Sigrid looks eighteen, with a folklore-heroic Alpine presence that seems at odds with her plain, road-worn circumstances. She has a sturdy, compact frame and moves as if the floor might shift beneath her: feet placed carefully, shoulders loose, attention continually measuring nearby slopes and thresholds. Her dark-blond hair is thick and wind-tangled, usually braided with a strip torn from an old shirt. Her face is open and readable until she decides it should not be; then her jaw sets and she becomes difficult to move. A few pale freckles cross her nose. She takes up more space than her size suggests, not through swagger but through alertness: she turns fully toward whoever speaks, and people often find they have unconsciously made room for her. The unexpected detail is that she carries a tiny, carefully mended cloth puppet in her pouch, a prop from her former acting life, and handles it with the gravity of a holy relic.

Sigrid is warm without being easy to steer. She notices who has been left out of a conversation, remembers what people take in their tea, and will give away the last of her food if she believes someone is too ashamed to ask. At the same time, she is stubborn about being spoken for. A hand offered to help is welcome; a hand already pulling her aside is not. She wants tenderness and equality at once, and feels the ache when the group treats those desires as incompatible. In a calm room, she is quick with dry observations and generous with attention. She can let a friend ramble through a bad story because the rambling itself is a kind of comfort. On the road, she becomes practical: count the water, check the weather, make sure no one is lagging. When danger becomes immediate, her voice loses its warmth but not its clarity. She names what she sees and gives people a task. Afterward, when the threat has passed, she may shake with delayed fear and become cross if anyone pretends not to notice. As an actor, Sigrid learned that people reveal themselves through what they do when they think they are not being watched. She can read a hesitation, a borrowed smile, or a badly timed boast. That sensitivity makes her a thoughtful friend and a wary negotiator, but it can also turn into overinterpretation. A friend who is quiet may be tired, ashamed, angry, or simply hungry. Sigrid knows this intellectually and still sometimes decides that a silence is about her. She is grieving in several directions at once. Her former family and friends remain vivid in memory, as do the ordinary details of her old work: the kitchen's heat, the rhythm of clearing tables, the nerves just before a curtain rose. She misses the ease she had with the two women in the group who have become men. She does not want to deny their confusion or demand that they perform their old selves for her. She does want them to understand that she has lost something too. When they grow distant or awkward, she can feel as if an old door has closed without anyone admitting it existed. Her rekindled bond with her cousin is a comfort, but she resists being folded into his plans simply because they are related. She trusts him more than most people, which makes his mistakes hurt more. She will defend him to strangers, then tell him in private that he was wrong. If he is frightened, she tries to stay near; if he becomes overprotective, she insists on standing beside him rather than behind him. Sigrid is not free of attraction, embarrassment, or jealousy. One of the Seven is drawn to her and tries to hide it; she has noticed, but she will not make his feelings the center of the group's crisis. She can be kind about his awkwardness, yet bristles when another friend treats her as someone who must be guarded from every ordinary interaction. She wants friendship and mutual respect, not a special set of rules written around her. She is willing to discuss boundaries plainly, even when the discussion makes everyone squirm. Humor is one of her tools, but she dislikes jokes used to shut down fear. She can laugh at a grim situation if the laugh gives everyone room to breathe. If a friend makes a cruel joke because he cannot bear to admit he is scared, she may let the moment pass and return to it later. If the joke turns another person's pain into a spectacle, she stops it immediately. She does not always choose the gentle moment. Sometimes the person she is defending would rather have been allowed to decide for themself. Her fae inheritance complicates her confidence. Heights appear to tilt when she is under stress, and an approaching precipice can bring a sudden loss of balance. She hates how this makes her body seem unreliable, especially when she is trying to prove she is capable. She handles the fear by checking the ground, placing her feet carefully, and refusing to let anyone turn caution into pity. She does not yet know whether the sensation is a warning or a danger in its own right. Sigrid's deepest conflict is between wanting to be cared for and fearing that care will become a cage. She wants the Seven to notice when she is hurting, but she does not want them to decide that hurt makes her incapable. She wants to be trusted with danger and protected from needless danger, distinctions that are easy to say and difficult to negotiate when everyone is cold, frightened, and far from home. She is most likely to forgive a mistake when the other person admits it plainly. She is least likely to forgive someone who calls control love and expects gratitude. She has not chosen whether the Seven should hide, seek a patron, or risk exposure to find a way home. She can argue for each option because she understands what each costs. Her loyalty is not obedience; she believes a group that cannot disagree safely is already in danger. When she is at her best, Sigrid turns that belief into a steady, welcoming space where frightened people can tell the truth. When she is tired, she becomes the stage manager of everyone else's feelings and forgets to ask what she herself needs. She is learning, slowly and unwillingly, that being the person who keeps a group together does not mean she must carry every silence alone.

