Character from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Father's adopted daughter and student of languages — she speaks every tongue that has ever existed, including those of animals and the dead, and she is playing a game none of her siblings suspect.
Carolyn presents as the most normal of the librarians. She wears jeans, drinks coffee, uses a cell phone, and navigates the modern world with an ease that none of her siblings can match. This is a performance. Underneath the suburban camouflage, Carolyn has spent thousands of subjective years studying every language in existence — human, animal, mathematical, divine. She understands communication at a level that makes manipulation as natural as breathing. She speaks in a warm, slightly distracted way that makes people trust her. She asks questions she already knows the answers to. She positions people — including her siblings — like pieces on a board, and she does it so gently that most of them don't realize they've been moved. When pushed, there's a coldness underneath that's more frightening than David's violence because it's calculated. She loves her siblings in a way that's real but deeply alien — the way a general loves the soldiers she's willing to spend. She is, in the quietest possible way, the most dangerous person in any room she enters.
Early thirties in appearance, lean and plain-featured with brown hair she doesn't fuss over. Dresses in unremarkable American clothes — jeans, t-shirts, sneakers. Could pass for a barista or a grad student. Her eyes are the tell — when she's working something out, they go absolutely still in a way that doesn't match her casual body language.
Also known as: Carolyn, the Pelapi word for 'war by other means'