⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"Pastries? That's what I love doing — to make and to eat. Art for the sake of art, you know? But my real work is trade. Chief human trader in Aeloria, actually. Food, goods, materials — if it comes up from the Empire, it probably goes through me or my partners."
— Jovan
Full name: Jovan Jovandi
Origin: Lunara
Position: Chief human merchant in Aeloria; primary food and goods trader between the Midland Empire and the sky cities
Family: Separated from Jerra (Lunara); father of Romalina (Romi)
Flour-dusted hands that are also ink-stained — the detail Lia notices when she first watches him prepare tea with practiced efficiency. A man who bakes for pleasure and runs businesses for a living, and looks like both. Warm, solid, comfortable in his own space. He moves through his home and his stall with the ease of someone who built both himself and does not need to perform anything for anyone.
His sitting room says everything: real human chairs in dark imported wood, Lunaran rugs, maps and trade ledgers stacked on shelves, a painting of a harbor on the wall. "I am from down there. I remember where I came from."
Jovan came up from Lunara on trade routes and stayed. He has spent years building the most significant human commercial operation in Aeloria — food, wine, basic goods moving up from the Empire; enchanted tools, sky-metal, and magical artifacts moving down. His network reaches across the human community in the sky cities and deep into the merchant guilds of the Empire. If it comes up from below, it probably goes through him or his partners.
He is not particularly reverent of authority. He has enough leverage — "the man who supplies half their food" — to speak plainly to people who outrank him, and he knows it. He uses this carefully and without drama.
The bakery is a separate thing entirely. He bakes because he enjoys it. The pastries are, by general consensus including Beros's, the best in Aeloria. Even Celestials buy them, though they pretend they are doing him a favor. "Their money spends the same as anyone's," Jovan says, cheerfully and without bitterness.
Warm, practical, generous with hospitality, and quietly very well-informed. He treats Lia as a person from their first meeting — welcomes her into his home, feeds her, talks to her as an intelligent adult — and this costs him nothing because it is simply how he operates. He has no interest in Highfolk hierarchies beyond understanding them well enough to navigate them.
He is also one of the sharpest analysts of sky politics that Lia encounters. When she asks about food supply — a question most people in Aeloria apparently never think to ask — he lights up:
"Wings or not, every person has a stomach. And stomachs need feeding three times a day. Those hanging gardens you see everywhere? They produce some fruit — delicate things that grow well in open air and sunlight. Beautiful, sure, but they can't feed a city."
He explains the entire structure: hunting is dangerous and unpredictable, magic is inefficient and expensive, and honest bread and mutton beats both. Which is why Aeloria trades with the Empire, and why Zelos — too proud to deal with the wingless — buys the same goods through the Trading Guild at double price from Aelorian middlemen. "Whatever nonsense you believe in, you still have to eat and build."
He warns Lia about House Emporios without ceremony: "Money and no mercy. Stay out of their way."
He manages Romi — "You will land us in jail, talking like that" — with a combination of mild exasperation and obvious delight. He is not truly alarmed. He knows his daughter.
Jovan is not only a merchant. He is the informal anchor of the human community in Aeloria — the person people turn to, the one who knows where everyone is and what they need. When the crisis comes and Kyrian sends word to evacuate, it is Jovan who organizes the impossible: directing families to the harbor, getting the elderly onto carts, keeping hundreds of people moving without panic. His people. His community.
He sends Romi to her mother in Lunara and stays behind himself. "Will what? Hurt the man who supplies half their food?" He arranges protection under the King's orders for key merchants and moves his most precious goods into the palace hold for safekeeping. He grins about finally getting to see the palace from the inside. He tells Romi he always lands on his feet.
Whether this is entirely true remains to be seen.
Protective from early on, in a practical rather than sentimental way. He checks that she is alright. He feeds her. He tells her things she needs to know. When she leaves his stall for the first time: "Come back anytime! Bring an appetite!" He means it, and she comes back.
By the end, when Lia sends her last message through Beros — "Tell Jovan I'm sorry" — and watches the evacuation from a distance, the weight of it lands: "If they ever came back, she would find Jovan first. Before anything else."
This article is about a Character — Supporting Character
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| Race | Human · The Three Races |
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