Captain Maelis Thorn is a weather-beaten human woman with the compact, balanced posture of someone who has slept in armor more often than in a bed. Her face is narrow and sharply composed, with a pale scar running from the left corner of her mouth to her jaw. Her skin has the ruddy bronze of a lifelong coastal soldier, but faint silver lines shimmer beneath it whenever the Seventh Nexus destabilizes. Her iron-gray hair is braided into seven tight cords, each tied with a different colored thread representing a lost unit. She moves with economical precision, never wasting a step, yet her left hand constantly trembles when she believes no one is watching. The contradiction is striking: she looks like an unbreakable fortress, but she carries a child’s cracked porcelain bird in the breast pocket of her uniform.