Description

High Magister Vanya Eshthar is a small, sharp-faced woman in her early thirties, in her first year on the council and the youngest sitting Magister in two centuries. She wears Magister robes in pale slate with white inner sleeves, the cut precise, every fold ironed; she does not look as if she sleeps in the same century as the rest of her colleagues.

Her hair is black and severely short, cropped at the jaw. Her eyes are the same pale grey as Selene Anvari's (they are, in fact, distantly related, a fact Vanya does not advertise) and they unsettle people who notice. She wears a single silver chain at her throat, threaded through a small unworked piece of starmetal.

Role

Eshthar is the prodigy. She entered the Lyceum at twelve — three years younger than the typical admitted student — and won her Senate seat at her very first Trial in year seven, the earliest a student is permitted to sit. She is one of perhaps a dozen students in two centuries to have won a seat on a first attempt. She then sat in the Senate for eleven years before standing for Magister. Her field is divination — formally, the Lyceum's chair of Practical Augury and Threshold Magic, the discipline that built the city's Dome of Hiding and the oathband scrying network.

Her Magister portfolio is technical: dome maintenance, scrying network oversight, Lyceum admissions reform. She has been on the council for four months. She has already proposed three reforms and won one of them, which is unprecedented.

Personality

Eshthar is brilliant, ambitious, and not particularly warm. She does not waste words and does not appear to enjoy small talk; in council she is brief, exact, and difficult to interrupt. She has not yet learned to lose an argument gracefully, and her colleagues have noticed.

She is not cruel. She is single-minded, in a way that some of her elders find magnificent and others find alarming.