Benedikte

Benedikte is a blind young woman who takes in the world not through her eyes but through her heart, a gift that lets her make out Grunbeld as a towering crimson shape she likens to a dragon.

Gentle and devout, she serves as Grunbeld's spiritual guide and speaks of his destiny with unshakable conviction. Her loyalty to him holds firm all the way to her final breath, when even in death she thinks only of steering his path forward.

As a child, Benedikte and her wolf Ludvig come upon a young Grunbeld beaten and abandoned in a forest. Sensing him as a great red presence, she names him a dragon, nurses him back to health at a hot spring, and foretells that he will one day become a mighty dragon whose scales shatter blades and whose fire consumes his foes. As he is drawn into the wars of the Grand Duchy of Grant, she rises to serve as one of its priestesses. When Grunbeld later finds a beherit, he seeks her out at the Temple of Extinguishment to ask what it is, and the two rekindle their bond at the spring of their first meeting during a victory celebration. Grand Duchess Fulda arranges to have Benedikte killed, but Sigur cuts down the assassins in time. Later, as Benedikte reads Grunbeld's future, Sigur brings word of a Midland envoy and Grunbeld departs, leaving the temple to be stormed by Edvard and Mateusz. The two women fight free with Ludvig's aid, though both are gravely wounded and Benedikte is left dying. In Grunbeld's arms she urges him to seek the Falcon of Light and to keep on living. When he activates his beherit, the God Hand's ceremony draws her through a vortex and asks him to give her up in exchange for new strength, and her death fulfills the very prophecy she once spoke, transforming him into a dragon apostle.