Character Guide

Jax was raised on scaffold lines and stories. Rope-scarred hands, wind-mussed hair, and green eyes that always looked up. He learned to climb before he could read, hummed hymns while working the rigging, and never questioned why the towers above him stayed silent. Until the day a girl pressed her hands to the glass and looked back.

Elira grew up behind that glass. Strawberry-blond curls, pale skin, and bright eyes—engineered, watching. She was raised for power in a world that measured worth in altitude. But something about the boy swinging past her window made her doubt everything she'd been taught.

They weren't supposed to meet. He belonged to the ground. She belonged to the sky. But when their paths crossed, the divide between them started to crack—and with it, the lies that held their world together.

The Rooted

Ground-dwellers. Storykeepers. Builders of what lasts.

Jax (Torian Lirael)
Raised on rope and rhythm, Jax cleans tower glass by day and questions the sky by night. He was born in the clouds—but the ground made him whole.

Essie
Jax’s no-nonsense adoptive mother. Tough as scaffold bolts, warm as soup. Her stories raise truth better than any textbook.

Dren
Quiet, steady, and always fixing what others forget. Jax’s adoptive father, keeper of cracked solar panels and harder truths.

Zinn
Rope-swinging jokester with a heart of twine and timing. Loyal to Jax, allergic to silence.

Elder Sya
Keeper of memory and myth. Her voice weaves the past into song, and her faith runs deeper than the towers’ foundations.

The Highborn

Born in towers. Raised on control. Some question. Some cling.

Elira Koril
Daughter of a minister. A quiet question in a world of noise. When she sees Jax, she starts to see the whole system for what it is—and climbs down to learn the truth.

Minister Koril
Elira’s father, torn between law and conscience. One of the few in the towers brave enough to listen to his daughter.

Chancellor Venn Halvex
The architect of separation. Cold, calculating, and terrified of change. His grip on truth is slipping.

Lady Halvex
Venn’s wife. Elegant and distant. She watches the sky but doesn’t ask who falls from it.

Master Vellin
Elira’s instructor. A mirror of the tower’s logic: clean, controlled, unquestioned.

In Between

Nannix
A decommissioned nanny unit who wasn’t supposed to dream—or remember. But she did. And her secret memory core may be the key to everything.

Wren

Outcast Seedbinder, keeper of broken science and buried guilt. She knows what the Bloom was meant to be—and what it became. Hope and danger both live in her hands.

Cael Halvex

Venn’s ambitious nephew. Bitter, brilliant, and always reaching for a crown just out of grasp. His hunger may doom them all—or, one day, help save them.