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A reluctant Lie Catcher in his early twenties who wanted to be an academic, not follow the family trade. Bookish, awkwardly handsome, and followed everywhere by a dark, seemingly sentient shadow of his own making. He blames his father for his mother's death and never planned on going back into the Lie Side — until his brother's life depended on it.
Trick's shadow is tied specifically to a truth he refuses to speak about his mother's death. By the story's end, he confronts and stops Father Mahoney's true scheme — but the cost is steep: the Lie Side and the human world become permanently separated, and Trick is left trapped on the Lie Side's side of that divide, inheriting the role of Guardian of Truth. His last act is a message sent to his recovering brother Bendy, felt only as a light breeze.
Trick and Bendy's father, and the family's Lie Catcher in the years since Elara's death. Carries the weight of that loss visibly.
After Elara vanished, Sully took over as the family's primary Lie Catcher despite inexperience, fell into serious debt, and became entangled with the Shadow Conclave's pressure on Father Mahoney as a result. What Trick never understood is that Sully wasn't going back into the Lie Side for money — he privately believed Elara might still be alive out there, and kept searching. He is taken by a monstrous presence during an expedition with Treacher and Bendy, his fate left open at that point in the story.
Trick's brother. His severe injury on a job gone wrong is the event that pulls Trick back into the family business, and his ongoing hospital care becomes a source of mounting pressure on everyone around him.
Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Bendy had secretly been drawn into a relationship with Justine, an undercover Truthseeker, and had independently planned to steal the family's captured lies for the Protectorate's use. He's hurt before he can go through with it.
Trick's mother, and once the most talented Lie Catcher in the family. Died — or seemed to — years before the story begins, during a mysterious expedition remembered only as "the Incident."
Elara worked closely with Father Mahoney on special cases before the Incident — an expedition to recover an artifact tied to the origin of Lie Catching itself, during which she and Sully encountered an ancient, mist-shrouded being known as the Guardian. She vanished in the aftermath. Publicly, Sully was blamed for failing to protect her; privately, she left behind a letter — never shown to Trick — insisting the Guardian transports rather than kills. The story's deepest twist: Elara was herself a Guardian of Truth, who sacrificed her old life to stop a catastrophic lie from merging the Lie Side with the human world. The monstrous presence that later takes Sully is, unbeknownst to any character on the page, Elara herself in that Guardian form.
Sully's longtime partner in Lie Catching, going blind, with a distinctive milky-eyed look. On the page, he acts with real self-sacrifice for the family more than once.
Treacher is written with a genuine, unresolved duality. He drags an injured Sully from a creature's path and later deliberately gets himself arrested — even stabbing Bendy to force the hospital back into life-saving care — at real personal cost, including the injury that's slowly blinding him. At the same time, his own background material describes a decades-long secret devotion to Elara and a plan to steal and sell the family's captured lies to fund a search for her, undisclosed to Sully. His engineered arrest also serves a private motive: he knows of a rift at the jail and uses it to manipulate Trick back into the Lie Side. Both sides of Treacher are stated directly in the source material, and this site isn't going to pretend the contradiction is resolved — he's a character still being worked out on the page.
The priest who mediates the trade of captured lies on behalf of higher powers inside his own church. Not a willing villain — more a man acting as a front for something bigger than himself.
Mahoney answers to the Shadow Conclave, an old secret society within the church that controls his actions. He is ultimately the one Trick must stop — his true scheme is what forces the Lie Side and human world apart for good.
A young woman entangled with the Protectorate's world in ways that aren't fully public. Her path crosses Trick's more than once.
Justine is an undercover Truthseeker whose handlers want Sully — or, by extension, Trick — to deliver the most powerful lies the family can catch. She's also secretly involved with Bendy. Over time she genuinely warms to Trick and grows reluctant to use him. She's not the only undercover agent in the picture: a Seeker named Grigori is working the same circles without either of them knowing the other's true role.
Tends bar at Alibi's Lounge — a "million dollar smile" and scarred hands, and old history with Sully.
Controls access to a section of the Protectorate's Justice Complex, deciding who gets in to see prisoners like Treacher.
A hospital nurse who administers the two-tier care system Bendy's treatment gets caught in.
A doctor connected to both the hospital and the Protectorate's prison medical clinic.
Trick uses a lie-vial on Skylar — without her knowledge or consent — to get his bag of captured lies past the Warden and into the prison clinic to reach Treacher. It only works on her because, unlike the already lie-exposed Mahoney, she has no tolerance built up to it.