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Curran was a bastard in a noble house in Arx, probably one of the Lycene ones, but he wasn't an important bastard. He was somebody's servant sleeping around trying to get a leg up on her employer for blackmail purposes, but she miscalculated because he didn't care. She was fired and she took her son to the Lower Boroughs, where she worked at the Murder for the Grayhopes, and her son was underfoot all of the time. He helped cook and clean from when he was old enough to hold a rag, but not like he was beaten into it. More like he was interested in sticking his nose where it wasn't wanted. It was not an ideal childhood. A low, scraggly little rat in the Boroughs, he developed a knack for creeping into corners, a light-fingered little punk who found trinkets where he could and shadows wherever he looked for them. Curran got old enough to get into real scraps and that meant he got old enough to get himself into trouble. He punched somebody he shouldn't have, but the Grayhopes liked his mother, so they looked out for him, too, and he wound up 'employed' by the 'organization', learning from spies how to be quiet. There's plenty of fine, fancy family folk, but Curran's who any of the family call when they need something shifty done on the quiet.

Curran is a slight, wiry figure with full cheeks that suggest even more youth than he can rightly claim, wide black eyes and heavy dark eyebrows beneath his rough mop of black curls. His lips are full and dark, his nose a smashed button and his olive-dark skin dusted with freckles and dark moles in unlikely places. Not tall or broad, he moves with quiet, eerie grace, slipping through crowds or into cracks as smoothly and elusively as a shadow, or a young, hungry tomcat.

Curran is sharp-tongued, sharp-witted, and impatient. His tongue will get him into trouble more often than it won't. He has a hard time kowtowing to his betters. That's not to say he doesn't know when to shut up. He can be silent for days at a time if there's money in it. Scrappy, bright, and hypercurious, it's hard to imagine anything that Curran wouldn't stick his nose into. Brave but sometimes foolhardy, he struggles to trust others and watches the world through wary bright black eyes, trying to learn it all and -- above all, of course -- survive. In the Lower Boroughs, sometimes that feels like it's the hard part.