The Faceless Men were born in the mines of Old Valyria.
These slaves had to dig while they lived. Did they think mere death would free them?
No.
Even after these slaves died, their corpses were not spared!
For the empire of Old Valyria possessed three strange powers.
Blood magic, necromancy, and prophetic ability.
Through necromancy, slaves who killed themselves were turned into mindless, controlled undead, repeating the work they had done "in life" day after day.
Here, slaves from different lands prayed to their own gods amid endless suffering, yet all begged for the same thing.
Release.
They had endured enough of the dragonlords' rule.
They sought true release.
A release in which both body and soul were utterly destroyed.
The first Faceless Man came to understand.
Every god had tools in the world to carry out its will.
And those hundreds of gods were, in truth, a single god with hundreds of different faces.
That was the origin of the Many-Faced God.
And so, acting as a tool of the "Many-Faced God" for the first time, this Faceless Man "freed" one of the slaves suffering most.
He smashed the slave's skull with a pickaxe and cast his corpse into a pool of lava.
And so, that slave was utterly free...
That was the origin of the "gift."
Afterward.
A second Faceless Man joined the resistance.
Then a third,
A fourth...
Braavos, meanwhile, was a city-state founded by refugees who had escaped slavery in Valyria.
As part of the slaves' resistance, the Faceless Men also followed the northerners here, where they flourished.
One could say that the Temple of Black and White and Braavos had been inseparably intertwined since their founding, together forming the bedrock of the city-state.
Eventually, alongside powers such as the Iron Bank, they formed the