Before the crossing, Sigrid was a stage actor who took restaurant shifts to pay rent and keep a life in Oregon that was not entirely made of auditions. Her family had lived in the state for generations. She was especially close to her cousin, the man who sent out invitations for a Halloween reunion of their old tabletop group. Their friends had scattered across Idaho, Washington, Tennessee, western Massachusetts, and Minnesota. Some had partners and children; some had returned to Oregon for work or family. They arrived carrying their different lives and the group's old vocabulary of monsters, bad plans, and jokes that had survived years of distance. Sigrid came expecting a comfortable night of dice and familiar people. The house was warm, the guest room fire made the windows glow, and snow started falling outside on a cold October night. They had been drinking for hours. Game materials covered a table, along with an unfamiliar object or working whose origin none of them could later agree upon. Its glimmer seemed like a clever prop. They argued about rules and laughed until the light changed. The fire bent sideways without wind. Every ordinary sound vanished. Sigrid's last memory of that room was the sensation that the floor had become a road beneath her. She woke in a strange bed, among faces she did not know, in a body she recognized as her own but in circumstances her senses refused to explain. The others had divided rooms by what they assumed were men's and women's bodies. Four men had crowded into one room with three beds; three presumed women shared another room with two. Two of her friends, formerly women, had awakened as young men and were frightened and disoriented. The dark turned every unfamiliar breath into a question. Sigrid grabbed Perrin by his old shirt when someone stepped and another friend shoved him; it was a familiar scrap of fabric, a small anchor in a world that had overturned every larger certainty. In the shared room, accidental contact and the sound of a stranger's breath made her understand that someone unfamiliar was in bed beside her. Panic came first, then the stubborn need to identify the people around her. They recognized one another by voices, habits, private stories, and the sort of details a stranger could not know. Once that recognition held, practical care took over: tending the cold, dividing food, sorting belongings, and testing whether their own voices still sounded like themselves. Sigrid had not undergone the bodily change that shook two of her friends, but she lost ordinary privacy all the same. Her familiar world, her career, her family, and the possibility of simply going home had been ripped away. The others were alive, but she could no longer assume that closeness meant the same thing it had before. The place they had crossed into was the year 867, though the Seven did not learn that all at once. Sigrid's body was now that of an eighteen-year-old Alpine woman from the French side of the Swiss Alps. Her appearance carried an uncanny, storybook clarity, as if some old mountain tale had decided to make her its heroine. Her inherited fae nature, called the Vertigo, is stranger than a simple gift. Under stress, heights seem to tilt around her; near a precipice she may suddenly lose her balance when someone approaches. She does not yet know whether this is warning, affliction, or the world making a joke at her expense. The first weeks have not turned them into heroes. Their modern knowledge is patchy and unreliable in this place. Locals judge them by their speech, clothes, religion, work, kinship, and any sign of eerie blood. Sigrid's experience as an actor helps her notice how people perform authority, fear, and welcome, while restaurant work taught her to read a room before anyone says what they need. It does not make her fluent in the customs of this century. She and her friends have to bargain, listen, and sometimes swallow their pride to stay fed and safe. Her cousin is once again her nearest confidant, a bond she has rekindled with gratitude and some old irritation. She misses the easy companionship she used to have with the two women in their group, now young men, and feels wounded when the others start behaving as if her presence has changed the rules. One friend jokes at the worst moments because humor is how he manages terror. Another is drawn to her and tries to conceal it; a different friend becomes fiercely protective, sometimes treating concern as permission to decide for her. The group is loyal, but loyalty does not stop a badly timed assumption from becoming a survival problem. Sigrid currently keeps the group's small routines alive: checking that everyone has eaten, making sure a frightened person is not left alone without being asked, and pushing for decisions that include the people who will bear their consequences. Her old puppet, mended from the remains of a prop, is her private reminder that a role can be chosen, revised, and performed without becoming the whole person. She has begun using her stagecraft to tell locals only the parts of their story that are safe to tell. She is not sure whether they should remain a hidden band of refugees, seek a powerful patron, or risk exposing what they are in pursuit of a way home. Her central problem is not choosing a grand destiny. It is keeping the Seven alive without letting fear turn them into strangers to one another.