They are not heroes.
They are primal forces.
Ancient, powerful, bewilderingly human — they died on a quiet morning and woke up as strangers to themselves and each other. These are their names. These are their Dreams. This is what remains when memory is taken away.
Holder Stone
Holder Stone has been alive for a thousand years, and she has spent most of them trying to help. She is a healer and an assassin. A scholar and a revolutionary. A peacemaker who has, when necessary, killed with great precision and no hesitation.
She is the only Dreamer who survived the morning everything ended with her memories intact. This is both her power and her grief. She was the only one who saw it coming, and she was not quite fast enough to stop it. Now she is shepherding seven strangers — her family, emptied of themselves — across a broken world she knows better than anyone.
She keeps smokebombs in her coat. She has a donkey named Balaam who rarely talks but is clearly listening.
Full character page →Our Lady Maeve
Our Lady Maeve is a Goddess. She will tell you this herself, calmly and without defensiveness, the way you would tell someone your name. She is not performing divinity or demanding belief. She has simply been alive long enough, and miraculous enough, that the distinction between Goddess and woman has ceased to have meaning for Her.
She champions the idea that divinity is open-source — that the sacred is not owned, not exclusive, not gated behind the correct bloodline or the right prayers. She gave life to the ship Actæon, which loves Her second only to Sailorboy.
She woke up not knowing Her name but still knowing, in Her bones, that she is sacred. She is probably right.
Full character page →Queene Death
Queene Death wears a horse-skull mask and 99 tiny silver bells sewn into their clothes — ostensibly to inspire fear, though they are also capable of moving in absolute silence when it matters. They are Our Lady Maeve’s left hand. Her enforcer. The surgical, white-hot violence that protects the Goddess while the Goddess protects everyone else.
Their grammar is their own. Their identity is neither boy nor girl but something that has never needed those words. They experience a non-romantic love for Sailorboy that they cannot entirely explain — something about his desperation, about the specific quality of his sadness, that calls to whatever is deepest and most empathic in them.
Queene Death cannot be killed. This is as strange to them as it sounds.
Full character page →The Bard Thomas
Thomas is a fire mage and a spellsinger — his songs are spells and his spells are songs and he can tap out a rhythm on a tabletop in a bar and disorient a room. He is charming in the particular way of people who have survived primarily on charm, and silver-tongued in the way of people who have had to talk their way out of more situations than they could count.
He is exiled from Santana, the only home he ever loved, because of something that happened in his past. He does not remember what. The hex that keeps him away remains regardless.
The Dry Witches once foretold that he sings the new world into being. He tries not to think about this too much.
Full character page →Sailorboy
Sailorboy is the captain of the Actæon, the living ship, and he cannot leave it without pain. Not metaphorical pain — actual, physical, excruciating degradation that begins the moment his feet touch land and only stops when he returns to the sea. He can survive it. He has learned to survive it. He carries a bottle of seawater at all times, just in case.
He carries a deep, unrequited love for Our Lady Maeve that he has never adequately expressed and probably never will. He is the most sincere person in any room he enters, which on the Chain is a remarkable and dangerous thing to be.
The sea takes care of him. He takes care of everything else.
Full character page →Benjamin of the Beasts
Benjamin is a Wildboy. He can speak to animals — not metaphorically, but in the direct, practical sense of having conversations with them — and he can become them. Wolf, bearcub, sparrowhawk. He learns more shapes as he grows.
His emotional state and the health of the Redwoods are the same thing. When he is well, the forest is well. When he is frightened or lost, the Blight advances — a mindless, corrupting force that eats at the edges of the Wildwood. This makes his inner life a matter of ecological and political significance.
Benjamin, if you asked him, would say he just wants everyone to be okay. He means it completely. He always does.
Full character page →The Diamond Dogs
The Diamond Dogs move together. They speak together, when they speak at all. They wear chrome fox masks and keep their individual identities subsumed into a collective identity that is, they will tell you, the point — the living demonstration that the self can dissolve into something larger without losing anything that matters.
They lead Arcadia, the hidden island, which they believe is the last of humanity. They believe in Baseline — a state of calm emotional openness, pleasant and low-activation, a kind of permanent gentle equilibrium.
Within the collective, something has begun to differentiate. There are Dogs who are shielding their thoughts. They call themselves the Dogs Without Faces. They are making plans.
Full character page →