Dramatis Personae

Mererid verch Tangwystyl

Mererid is a wolf-clothed, someone whose soul can leave her human body in the form of a wolf while her human body sleeps. She hails from a matriarchal community of wolf-clothed in the Brecheliant Greenwood, making her living by hunting, fishing, and foraging. Her family is content to stay in their village, but there’s an entire world beyond the forest, and she wants to feel like she belongs to all of it, to take her love for her family's old stories and ancient legends and to see the places in them for herself. Mererid is intense, earnest, often quiet, and possessed of a deeply romantic temperament.

Eleyn of Ban Gwyn

As a young girl, Eleyn was found adrift as the only survivor of the flood that destroyed her home, Maes Gwyddneu. The only thing she remembers is the face of a woman with long golden hair and sorrow in her eyes. As a youth, she convinced her foster parents to send her to train as a bard at Gwenffrewi College, a women’s college in Aberddraig University, rather than arranging a marriage for her. Eleyn is mystically-minded, passionately idealistic, and believes in learning from history to guide the future.

Orphne Lydina

Orphne was born to a wolf-clothed family in the far-away Ilian Basilearchy, and might have lived an unhappy life as a purported younger son had she not displayed a remarkable talent for magic from an early age. She was apprenticed to a Cantreviad sorceress who not only nurtured her talents but helped her blossom into the young woman she truly was. Now attached to Gwenffrewi College, Orphne is self-possessed, supremely confident in her abilities, intellectually curious, altruistic, and fiercely loyal to those she loves.