Tharyn'Breka Kael

Tharyn'Breka Kael was a Frost Sentinel of Northern Pass descent and the childhood friend and protector of Prince Ashan'Raeth Vareth. Her family had long left the northern passes of Ngorrhal, but she carried the bearing of those origins in everything she did. Raeth had been drawn to Frost Sentinel culture since youth, to their silence, their size, and everything they had survived. They named him honorary among them, and he took it as a challenge. Breka was the reason he survived long enough to keep trying.

Guardian of Prince Raeth

She served as the expedition's protector during the decade-long journey to verify the empire's relay grid beyond the inner ring. She stood a head taller than any man in the party and carried a rifle the length of a child without effort. She had deep-set brows, burnished copper skin, and dark wavy hair worn thick and unbound, and her voice carried like a chime struck in ice. Her smile was rare and disarming when it came. Her teeth were perfectly straight but large and strong, with canines that looked like they could tear through bone. The smile appeared only after something unsurvivable had been survived, or at random moments that nobody in the party could place or predict. Whether what crossed her face in those moments was joy or something closer to the anticipation of violence was never clear, especially from someone whose expression at every other moment was so absent that most people forgot she had one. The prince noted her smile more than once in his records, and the attention he gave to describing it, down to the way it changed the shape of her jaw and the weight it carried in her eyes, suggested he was watching more closely than the passage required.

Expedition

In regions that still held insurgents she involved herself directly against the prince's advice, fighting as if she had marched in the original conquests. During the Thazvaari combat games she advanced furthest of the entire party, throwing competitors from the fifth platform and plowing through several more on the sixth before her size became a liability in the upper tiers and she was struck midair. The rest of the expedition spent days recovering. Breka kept playing.

When pirates ambushed the party in Inland Thazvaar, she checked on the prince, nodded once, and ran into the fight without asking for orders or waiting for a plan. Once she knew Raeth was alive, she went to do what she existed to do. She insisted on visiting the corroded proving grounds of her ancestors in the passes, standing in places where the relay systems had been stripped to bare metal by centuries of frost and wind. She treated the visits as inspections. She wanted to see for herself what remained.