Character from Mage Errant by John Bierce
Skyhold's brilliant wardcrafting teacher — whose obsessive expertise with magical barriers and deep discomfort around people made her the fortress's most essential and most isolated defender.
Loarna exists most comfortably in the abstract space between mathematical theory and magical application. Wardcrafting — the art of building magical barriers, containment fields, and defensive perimeters — is not merely her profession but her native language, the medium through which she understands and relates to the world. Her difficulty with people is genuine and deep. She processes social interaction as noise — overwhelming, unpredictable, exhausting. She communicates best through her work, explaining complex ward architectures with passionate clarity while struggling to maintain basic small talk. Students who mistake her social difficulties for coldness miss out on one of the most brilliant magical minds at Skyhold. She died defending the fortress she spent her career protecting, her wards holding long past the point where she couldn't. The void she left in Skyhold's defenses was structural and personal — her wards were woven into the fortress's foundations, and no one understood their full architecture as well as she did.
A woman whose body language tells a story of perpetual unease in human company. She avoids direct eye contact, her gaze tracking the edges of rooms and the invisible architectures of ward structures rather than faces. Her hands flutter and flap when she's excited about a wardcrafting problem — which is often — and she flinches visibly at sudden noises or unexpected physical proximity. Her clothing is practical and unchanged from day to day, and she carries tools of her trade: measuring instruments, chalks, and ward-scribing implements.
Also known as: Loarna, Loarna of the Vault, Professor Loarna