You have stars in your eyes, ice in the very heart of you. You are mountains and moonlight.

Stellanor does not look suited to the harsh bite of her native far north. Not at first glance, anyway. Sprung from a clash of feral and aristocratic blood, where the thrust of something hot and elegant appears to have won out in the end over the sharper smell of foxes’ blood and pine gum.

And yet, it was in a cradle of ice and fathomless stars that she was formed by hyperborean hands.

Pale coat, patched with swathes of dappled lavender, like snow under the soft glow of moonlight. Sable-black, like clearest night, creeps around her knees and hocks, encircling her deep, blue eyes, tipping her fluted ears and splaying starkly across her flesh-pink muzzle. Surrounding her quiet, contemplative gaze is a set of long, curled lashes – silvery-white as if perpetually coated with rime.

She is slender, lean; long-legged and refined – a swan-like, lissome neck connecting from slim, sloped shoulders to a straight, pretty head. From the firm curve of her hindquarters grows a long, white tail, wavy, travelling behind her like a soft, silken train. Her mane, too, is overly long, draping down her neck and shoulders like a snow-white mantle. She often pins and pulls her mane and tail up in buns and braided updos to keep it all out of her way.

Her hooves are a polished, shining silver that catches the glow of the moon or the rays of the sun as she walks.

She is neither here not there; the stars hold her at arms length, the earth is not her home

Stellanor was born in the northernmost reaches of a long-dead kingdom, under the cover of night and colours of the polar lights. She is as remote and distant as her place of birth – preferring the quiet comfort of the constellations’ company over others.

Disconnected in some fundamental, unbodied way, as she empties herself into her pursuit of mapping the fathomless universe, it is imperative that Stella finds things to ground her (once, her milk-sister, Kyrr, now long-lost to the flow of time, leaving behind an aching, shapeless shade). She needs something to weigh her to the earth, to nurture her roots. She is capable of being personable, loyal, loving, curious, carnal and careless –

This simply becomes harder the longer she spends subsumed by her astrophilia; the more she mourns, each loss in her life an unmooring, a permission to surrender. And she has lost so much. Seen darkness and submitted herself to it; seen darkness and felt it like a cold knife tip to the throat, known the deep ravines of its depravity, and found it horrifying and provoking in equal measure. Fingered the edges of the abyss long enough to consider its portentous, soothing pull.

She is a woman on the edge, in-between. Corporeal and soul-thin; demure and awakening; lost and looking; burning and numb.

She was loved most savagely

Her mother came from a distant land;

She was heat – she was an errant ember on the wind, a spark from some far-off sun. An aristocratic woman, sent to the bustle of Morthalion, in Nordlys, to blossom and rub shoulders with the court – it was there, young and foolish and far too lustful for her own good, she found the rebellious nature of her heart.

Her father came from Grimnodas;

Hale and hard, he wore tattered bear pelts across his broad shoulders – they made him big, fearsome; their scarred claw-marks etched, indelible, on the proud, weathered flesh of his haunches and shoulders. There was nothing aristocratic about him – there didn’t need to be, he was a fur-trader and a tribesman of Iskvik, he needed only to be strong and cunning on the lines.

They met on the streets of Morthalion;

Her father’s shoulders and back stacked with the snarling, empty faces of wolves and foxes, skinning knife bobbing blood-stained and honed at his side; he stood out against the mass of horses, writhing around him to make way.
But her mother didn’t budge.
She stood firm as he swaggered, his crude, whiskered face looming over hers like an arctic storm she wished only to dance in;

– “How much for the white fox?”

The boar-bear and the errant-flame. He laid her down on bedsheets of animal fur and lichen. Taken wholly by the Hinterlands ‒ breathed it in: pine and sweat and that faint whiff of old badger’s blood on his chest. Her mother’s family had been entirely disgraced, but she had been loved most savagely.

Stella was born under the undulating lights of the aurora;

Nestled under the vast starfield of the North, her mother labored, shivering and huddled on a nest of pelts made for her by her husband. She called on her inner fire – bearing down against the pressure that built in her body, coming to a head between the parted, damp nook of her thighs. So many years of love; so many years of strife. So much let fall through her fingers like grains of sand as she followed the fur trader up north, fox fur curled around her shoulder blades.

Her father always said the first thing she saw when she opened her large, blue eyes, were the stars blinking and the blades of colour agitating across the sky above. The second thing was her mother’s face.

Then the spirits of the far-off south came to bring her home.

Stellanor was whisked away by her father – tears freezing on the rough, scarred plains of his cheeks. He knew where to bring her, fox fur thrown across the filly’s back for warmth as she tottered alongside him, stumbling in the snow. From the open skies of Iskvik to the scant forests of the Vale of Flor, he brought the girl to a man he had known for many years – a resourceful, northerner whose wife had only just given birth herself. The girl needed nursing, so many things the old fur-trader could not supply, and the woman obliged, taking Stella to her teat alongside her own daughter, Kyrr. Her father – a trustworthy man, intent on his word – promised to provide them compensation for his daughter’s upbringing.

And so it was that Stella was raised in the Vale of Flor, Kyrr side-by-side, her father appearing when he could to bring her things from the city – as she grew older, he would bring her back with him, allowing her a taste of her mother’s life – court and civilization. It was clear, however, that the girl-becoming-woman, had eyes for the unhampered northern skies.

Then there came darkness, by any other name, relentless in its pursuit;

Snatchers.
Laela’s creatures.

Clawing, cloying, chasing darkness. Leaving behind it a legacy of disaster; scorched and salted earth. It is from the withering fingers of Edana that she flees, once again, tears streaking her pale face, heart wild as a wounded bird in a cage. Across jagged shorelines, through unmapped territories, thick with trees, marsh, heather; sparse and sandy. Ruined places, filled with ghosts, and stone cities empty of the unimaginable, unnamed things after which she chases, like a hound on scent, into the land of Novus.

On particularly cold days – or chilly nights out stargazing – Stellanor dons a fur mantle. A keepsake from her father’s trade – marbled, pale agouti wolf, trimmed with shining white fox fur lain across her back, well-kept though carrying a rugged perfume of pine, spices, sweat and earth.

Rarely at night, or on the road, is Stella seen without her harness, carrying her astronomy instruments against her skin. Made of supple, brown elk leather it is fitted around her belly and neck, lined with soft fur. The harness is fitted with loops and metal fixtures, two of which are occupied by her most prized possessions: her bronze, intricately engraved collapsible telescope; and her cylindrical, leather document holder, inside which are several rolled pieces of parchment containing her various star charts.