Lines That Don't Fade: An Interview with Larissa Sabine Osborn

CROSSROADS CONFIDENTIAL Special Arcane Edition - Issue 47

Lines That Don't Fade: An Interview with Larissa Sabine Osborn

She's the broker your broker whispers about. A tattoo witch raised by imps. Codex-marked. Veil-crossing. Dangerous on a good day—and we caught her in one of her rare moods. Jude Rael sat down with Larissa Sabine Osborn in a warded backroom of the Black Salt Diner to ask the questions nobody else dares ink.

JUDE RAEL: The back booth at Black Salt smells like burnt coffee and old hexes. Larissa Sabine Osborn slides in across from me, ice-blue eyes scanning the room's protective sigils before settling on my face. She's smaller than I expected… maybe 5'3" in her boots… but there's something in the way she moves that makes the air itself pay attention. Dark blonde hair frames a face that's learned hardness early, and when she sheds her leather jacket, I catch glimpses of ink that seems to shift under the diner's fluorescent lights.

"You buying coffee or just wasting my time?" she asks, pulling a bone stylus from her jacket pocket and turning it over in her fingers like a nervous habit.

I signal the waitress, a tired-looking woman whose aura suggests she's seen worse things than magical implements, and dive in.

RAEL: Let's start simple. When someone hears your name… Larissa Sabine Osborn… what do you hope they feel?

OSBORN: [She traces the stylus along the table's edge, leaving faint marks in the wood] Hope? That's cute. I'm not running for prom queen, Rael. When they hear my name, I want them to think twice before they fuck with something they don't understand. Fear keeps people honest. Respect keeps them breathing.

But if I'm being real? I hope they remember that some of us crawled out of Hell's gutters with our principles intact. That power doesn't have to come with a leash.

RAEL: You were raised by imps. Not fostered. Not mentored. Raised. What does that kind of upbringing carve into a person?

OSBORN: [Her expression softens, just slightly, and she stops fidgeting with the stylus] It carves truth. Imps don't lie to spare your feelings or dress up ugly realities in pretty words. They tell you the world is cruel, magic has a price, and family isn't about blood. It's about who bleeds for you when the chips are down.

They taught me that loyalty flows up from the bottom, not down from the top. That the smallest voices often carry the biggest truths. And that sometimes the only way to love something is to burn down what's killing it.

[She traces a finger along what looks like a chain tattoo on her forearm] They also taught me that chains break. All of them. Eventually.

RAEL: You could've stayed hidden. Off-grid. But you tattoo pacts for mortals now. Why bring your art to the profane?

OSBORN: Because hiding doesn't change anything. It just leaves the field to bastards who think power is a zero-sum game.

Look, every mortal I ink is someone who won't go to a Council-sanctioned Broker. They come to me desperate, broke, or too proud to beg permission from some ivory tower asshole who's never had dirt under their fingernails. They need someone who understands what it's like to want more than the world thinks you deserve.

[She taps the stylus against the table in a steady rhythm] Plus, the profane world has better coffee. And fewer bureaucrats.

RAEL: Codex fragments. People talk. Say you carry one. Some say it's writing you. Care to clarify who holds the pen?

OSBORN: [Long pause. Her hand moves unconsciously to her jacket pocket, the stylus going still in her other hand] People talk a lot of shit about things they've never seen.

The Codex… it's not what most Brokers think it is. It's not some holy scripture or instruction manual. It's more like a mirror that shows you what you're afraid to become. And yeah, I carry a fragment. Found me more than I found it, if I'm being honest.

But writing me? [She laughs, but there's no humor in it, and she begins turning the stylus end over end] Nothing writes me but me. I've seen what happens to people who let prophecy think for them. They end up as footnotes in someone else's story.

RAEL: What's the first glyph you ever carved? Was it for power, survival, or revenge?

OSBORN: [She shifts in the booth, angling her shoulder toward the dim overhead light. With a practiced gesture, she tugs the collar of her shirt wide enough to reveal the skin beneath. The glyph shimmers into view—etched across the upper curve of her shoulder blade like a wound that never closed] This. The Rabisu Eye. I was twelve, bleeding in a Pandemonium alley while some punk demons thought they'd teach the little human girl her place.

Kratch… old imp who helped raise me… he handed me a bone stylus just like this one and said, "Pain's a teacher, girl. Time you learned to make it work for you."

