Rides the Wake carries herself like someone accustomed to moving through rough water — patient in stillness, overwhelming in motion.
She is not reckless in the way people imagine barbarians to be. There is a current of deliberate purpose beneath the fury, a sense that the rage, when it comes, has been earned. Those who travel with her describe a quiet confidence that borders on the serene, right up until it doesn’t. The name fits: she goes where the force has been and holds the line in the turbulence that follows.
Shard C announced itself on the first night ashore with poison daggers and arithmetic moving fast in the wrong direction. Wake absorbed more than her share of it — compounding damage that took her past the margin where most fighters stop being useful to their enemies and start being a problem for their allies. A Healing Word kept her from crossing the final line. She crossed every other one. The others finished the fight while she was still finding the floor. She is alive. One point of it. What comes next in the Sea of Governance will have to wait for that one point to become more.