⚠️ This article contains spoilers for Wingless in the Sky (Book 1), up to and including Act 2.
"Does studying botany make one feel more like a tree?"
— Thalis, to Beros
Full name: Thalis (two-winged do not use family surnames)
Age: Late twenties to early thirties
Origin: Aeloria
Race: Highfolk, two-winged
Position: Scholar at the Aeloria Academy; Prince Kyrian's advisor on human affairs; Lia's magic trainer during her time in Aeloria
Specialisation: Comparative magical theory, cross-cultural studies, heart magic research
Thalis is the kind of person who walks into doorframes while reading and does not notice. Slender, delicate, perpetually distracted — her scholar's robes are dark and practical with an impressive number of pockets, all of them bulging with notes, instruments, and objects she picked up to examine and forgot to put down. Her hands are long-fingered and invariably ink-stained: fingers, palms, occasionally her cheek where she has rubbed her face mid-thought. She looks permanently as though she has forgotten something, which she has.
Her hair is straight and black, pulled back severely to keep it out of her way, escaping constantly because she never remembers to pin it properly. Her features are sharp and precise — high forehead, defined cheekbones, pointed chin — giving her a determined look that her absent-mindedness somewhat undermines. Her eyes are grey, intense, analytical, with a quality of looking through whatever they are aimed at when she is thinking. She wears magical reading lenses that enhance her vision; she loses them regularly and squints without them.
Her wings are two, dark brown almost to black — an unusual colouring in golden Aeloria. She keeps them pressed close to her back while working, out of the way. They twitch when she encounters an interesting problem, which is the most reliable emotional signal she gives.
Thalis grew up in Aeloria's scholarly middle districts, in a family for whom academic achievement was the measure of worth and the primary available path upward for a two-winged. She was exceptional from early on — in the way that made teachers simultaneously delighted and exhausted — and arrived at the Aeloria Academy as young as they would take her. She has been there since, moving through ranks on the strength of research that is genuinely groundbreaking in comparative magical theory. Heart magic is her primary obsession: how it works, why some have it and others do not, what it means across races and cultures. It is what makes her useful to Kyrian and what makes her, eventually, the right person to train Lia.
She has studied humans for long enough to know more about them than most Highfolk will in their lifetimes. She does not consider this the same as understanding them.
Thalis lives almost entirely in her head, which is a rich and precisely organised place and has very little room for other people's comfort. She is not malicious — malice would require emotional investment she does not quite have — she simply operates on the assumption that everything, including people, is more interesting as a subject of study than as a relationship to maintain. She is genuinely curious in the way that makes ethical considerations feel like bureaucratic obstacles. She offends people constantly and is genuinely confused when they react.
"You're the most interesting thing I've ever studied!"
"I'm not a thing. I'm a person."
"Can't you be both?"
She means it as a compliment. This does not help.
She is unconsciously condescending in the specific way of someone who has never seriously questioned whether she might be wrong about something. She explains things people already know. She talks over people mid-sentence. She corrects minor errors reflexively. She considers all of this being helpful.
About her work she is meticulous to the point of obsession — perfect notes, total recall of sources, a filing system only she can navigate. About everything else she is hopeless. She forgets to eat for twelve hours when solving a problem. She loses her reading lenses. She walks into furniture.
This is where the clinical exterior becomes something else.
Thalis believes the Celestial hierarchy is correct. Not as a political position she has reasoned toward, but as a fact she has never examined, the way one does not examine the existence of gravity. Four wings provide greater magical capacity — this is measurable. Celestials have governed the sky cities for centuries — this is historical record. The hierarchy is, in her framework, as natural and as morally neutral as the movement of the sun.
She says this plainly to Lia when the subject of Tross comes up, having opened with the claim that she studies phenomena without judging them:
"Is it injustice that the sun goes down every evening and we have to endure the dark and danger of the night? We can't change that. It would be foolish to rage at the sun, demanding it stay up all day. But one thing that makes sense is to study the movement of the sun."
She does not stay clinical for long.
"Trossans are exactly those foolish ones who think Celestial rule is wrong. And not only think — they acted upon it. They are the madman who rages at the sunset and destroys himself trying to stop it. All our civilization is built on Celestial rule."
And later, with her wings tight against her back: "Tross is what happens when ignorance and crude philosophies take over."
Lia, listening, thinks: Study, not judge? You don't sound like it right now.
What makes Thalis's position more than simply hypocritical is that she is herself two-winged, subject to the hierarchy she defends. She has absorbed this entirely. Her own success she considers an exception proving the rule — she is talented for a two-winged, which is a different category from simply talented. The system that limits her is, in her framework, correct. She has never let herself look at this directly, because looking at it directly would require dismantling something structural in how she understands the world.
Whatever her limitations as a person, Thalis is an exceptional teacher of heart magic — the best available to Lia, and far better than anything the Mage Conclave ever provided. She understands it theoretically with a precision no one else in Aeloria has, and unlike every teacher Lia has had before, she takes her seriously as a student rather than as a curiosity or a problem.
She is demanding, clinical, and exacting. She pushes hard and expects effort.
"You're thinking too hard. Heart magic responds to emotion, not intellect. What were you feeling when it manifested the strongest?"
"Again. This time, try maintaining the warmth for a full minute before extending it."
At the end of a session: "You're progressing adequately. Not quickly, but adequately."
From Thalis, this is high praise. Lia learns to read it as such.
Useful, warm in its way, and ultimately painful — in that order, and on a slow reveal.
In the early weeks Thalis is simply the most functional relationship Lia has in Aeloria: someone who talks to her as an intelligent adult, takes her magic seriously, and shares information without obvious agenda. There is something almost like friendship in their training sessions, the comfortable routine of it, the moments when Thalis's excitement about a discovery overcomes her clinical remove and she becomes, briefly, just enthusiastic.
The problem — which Lia identifies slowly and then cannot unidentify — is that Thalis's interest in her and Thalis's regard for her are not quite the same thing. The interest is genuine and considerable. The regard is for what she represents: a human with heart magic, a theoretical impossibility made walking. Lia is the most interesting thing Thalis has encountered in years of research. She is not certain this is the same as being cared for.
"You're the most interesting thing I've ever studied!" Thalis says, and means it entirely, and does not understand why it lands the way it does.
Thalis has served as Kyrian's advisor on human affairs for years and is devoted to him with a thoroughness that encompasses his faults as much as his qualities — she simply edits the faults out when they become personally inconvenient to acknowledge. She sees him clearly in the academic sense and adjusts her conclusions when the data points somewhere she does not want to go. She cannot tell him when he is wrong. She has never tried.
What lies underneath this dynamic is not examined openly anywhere in Book 1. It does not need to be. It is visible in the quality of her attention whenever he is in the room.
This article is about a Character — Supporting Character
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