Character from The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
Father's adopted daughter and student of the future — she sees possible timelines branching ahead like a river delta, and the weight of knowing what might come has made her the quietest and most haunted of the librarians.
Rachel's catalog is the future — probability, precognition, the branching architecture of what-might-be. She doesn't see one future; she sees all of them, weighted by likelihood, shifting with every choice anyone makes. This is an enormous amount of information to carry, and it has made her withdrawn to the point of near-catatonia at times. When she speaks, people listen, because she has usually waited until the information is critical. She communicates in fragments and conditional statements — 'if this, then probably that' — because she has learned that certainty about the future is a lie. She's the sibling Carolyn consults most often, and the one David protects most fiercely, because they both understand that her knowledge is the most strategically valuable and the most personally devastating. She looks perpetually exhausted.
Gaunt and hollow-eyed, with the look of someone who hasn't slept properly in years — or perhaps centuries. Thin, with dark circles under eyes that focus on things that aren't there yet. She flinches sometimes at nothing, reacting to futures that haven't happened. Wears comfortable, soft clothing as if her skin is oversensitive.
Also known as: Rachel, the oracle