The four of you sit around the table, you got your beverage of choice, and you are waiting for the meals to come. You just finished your job, in the tavern you got a silent space that allows you to speak clearly, you checked it for any eavesdroppers.
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orders a drink but does not touch it.
Perhaps he is some sort of ascetic. Perhaps he is wary that someone else is trying to poison him. Perhaps it is because he doesn't want to reveal his face in public - be it beautiful and elven smooth, or unrecognizably scarred and disfigured. But the truth, gleaned or divined, as it were, lies somewhere between all three. After all, practicing the most ancient profession requires a rigorous training of body, a healthy sense of paranoia, and a distinct manner of being infinitely discreet.
He imagines, too, that those seated around the table with him share at least one or all of these qualities, or rather, qualifications for entry into The Guild (as he calls it). The same where he feigns allegiance to a cruel and mysterious god, all the while paying true spiritual fealty to a less cruel and but more mysterious one. Not that it makes much of a difference. For Hammid - as his name will not be known - mimics the qualities of both. With cold dispassion, he lusts for power by any means, to satisfy some ambitious curiosity, and to reconcile the enigma that surrounds his people. A ghost in a world of men, aged well past what many would consider a reasonable lifespan.
These pawns surrounding them - his coworkers - he becomes acutely aware that the chances of all four of them surviving their tenure together approach impossible odds, for invariably, an instrument, finely tuned for one purpose, sharpens it's destiny as well as it's edge, turning one end upon the other to make a clean, inevitable break.
He solemnly swears, with some foolishness, like all those that came before him, that it will not be he that not the last standing, wallowing secretly in conspiracy and megalomania behind a well-postured composure broad and tall as an ivory tower!