The Guardian

Tharyn'Breka Kael was a Frost Sentinel of Northern Pass descent and the childhood friend and protector of Prince Ashan'Raeth Vareth. She stood a head taller than any man in the expedition party and carried a rifle the length of a child without effort. Deep-set brows, burnished copper skin, dark wavy hair worn thick and unbound. 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 itself 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.

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. Their silence, their scale, the weight of what they had once endured. They named him honorary among them. He took it as a challenge. Breka was the reason he survived long enough to keep trying.

The Expedition

She served as the expedition's protector during the decade-long journey to verify the empire's relay grid beyond the inner ring. 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. She did not ask for orders. She did not wait for a plan. She assessed that Raeth was alive and then 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. These were not pilgrimages of grief. They were inspections. She wanted to see for herself what remained.