Aura

Two pale-brown horns break through Aura's hair, and her eyes are a dark blue. The magenta hair itself falls to mid-back, bound into a thick pair of shoulder-tied pigtails whose loose lengths each split into a trio of braids. Her outfit pairs a sleeveless dark bodice, white-trimmed and open at the navel, with a frilled pale skirt beneath; a magenta tail of cloth hangs from her hip on gold buttons that echo the gold at her throat. Laced threads run her opera gloves up each forearm in a tone matching the bodice, and her striped boots climb to the mid-thigh.

Articulate yet utterly without empathy, Aura embodies the self-absorbed cruelty common to demons; the deaths of her own executioners stir no grief in her at all. She trusts completely in the supremacy of her magic and relishes any clash she expects to win, though a streak of caution runs beneath the arrogance. Faced with foes beyond her, the Hero Party among them, she chooses flight over a head-on fight, and that instinct is what carried her through the Demon King's fall. Before engaging a mage she looks for any flicker of unstable mana and reads up on the reputations of celebrated opponents, Frieren included.

More than five centuries back, Aura took her seat among the Sages and raised an army from those her magic had enslaved. Discovering that a sufficiently strong will could partly resist her control, she began beheading everyone she claimed, which earned her the Guillotine title. Long before, answering Schlacht's summons, she joined the others to face the Hero of the South; she lived through it, while three fellow Sages and Schlacht did not. Her later run-in with the Hero Party went badly, stripping away much of her undead host and leaving a wound from Himmel, so she withdrew and hid as the heroes pressed on to end the Demon King.

Once Himmel had passed, Aura emerged to seize Graf Granat's lands in the Northern Lands, a drawn-out war that killed the Graf's son. Nearly thirty years after the hero's death and weary of fighting, she sent a trio of her executioners as supposed peace envoys, Linie and Draht alongside Lügner, their true errand being to coax Granat into lowering his domain's barrier. It came apart when Frieren slew Draht and met Aura in the open. Once her risen soldiers fell, Aura set both their souls on the Scales of Obedience to measure mana. The balance favored her at first, then tipped to Frieren, who had spent a lifetime suppressing her output to deceive demons. Aura bragged of five hundred years; Frieren countered with over a thousand and unveiled her real power, and the spell forced Aura to behead herself.