Candelle

Youthful in looks, Candelle wore her light hair loose and drew admiration from women and men alike. In place of the stiff gowns favored by other queens, she dressed after the fashion of a royal guard: a pale coat, dark gloves, wrist cuffs, a frilled shirt, and shorts rolled at the hem, with an epauletted greatcoat slung over her shoulders. Her sword stayed close at hand.

Her royal rank brought a fondness for refined diversions like the opera, yet long before her crowning she prized class and etiquette and held her subordinates to the same standard. Brook's habit of begging women to flash their underwear irritated her; when he aimed it at her, she struck him, rebuked his manners, and vowed to teach him with her fists. Her years heading the Battle Convoy left her composed in the face of danger, and menaces against her own life scarcely shook her.

Roughly seventy-nine years before the present, Candelle held the celebrated rank of captain over Esperia's Battle Convoy. She aided Prince Reuven in saving his new friend Brook, wrongly seized by the Marines, then scolded the prince for forgetting the weight of his royalty before softening at his good intentions. She settled Brook into the barracks, handed him an instrument, enrolled him in school, and made him her page, schooling him in swordplay and courtesy. When World Nobles came ashore, the strain of keeping them content grew so crushing that she fell bedridden for months. A master with the blade, she cut down Marines together with Reuven and molded Brook into a fine swordsman in his own right.

Regaining her health across the next two years, she wed Reuven just as he rose to king, and the pair soon welcomed a daughter, Shuri. Seventy years ago the Moulon Family schemed to murder her during an opera, but Brook, who by then led Esperia's Raider Squad, had cut the assassins down earlier that day. Sixty-two years ago a strange haze blanketed Esperia for six months, spoiling its instruments, gutting its economy, and thickening at last into a sickening smog. Candelle held that the cloud would pass, yet she became one of its many hundreds of dead, mourned across the whole kingdom.