[The tattoo seems to pulse with its own light] It was survival. But everything after that? That was choice. Every mark I've earned since then says the same thing: I decide what I become.

RAEL: You've been called 'the Inkmother' by some Hollow imps. Rebellion icon. Do you see yourself as a leader, or just someone who keeps surviving?

OSBORN: [She picks up the stylus again, rolling it between her palms] I'm not anybody's mother. And I sure as hell didn't ask to be an icon.

But… [She looks up, and for a moment, her armor cracks] If some scared imp looks at me and thinks, "Maybe I don't have to accept the cage they built for me," then I guess that's worth something. If my refusal to kneel gives someone else permission to stand up, then sure. I'll carry that weight.

Leadership's not about having followers. It's about showing people they don't need permission to be free.

RAEL: Let's talk scars. Which tattoo hurts the most? And I don't mean the one that glows. I mean the one that still speaks in your sleep.

OSBORN: [She's quiet for a long time, staring at the stylus in her hands as if it holds answers] There's one most people never see. Over my heart. It's… it's my mother's name. Camilla. Done in Mirror Ink when I was sixteen and thought I could summon her ghost through sheer want.

[Her voice drops to barely above a whisper, and her grip tightens on the bone tool] The ink burned for three days. Fever dreams, visions of a woman I barely remembered singing lullabies in a language I didn't recognize. When it was over, all I had was her name and the certainty that she died for something I still don't understand.

It doesn't glow. Doesn't grant power. Just sits there, a reminder that some wounds don't heal. They just teach you to carry them better.

RAEL: There are Brokers who say the Council needs you eliminated. Others say they need you on their side. Which is worse in your book?

OSBORN: [She begins etching idle patterns in the wood with the stylus point] Elimination I understand. It's honest. Clean. They think I'm a threat, so they try to remove the threat. Fair enough.

But recruitment? That's how they corrupt you. They offer you a seat at the table, make you part of the system, and before you know it, you're making the same compromises that turned them into everything you swore you'd fight against.

[She leans forward, the stylus going still] The Council's worst fear isn't that I'll destroy them. It's that I'll prove they're unnecessary. That Brokers can operate without their blessing, their rules, their permission slips written in blood and bullshit.

RAEL: You've inked glyphs into saints, sinners, and something in between. Ever regret giving someone power they didn't earn?

OSBORN: [She's quiet for several heartbeats, absently spinning the stylus like a miniature baton] Every Broker who's honest has that list. Names of people we should have walked away from.

There was this banker in Newark. Mid-life crisis, dead marriage, wanted a strength glyph to "reclaim his manhood" or some such horseshit. I was young, needed the money, figured what's the harm in giving a sad suit the ability to bench press his feelings.

[She stops spinning the stylus and grips it tight] Two weeks later, his wife was in the hospital. Turned out his idea of strength wasn't about building himself up. It was about tearing her down.

Power doesn't make you who you are. It just gives you the tools to become who you were all along.

RAEL: Final question: if a client sits across from you, broken and desperate, and asks what ink can fix… what do you tell them?

OSBORN: [She sets the stylus down on the table between us and meets my eyes directly] I tell them the truth: ink doesn't fix anything. It just changes the terms of the problem.

[She stands, throwing money on the table and pocketing the bone tool] You want strength? I can give you that. But you'll still need to find something worth being strong for. You want love? I can ink glamour that'll make you irresistible. But you'll never know if it's real, and that'll eat you alive.

[She pulls on her jacket, and I catch a glimpse of more tattoos… a constellation of power and pain written across her skin] What I can do is give you the tools to become who you choose to be. The rest? That's on you.

Magic's not a shortcut. It's a mirror with teeth. And sometimes, the person staring back is exactly who you need to fight.

RAEL: She walks out without looking back, leaving me with a cup of coffee that's gone cold and faint etch marks in the wooden table where her stylus had been working. Outside, a Jeep with glyphs carved into the dashboard roars to life, and for just a moment, I swear I see wings of shadow spread from its sides before it disappears into Baltimore's neon-scarred night.

Some interviews end with answers. This one ended with questions I'm not sure I want to know the truth about.

—Jude Rael

Next issue: "The Hollow Markets: Inside the Imp Underground's Black Economy" and exclusive photos from the raid on Vault Septimus Station 7.

Crossroads Confidential: Because every pact deserves a paper trail.

#Hell's Broker #Character