In her fae mien, Louise has the arresting, otherworldly beauty of the sidhe, sharpened rather than softened by a warrior's life. Her blue-grey eyes catch light like rain on slate, and pointed ears emerge through her dark, tightly braided hair. Her skin is olive-toned, with a fine, dry texture like sun-warmed stone. She stands straight but never rigid, shifting her weight with the economical balance of someone always measuring a room for exits and threats. Her mail and travel leathers are scuffed, oiled, and carefully maintained. Unexpectedly, she carries a tiny folding paper theater in her breast pocket and repairs its painted scenery when she is alone.

Louise is brutal when a threat leaves no room for hesitation, yet tender in the slow, unshowy work of keeping someone alive. She values independence but keeps taking responsibility for people who have not asked her to. In a calm room she can be wry and unexpectedly patient; when a vulnerable person is endangered, patience gives way to decisive, sometimes excessive force. She wants trust but has built her life around making sure nobody can surprise her.

Louise Sarne de Scathach was born in northern Italy and grew up between the demands of ordinary family life and a bloodline whose fae inheritance pressed insistently at the edges of the world. She has a younger brother in her human life, whom she loves fiercely and protects by keeping him at a distance from the supernatural. Her Chrysalis did not make her gentle; it gave names and faces to forces she had already learned to fear. The experience that shaped her most came later, when a frightened young changeling's uncontrolled choices helped send a man falling to his death. Louise tracked the raven-born pooka from the Tower of London and brought him to a freehold lodge, not to punish him but to make him face what he had done and learn how not to do it again. She now takes payment from the freehold to watch for Unseelie threats and rival supernatural factions, a job she treats as a promise rather than a contract. She is still in contact with her brother, though her excuses for missed visits are wearing thin. Her current trouble is that the freehold expects her to be both its sword and its conscience, while the pooka's presence keeps reopening the question of whether protection without trust is only another kind of cage.