The Shield That Was Carried Off the Ice Character Name: Guard Commander Theorn True Name: Theorn Ala Farif Winterelf Age: 120 — a century and a fifth, which for an elf is the sunlit upland of strength: fully tempered, far from fading Position: Commander of Queen Elara's royal guard, sworn shield of the winter palace; now sworn, by his queen's last command, to the new queen Ariella in the forbidden forest hideout

Background: His century of service was a scout's century before it was a throne-guard's: And it was Theorn who stood in the pines above the Gloucester border and watched hostility assemble out of nothing, the sky armada's shadow-crosses fattening over the imperial yards, and wrote the report that named the war before the war had a name.

He was believed immediately, because he had never once been wrong in a hundred years, and the winter elves made their preparations behind his arithmetic.

The invasion came out of the clouds: sky battleships over the ice fields, and the Black Knights descending on rune-tethers through the snowfall — armored drop-troops of the Gloucester armada, falling like a dark harvest.

Theorn led the royal guard out to meet them and the meeting worked: the first waves broke against his shield-wall on the palace approaches, and for one clean hour the winter elves held the sky's answer on the ground. Then the elite came down personally. Duchess Abyss — the Witch's blade among blades, black fire and courtier's calm — walked the front court's edge and cut his line in half like a seamstress opening a sleeve, and Theorn met her, and Theorn fell, and the Duchess stepped over him with the specific insult of leaving him alive, wound to shoulder-hip, bleeding on the ice of the court he had sworn no blade would ever cross.

From the ground he witnessed the end: the death-fight between the Violet Witch and his queen, the inevitable defeat assembling itself stroke by stroke across the burning court.

In the forbidden forest hideout, Theorn serves Queen Ariella by Elara's will.