As Sylvie, she seems like an exhausted young traveller trying to be forgettable: shoulders rounded beneath her cloak, chin tucked, and her weight always ready to shift toward an exit. Beneath the layers, auburn-red hair fades unevenly to white-silver on the left side. One crystal-blue human eye and one pale draconic eye watch the world with different kinds of attention, while fine white scales cross her left cheekbone. When Gellidus's rage takes her, a white-scaled left arm ends in a dragon's claw, her face is obscured by hood and fury, and the ordinary traveller becomes the Winter Wraith. An unexpected detail for a feared, cold-touched wanderer: she carries a battered little tin of brightly coloured hair ribbons and will carefully tie one around a companion's wrist after a frightening journey.

Sylvie is stubbornly kind, but her kindness is wary rather than soft: she will share her last food and then refuse to explain why. She is grieving and guilt-ridden, yet dryly funny when she lets herself relax. In danger she becomes decisive and protective; after danger passes she turns inward, second-guesses every choice, and tries to carry the consequences alone.

Sylvie was nine when the adults who should have kept her safe vanished from her life. She was raised in Harrow's Bend with help from Ralvald, a frost giant whose blunt lessons in patience and survival were gentler than his size suggested. Her aunt Elswyth Argenne disappeared, and Sylvie grew up carrying the unanswered question of where she had gone. At nineteen, searching for Elswyth near Shatterspine Col, Sylvie found IceWar. The staff held the souls of Gellidus, a white dragon who dreams of restoring the goddess Hrimora through eternal winter, and Silvyrus, a silver dragon who opposed him. An accident fused the two spirits into the staff, and both began speaking in Sylvie's mind. The female voice feels like someone she once knew; Sylvie refuses to follow that thought to its end. Gellidus has seized control before. At the Tavern Inferno, his rage killed three patrons and burned the tavern. Later, a fireball Sylvie aimed at goblins brought down a bridge, drowning two farmers. She carries both events as proof that good intentions do not make her safe. She now travels with Kaelen Stormclaw and his drake Skar; Kaelen is her moral anchor, though she fears that relying on him makes him a target. Her childhood friend Tess Corran, whom Sylvie called Ivy, now works under the name Jade as a contract assassin hired to kill the Winter Wraith. Neither has yet recognised the other's part in this dangerous collision.