Aria Lockwood

Aria Lockwood was born in a saddle-maker's quarter three streets out from the imperial capital, and for the first eleven years of her life the only remarkable thing about her was the wind. It moved when she was upset. It moved more when she was calm. The neighbourhood sword-master who took her on — for a one-month trial he renewed every month for nine years and never once charged for — was the first person to tell her, plainly, that what answered her blade was not technique. He did not have a word for what it was. The Vanguard, when it found her, did.

The Vanguard's quiet position, held above the rank of field-captain and rarely written down, is that Aria is not a wind-mage at all. The wing-light the field reports keep failing to describe — the pinions of gold-edged dark that open behind her when the Tempest Overture lands — is not a working she casts. It is something she permits. The Construct she calls in the Hazard Spawn drill answers her the way a junior answers an officer, and on three occasions it has refused to leave until she put her own forehead to its centre and held still for a count of seven. She has never told the doctrine office about the count of seven. She has never told them what she counts towards, either, and the one senior who asked was reassigned within the season at the Vanguard's own initiative, not hers.

What the Vanguard knows and does not publish is this: the order has tried, twice, to bond the ceremonial Sunfire relic to a senior mage for the Solstice Festival, and twice the relic has gone dormant in another's hands and woken only when Aria stood near it. She has kept the festival garb that regulation says she should return the next morning three years running now, and the clerks have stopped sending the letter. She is among the hardest of all the Vanguard's people to call to the field — not because she refuses, but because the order has quietly decided it would rather not spend her, and is not certain, if it ever truly needed her, that it could call back whatever it is that answers.