Mira Roehart

The sea had always sung to Mira Roehart. Five years after the Silence dropped its curtain over the world, she leans on the moss-softened railing of Rivenglade's pier and watches the refugees of fallen Solara and battered Atheria stumble ashore — and then watches something else arrive in the pause between breaths: Lucien Altheris, robed in white and gold, speaking not of gods but of God. Where the town hears salvation, Mira hears an extreme trading places with an extreme, and her heart stays "stubbornly resistant, a rebellious flicker against Zenith's consuming light."

She has always been other. Violet eyes "the rare hue of twilight skies bruised with coming darkness" mark her out in a town where she never learned the rules — the wrong words, the wrong clothes, the wrong presence. She was raised alone by her father, Elias, on a childhood of Wild God stories, offerings left in hidden glades and flower crowns woven for the nymphs, and on a mother she never knew, about whom Elias will say only that "she's not like us… She walks a different path — a path we can never follow." She sings a lullaby she cannot remember learning — The river weeps, the mountains sigh — and does not know where it came from.

Her story in The Chosen is the story of a cage built one kindness at a time: a friend's conditional love, a father's conversion, a Baptism she never wanted, a marriage she never chose. What was meant to erase her instead recoiled from her, because something ancient in her blood does not belong to the Light. When at last she stands above the pool beneath the Whispering Falls with a stolen dagger in her hand, it is the void — not the Light — that answers her.

Mira is fiery, blunt and inward-turning by turns — a daydreamer who slips out of sermons into imagined forests, a swimmer who strips and leaps from the top of a waterfall with a triumphant scream, a young woman who wants desperately to belong and cannot make herself into the shape belonging demands. Even at the altar she finds a way to say no inside a yes, vowing to give herself "as the dawn yields to the day" while knowing the dawn does not choose to yield.

Mira's power is not learned; it is uncovered. It sleeps in "her blood and bone—something not human" until Zenith's Light tries to rewrite her and strikes a wall "not built by will, but by nature." The Nimwe of the Rivenglade woods — creatures of the void, cat-eared and violet-eyed, who "walk between worlds" — know her by name before she knows herself. They call her little starling.

The Chosen is a slow closing of walls, then a single crack of light. Each step below is a chapter of the published book; the last is where the public chapters of The Forsaken leave her.

Everyone Mira loved was taken or turned; everyone who shelters her wants something. The bonds below are as they stand at the end of The Forsaken's public chapters — the roads to the Verdant Veil, and to the people waiting there, lie beyond them.