Seraphine, an elven noble with a courtly smile, guards a secret older than her house. Her family’s shadowed colonnade was built to imprison a fallen “star” that was really a thinking hunger. When the seal began to crack, she bargained with an eclipse-borne Archfey: power to stitch the wards shut, in exchange for beautiful debts.

Now she travels to recover lost star-maps and ward-stones, calmly dangerous, always courteous. Her midnight velvet-satin gown is the lock’s living diagram, constellations and orbit-lines embroidered in gold. A faint crescent sigil hovers at her collarbone when she channels pact magic, and a moon-silver pact blade blooms into her hand like cold light.