they understand her, and that's so much more valuable. And it's not so wonderful a thing, to be a "Watcher", that she should feel pity for them. To be lured into the memories of others, often with no warning of the trap in store, and to learn every cruel secret of every life they have lived; to know every wandering Lost who is trapped away from Berath's Wheel, and the pain which keeps them from the gods; to struggle for her mind's balance against the tide of Awakening; to be regarded with awe and fear and a resentment of her gaze: she'd wish little of it on her enemies, never mind her friends.
So - whatever the title, whatever the misunderstandings, there's nothing to be done to change it anyway. She has no desire to force comprehension on her companions, and no way to bring it about even if she did. Nor can she stop herself sensing souls, any more than she could stop hearing: less, since there's hardly a spiritual equivalent of wool to wad up and stuff in her ears. And when there's nothing to be changed, there's no point in dwelling on it.
She is given a meaningless name that captures the barest fraction of what she does. But she, better than anyone, knows that the passage of time and the turning of the Wheel make every name meaningless, sooner or later. Actions are what leave their imprints on history and on the soul. So, for herself and for her friends, she will Watch, and she will do it gladly.
AN: Further background and musings on writing this under the same title at the Archive of Our Own version, which properly supports author's notes. Also, hopefully, a recorded reading will be posted there at some point soon.