Description
High Magister Selene Anvari is a slender woman in her early forties, in her third year on the council and the Lyceum's ranking historian. She wears Magister robes of deep midnight blue, the cut conservative, but the lining is patterned in faint gold script — the long memorial inscription of the imperial era, embroidered by her own hand across the four years she sat the Senate Trial before passing on her final attempt. Few people in the city can read it, and she has never told anyone what it says.
Her hair is dark and long, usually pinned up with a pair of stylus-pins; her eyes are a startling pale grey that catches lamplight strangely. She is rarely seen without an open book, a closed book, or both.
Role
Anvari is the only sitting Magister with a primary academic appointment. She holds the Lyceum's chair of Imperial History and Pre-Fall Continuity — the chair concerned with what Khalad was before the catastrophe of Year ~55 SC. Her portfolio on the council is scholarship: Lyceum policy, the Senate's continuity archive, and the small handful of Magisterial decisions that touch on relics and inherited artifacts.
She is well-respected by the Lyceum and politely tolerated by the Senate, who consider her impractical until the moment they need her, at which point they consult her urgently and forget her again.
Personality
Anvari is patient, exact, and quietly stubborn. She speaks slowly when she is being careful and quickly when she is being honest, which is a tell most of her colleagues have never noticed. She loves her field with an unembarrassed intensity and gets visibly excited about textual minutiae no one else in the room cares about.
She is kind, in a distracted way. She is not at all naive.
Story
The party first crossed paths with Anvari in Session 42 - The Diviner's Bluff — she stopped them in the halls of Shahzir's Library and asked who they were. They bluffed past her with Lirielle posing as a Senatorial Diviner, then watched her descend ahead of them into the Oasis Vault later that day.
In Session 43 - The Empty Chest, they realized the "Anvari" who had passed them in the vault corridor had never been Anvari at all — Mira had been wearing her face.