⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"Four wings, two wings, no wings — we all bleed red."
— Beros
"You know what I love humans for? They invented BEER! And they're the race making it! Dratted barley and hops can't grow in our hanging gardens. We must defend Midfolk at all costs, or we'll have to be sober all the time!"
— Beros
Full name: Beros (two-winged do not use family surnames)
Age: Early to mid-thirties
Origin: Lower districts, Aeloria
Race: Highfolk, two-winged
Position: Captain of Prince Kyrian's personal guard
Background: War veteran of the Zelos conflict; former merchant caravan guard
Burly by Highfolk standards, which is saying something. Wide-chested, muscular, built more like a tavern brawler than the lean, elegant soldiers of the palace guard. He moves with a soldier's economy — purposeful, always aware of the room, always noting the exits — and carries himself with a comfort in his own body that has nothing to do with aristocratic confidence and everything to do with having long since stopped caring about appearances.
His face is weathered, looks older than his years. Laugh lines around the eyes from smiling more than most veterans do. His wings are tawny brown, short, scruffy-feathered — kept clean enough for flight, not for show. The left one carries visible scar tissue from the Zelos war, a magical fire burn that healed imperfectly and left some feathers that never grew back. It affects his flight slightly, a gentle list to the right that he compensates for automatically after years of practice. He makes jokes about it before anyone else can.
His voice is deep and husky, working-class Aeloria accent, drops letters, uses contractions. He greets people with "Hey there" — an ambiguous casualness that can read as friendly or patronising depending on your perspective, and he is aware of both readings.
Beros was born in Aeloria's edge districts — the parts of the city furthest from the Core, where the stabilising magic thins, buildings lean into the wind, and the whole platform tilts and sways in ways the palace quarter never does. two-winged Highfolk work themselves through lives that the city's golden towers were not built with in mind. His family were labourers and craftspeople; he was raised understanding that Celestials matter and two-wings serve, and that the best available option for a two-winged boy with limited prospects was the military.
He enlisted at eighteen. He was a natural: strong, fearless, quick, popular with fellow soldiers. He rose to sergeant within a few years, and life made sense in the way it sometimes does in armies — clear hierarchy, defined purpose, people who would die for you and you for them.
Then came the Zelos war. Five years of aerial combat, burning ships, boarding actions, and friends dying in ways he does not talk about willingly. When it ended he found himself with a scarred wing, a head full of things he hadn't asked for, and work that was suddenly scarce. He spent the following years on merchant caravan ships — the pudgy Highfolk vessels that haul food and goods between the surface and the sky realms — working as a guard alongside human merchants, fighting off aerial predators and the occasional band of exiles-turned-pirates. He had human comrades. Some of them died.
"For my money — four wings, two wings, no wings — we all bleed red."
Kyrian found him at the Aeloria docks one day, recognised his face from the war, and offered him the captaincy of the prince's personal guard. Beros took it.
The joker first, and everything else underneath.
Beros deploys humour with the efficiency of a man who has learned it is the most reliable tool available. He is warm, direct, and entirely without the reflex deference toward rank that most of Aeloria considers basic courtesy. When he meets Lia on the voyage to Aeloria, wrapped in canvas against the cold because the Highfolk around her didn't think to prepare blankets, he chides the scholar Thalis without ceremony and keeps Lia talking until the warmth comes back to her fingers. He treats her as a person from the first encounter, which she notices because it is not the norm. The same ease extends to Thalis, though with rather different results — when the scholar responds to Beros's mild reproach with clinical indifference, he considers this for a moment and delivers his verdict: "I can't wait till you get married, scholar. Your husband will make one hell of a drinking buddy." Thalis does not dignify this with a response. Beros is unbothered.
He is also the kind of man who says what he actually thinks to people who have authority over him, which in Aeloria takes a particular kind of nerve. After the Tesseon beating, when the rest of the court is navigating carefully around Kyrian, Beros finds him in the training yard and says it plainly:
"You crossed a line. I've served you for years. Followed your orders. Defended your decisions. But this…"
And later: "I'd die for you. You know that. I've proven it. But I won't become a monster for you. And I can't watch you become one either."
Then he walks away. The relationship survives it. Both the walking away and the surviving are characteristic.
He loves proverbs — collects them, invents them, attributes invented ones to his old sergeant or his mother with equal confidence. He will eat almost anything in significant quantities. He considers beer one of humanity's more significant contributions to civilisation. He naps whenever he can, a military habit he has never entirely lost.
What he wants, though he would not phrase it this way, is a small house and a normal life. He has concluded this is not available while Kyrian needs a guard captain, and he stays anyway. Some loyalties are not entirely rational.
One of Beros's distinctions is that he moves through Aeloria with knowledge Lia doesn't have — the knowledge of someone born in the edge districts, who knows where the golden towers end and the city's edges begin.
When Lia remarks on the beauty of the city, it is Beros who takes her to the human quarter. He knows the turns. He knows Jovan the baker. He knows which corridors to avoid and why. When a conversation about hired assassins leads Lia to wonder how desperation can exist in such a gleaming place, he explains:
"You live in the palace, Miss Lia. You see the pretty parts. The golden towers, the fancy markets, the nobles with their perfect wings and perfect lives." He gestures toward the window. "But there are plenty of less gorgeous places around here. Especially on the edges of the city where it rocks in the wind and the tilt is worst. Where the old buildings lean and the Core's magic doesn't reach quite as far."
"Strange as it may sound to a human, there are poor Highfolk. Lost ones. Some are war veterans. Came back from Zelos with injuries, with nightmares, with nothing to their names. I got lucky — found work on a human merchant ship for a while, kept my head down, kept my sword sharp. Then Prince Kyrian noticed me one day at the docks."
His voice softens slightly.
"But not everyone is so lucky. Some folk need coin too badly. When a middleman shows up offering more money than they'd see in a year, for one hour's work? They don't ask questions. Can't afford to."
Complicated, functional, and genuine, roughly in that order. Beros served under Kyrian in the war before he served as his guard, which gives the dynamic a different texture than the usual prince-and-retainer arrangement. He is loyal — demonstrably, provably — and he is also capable of telling Kyrian to his face that he has done something indefensible. This is rarer than it sounds in a court built on deference.
Kyrian, for his part, laughs at Beros's jokes, which is one of the few places in the novel where he laughs at anything. "That's what I keep you around for. To distract me with your tomfoolery on long voyages." There is affection in it. There is also, between the lines, something closer to reliance than Kyrian would be comfortable admitting.
Older-brother energy from their first meeting, and one of the things that keeps Aeloria survivable for her. He brings her food, gives her warnings, explains things the palace would not bother to explain. He also — not quite accidentally — plants the seed she cannot stop thinking about: that whatever Kyrian is on the surface, he is something else when things get difficult, and the something else is worth knowing.
"Don't mind the words. We all love 'im, and you might too someday, if you spend enough time up there. I served under Kyrian in the war. He's sharp around the edges, but when things get hairy, he's a rock you can lean on."
She files this away. She returns to it more than once.
This article is about a Character — Supporting Character
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