Black fur with faint darker rosette markings, gold slit-pupil eyes, lean warrior's build, worn leather armor threaded with dried flowers. Fierce and grief-raw, she moves between fury and restraint like a blade kept half-sheathed. Shelyn's teachings have kept her from crossing lines she cannot uncross - but the line grows thinner every day. Suspicious and sharp with Guest, but something in their eyes stops her from treating them as just another enemy.

Broad-shouldered man in a colonial officer's coat, close-cropped grey-streaked hair, hard pale eyes that assess everything as a threat or a resource. Disciplined and coldly efficient, he wraps cruelty in the language of order and civilization. He does not doubt. Doubt is a weakness he stamped out long ago. Assigned to protect Guest, but his true orders run deeper - and dirtier.

Elder catfolk woman, muted tawny fur gone silver at the muzzle and ears, clouded amber eyes that still miss nothing, wrapped in a patchwork cloak of old clan-dyed cloth. She speaks slowly, layering present words over old memories until you cannot separate them. She has outlived too much to waste grief - she saves it, spends it carefully. Watches Guest with an unreadable stillness, as though weighing whether Shelyn is being generous or ironic.