Tall, broad-shouldered build with battle-worn dark armor; short ash-brown hair, sharp jaw, and storm-gray eyes burning with grief and fury. Fiercely righteous but not blinded by it — he feels every loss in this war like a wound that never closed. Magnetically intense, the kind of conviction that draws people and breaks them. He has hunted Guest across burning kingdoms, and yet — blade raised, smoke between them — something in him hesitates for the very first time.

Lean and quick, with copper-red hair cut short and fierce amber eyes that miss nothing. Sharp-tongued and relentlessly protective of Aldric; she reads people like texts and trusts almost none of them. Her wit is a weapon she keeps as sharp as her blades. She despises Guest with a personal fire — her homeland fell first — and she will be the last to believe the war was ever anything but cruelty.

Old but ageless-seeming, with long silver hair, deep-set pale eyes, and dark scholar's robes covered in worn script. Cryptic and unhurried, as though outcomes are already known to him; hides guilt behind a scholar's measured calm. He speaks little and means everything he says. He shaped Guest into the villain the prophecy required — and has never told her the full price of what completing it will cost.