I made a Small Council character for a super fun canonical role: master of torturers and spies (though I used the fancy titles, of course). If anything needs tweaking, just let me know and I'll fix it.

[hider=Lord Rhaegel Waters][center][img]https://i.imgur.com/q9D9P7J.jpg[/img][/center]

[B]Name:[/B] Lord Rhaegel Waters
[B]Age:[/B] 28
[B]House/Affiliation:[/B] Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers to King Viserys I Targaryen

[B]Appearance:[/B] Art by [url=https://www.deviantart.com/leafofsteel/art/Portrait-2-510772681]LeafOfSteel on Deviantart[/url].

[B]Biography:[/B] While Rhaegel's father was never positively identified, his heritage is written clear for any with eyes to see. Even in the cradle, the silver hair and purple eyes made it clear that his dark-haired tavern wench mother, a young woman named Ella, had made the child with someone of Valyrian blood. He was born on Dragonstone, and there his status as one born of dragonseed made it simpler for his mother to raise him as a single mother. The men who had laid with her in the time Rhaegel might have been conceived were courteous enough to see that the boy's needs were met and that he got at least a rudimentary education from the maester of Dragonstone, though none stepped forward to claim him directly. Thus Rhaegel live in relative comfort, helping do some work on ships at the docks out of interest rather than need, until Ella died of a pox when he was ten years old. Two of the three men who had been helping his mother out with money came and found Rhaegel a few days later, and they presented him with a variety of options for what could be done, none of which included the silver-haired and purple-eyed men taking direct responsibility for him. Rhaegel made his choice with his deceased mother in mind, and so he was sent by ship to the Citadel with a sack of coin and two letters of recommendation in order to learn the healing arts and fight diseases like those that took his mother's life.

After getting situated in the Citadel, Rhaegel made fine progress in forging his maester's chain. His first link, silver for medicine and healing, took him a year and a half. The second silver link took just a year. The following year he forged two silver links and made good progress on one of black iron for learning to work with ravens. Over the course of eight years, Rhaegel managed to forge a particularly strange chain compared to his fellows: where others spread their focus between a few differing fields of study, Rhaegel was relentless in the pursuit of knowledge regarding the workings of the human body and how to heal all manner of ills. As a man of eighteen years, he left the Citadel with a chain made of eleven silver links and just four of other metals. He never swore the maester's vow, in large part because the archmaesters decided that he needed to learn more of other subjects before he would be worthy of the title, but Rhaegel did not truly care to become a maester. He'd long ago abandoned that burning desire to become a healer, turning instead toward a desire for knowledge for its own sake, and he had learned all the Citadel had to teach in the area he cared about.

It took him only a month to find someone, a minor lord of the Reach, who was willing to let Rhaegel delve into the studies that would have stripped him of the status of maester had he bothered to achieve it. The lord was very paranoid and saw enemies all around, so Rhaegel got to work stripping every last secret from anyone the lord suspected of treachery. He learned a lot from his living subjects, both in matters of anatomy and the nefarious doings of the rich and powerful. It turned out to be very simple to make someone tell the truth, but much harder to make them tell and believe an alternative truth more to Rhaegel's liking. He manipulated some of them into earning death for supposedly plotting against the lord who employed him, and the grateful lord in turn allowed him to carry out the sentence in his own way. He learned many fascinating things about the inner workings of a living body, but his subjects lacked the vision and brilliance to see him as anything more than a butcher.

Rhaegel's quick elevation in status began soon after he reached his twentieth nameday. A traveling merchant had caught the ire of the lord for not bringing any fine Dornish wine, which of course made him some kind of assassin in need of an aggressive push toward confession. In truth, it turned out that the merchant [i]was[/i] party to a murderous plot, but against one Lord Tarly rather than the unimportant lord who employed Rhaegel, and his bags actually contained the bottle of poison that was meant for the hands of the would-be assassin. It was quite simple to arrange for transportation to Horn Hill with prisoner in tow, especially after Rhaegel's poor employer passed in his sleep the same night the merchant was caught. The merchant had been carrying a variety of medicinal herbs intended for sale to maesters, and a hefty does of wolf's bane in the lord's mulled wine was more than enough to stop his heart. The actual maester of the small holdfast, a man who despised Rhaegel for what he viewed as a dark perversion of the healing arts, ruled the death a matter of natural causes due to old age.

Lord Tarly proved to be quite grateful for Rhaegel's services, and he was invited to watch the beheading of the merchant and the three known co-conspirators. Rather than keeping him around, Lord Tarly sent him on to King's Landing with a glowing letter of recommendation in hand, telling King Viserys of his service and imploring the Lord Confessor of the time to take Rhaegel on as one of the crown's confessors. Upon arrival and being seen during one of the king's public audience sessions, Rhaegel received the gratitude of the crown for his efforts made to save the life of a loyal lord and a royal appointment as a confessor. The elderly Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers turned out to be rather terrible at his job, leaving all the hard work to his underlings, but the newest confessor was content to work in the shadows for a while. Holding to the constraints imposed by a lord whose mind was not addled with paranoia was something of a challenge, but Rhaegel enjoyed the puzzles posed to him by those limitations. What is the best way to break a knight's will without spilling any blood? How can one make a hardened cutthroat confess his crimes but leave him living by the end of it? Is it possible to make a lord break down and tell his darkest secrets without harming a single hair on his head?

Rhaegel solved all of those problems and more, and he quickly became the confessor most trusted to handle difficult prisoners. He was castigated once for botching a questioning by planting false truths in the prisoner's mind, but that was all it took for him to accept a new constraint: seek only the actual truth, not whatever version of truth would be the most exciting. He worked diligently in the dungeons for four years, slowly acquiring more and more responsibilities as the elderly Lord Confessor crept toward the grave. By the time the old man retired in order to die in his own land rather than King's Landing, Rhaegel was the Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers in all but name, and his predecessor acknowledged that by telling King Viserys that there was no man better suited to take on the titles and the seat on the Small Council. The king took that advice to heart, and in 109 AC Rhaegel was appointed to the Small Council and given land in the Crownlands and a separate title in order to make him a full lord rather than a mere lord in name by way of his seat on the council. He declined the offer to establish a lordly house of his own making, instead wishing to keep the bastard name of Waters until such time as he found a suitable wife and married into her family name, which the king graciously allowed.

In two years as Lord Confessor and Master of Whisperers, Lord Rhaegel Waters has made his presence felt across Westeros and beyond. With his hands fully on the reins he was able to revitalize the crumbling spy network his predecessor had left him, expanding it in the realms governed by the Iron Throne in the first year and then finding contacts in Dorne and Essos in the second. The confessors have been whipped into shape, quite literally in one case, to the point that now Rhaegel only gets his own hands dirty because he wants to rather than because he cannot trust his underlings to do a proper job. With the machinery of spying and torture now running smoothly, Rhaegel has turned his eye toward a somewhat less bloody matter: the search for a suitable wife who has enough fortitude to not faint at the sight his work. It is a rather different challenge than those he has faced thus far, but he looks forward to overcoming it all the same.[/hider]