Esphyr

Esphyr The Nightborn takes their place in the story. She was born Aiyana, in the village of Sivilan, to a father the village called a creature of the night and a mother the village called beautiful, and for a time that was enough. No record names what her father truly was, only what the village believed him to be: something that drank blood and passed that thirst on in the blood itself. Her mother did not survive long. Whether her father was the cause of it, Aiyana held as certain, and that certainty hollowed her out in ways that hunger alone could not. She was a child when Sivilan decided it had kept her long enough. The village pushed her out, frightened of what her nature might mean for them, and she cannot have blamed them entirely, for the thirst was real and she did not always win against it. In the years that followed she turned on people who came too close, and she knows it, and she does not dress it otherwise. She was dull, she will tell you. Empty, even. The Reset found her somewhere outside any wall she had ever known. What it took from her, she cannot name, because she cannot remember what she had. What it left her with was a quieter version of herself: the surges still come, and she keeps them hidden with the care of someone who has learned what happens when she does not, but the emptiness is less, and she does not turn on every stranger now. She has kept certain tastes across whatever the Reset erased. Cats find her without being called. She is drawn to the craft folk call witchcraft, to the study of the undead, to the particular comfort of sleep, and to blood in ways she does not always care to explain. She does not offer Aiyana to anyone now. The name she carries is Esphyr, and she decided that herself, which is more than most can say about the names they were given.