Aelara moves like someone who learned to fight on slippery decks and in narrow stairwells: compact, deliberate steps, hips squared, shoulders ready. She wears battered chain over a threadbare blue tunic, the metal scored in a thousand small gouges like seashell ridges. Her left forearm bears a pale crescent of old burn scar, and a thin silver circlet of hair—one braid threaded with a strip of weathered lighthouse canvas—falls down her shoulder and smells faintly of salt. Her shield is polished to a mirror finish only in the center; the rim remains dulled by sea-spray. Unexpectedly, pinned over her heart to the breastplate is a child's ribbon, a faded ribbon of red that shifts the whole expression of her armor from sternly martial to quietly tender.