Characters
Thelian Thelian is a Maan boy of about twelve, raised in the tower-city of Udhafa, who works a training shift at the Udhafa ISEMH node on the sixtieth floor. He moves through the canal-block streets with the practiced invisibility of someone who has learned that silence is safety and that his mere existence is an inconvenience. His deep, vivid blue eyes mark him as unlike everyone around him, drawing stares and hostility in a city where that colour carries weight.
Harri Harri is a Maan man of about thirty-seven, factory-class, large and street-shaped, who lives in the same sixtieth-floor canal-block apartment as Thelian and Elle. A ten-thousand-imperial-credit debt to the Order of Randen hangs over him and has shaped everything about the way he moves through the world. Proud, angry, and running on alcohol and endurance, he is the head of a household held together by inertia rather than care.
Bigtooth Bigtooth is a small, scaled Annil who keeps and guards the old workings of the great Udhafa ISEMH node, carrying out a duty assigned to him by his order with meticulous care and professional conviction. He is 92 cm tall, rust-red-hooded, long-eared, and relentlessly talkative, narrating his own actions aloud as a way of maintaining order in the tight spaces he inhabits. His devotion to his task and to his order is absolute and entirely sincere.
Aeron Aeron is a Maan man of about sixty-five, yard lead and corpse-handler at the Udhafa ISEMH node on the sixtieth floor, with the posture and instincts of a former soldier whatever the paperwork says. He is a quiet, unsentimental presence who keeps the work moving and the people around him out of the worst sightlines. To Thelian he is the nearest thing to a steady adult in a world that offers few.- Matti Matti is a street child of Udhafa who sits outside Thelian's apartment during Thelian's shifts, bringing pik-tree-bark tea for the sick girl inside and watching for danger. He is pale-haired and sharp-eyed, wearing a coat too large for his hunger-whittled frame, and he carries a stubborn smile like armour. He is the only person Thelian's age who stays without being asked.
Sila Sila is a young Bar girl of about twelve winters, daughter of Mara Yara, the chief of Yara Village on the forested island of Baramma, growing up among her people in the forest canopy. Deep bronze-skinned with dark mottled spotting, jet-black unbound hair, and sharp conical horn-spikes along her shoulders, she moves barefoot and with the proprietary ease of someone who treats the forest as kin. She names the bridges and stones around her and argues with everything that stands still long enough.
Mara Yara Mara Yara is the chief of the Yara clan on the island of Baramma, a towering Bar of fifty-eight winters with iron-gray hair worn loose, a long silvered beard, and the unhurried authority of someone who does not need to raise his voice. He walks as if the village square belongs to him because it belongs to the village and the village belongs to his work. He is Sila's father, and when he speaks in council the room adjusts to him rather than the reverse.
Alni Alni is an elderly Bar woman of sixty-four winters who serves as healer and practical advisor in Yara Village, accompanying Sila on mapping expeditions and operating as the steadiest presence in a crisis. Clay-brown skinned with iron-gray hair under a red headscarf, healer-triangle tattoos on her brow, and a heavy apothecary bag always at hand, she treats injuries with ruthless efficiency and does not soothe when fixing will do. She is one of the few people whose authority Sila accepts without argument.
Nago Nago is a Bar man of forty-eight winters who holds a seat on the council of Yara Village and is openly and publicly a follower of the Order of Randen, a faith well known to the village community. Lean and long-limbed for a Bar, with a shaved head and a long iron-gray beard, he dresses in layered modest garments of deliberate severity and speaks in the careful, consequence-first language of someone who measures every word for procedural weight. His Randenist faith, his morning observances, and the crest he wears openly are no secret to anyone in Yara Village.
Miahy Miahy is a Meir Conduit of the southern living arcology of Vaparium, immense and four-armed, whose role is to translate the will of the governing Council of Twelve Echoes into executable procedure. At 722 years old and roughly 380 cm tall, he has lived through the entire post-Chaos era, and his patience is biographical rather than philosophical. By deep custom the Meir are neutral in the conflicts of other peoples, and Miahy operates first as a keeper of that restraint before any other function.
Teawy Teawy is a young Meir of the southern arcology of Vaparium, son of the Conduit Miahy, tall even by the standards of his kind at roughly 290 cm and barely into adolescence at 182 years. Where his people keep to distance and restraint, Teawy is an integrationist and a quiet pacifist who has taken up the planet's own art of poetry and bent it to Meir use, treating verse as a way to carry conscience and memory. Pearl-pale and four-armed, he speaks softly, watches before he speaks, and refuses violence as a thing that changes the self.
Elle Elle is a small girl of three years in Thelian's household, gravely ill with heart-fever that has held her low for weeks. Reddish-auburn curls, deep blue eyes, and a faded nightshirt with a Socly glider printed on the front are what she wears through the slow hours of her sickness. She is the person Thelian comes home to, and her few words are single syllables worn smooth by fever.- Saint Randen Saint Randen is the revered and feared figure at the root of the Order of Randen and the Randenist faith, known through folktale, scripture, and institutional power in roughly equal measure at the time of the story. In the folk tradition he is a wanderer who left his home during the Chaos to spare others a mouth to feed, crossed into the wilderness of Baramma, and returned changed, rebuilding what the Chaos had broken with his own hands. The Order that bears his name has translated that life into a creed of debt, labor, and vigilance enforced across the Maan empire.