Character from The Locked Tomb by Tamsyn Muir
The Duchess of the Seventh House — a terminally ill necromancer of extraordinary charm who was murdered before she could reach Canaan House, her identity stolen by a ten-thousand-year-old Lyctor with a grudge.
Dulcinea refuses to be tragic about being terminal. She flirts, she laughs, she makes inappropriate jokes about her own death, and she pursues intellectual connection with the same hunger other people bring to physical survival. She fell in love with Palamedes Sextus through letters — they wrote back and forth for years, building a relationship of pure mind — and she died before they could meet in person. Even as a revenant, she maintains her characteristic levity, noting that her death is 'truly wonderful news for her haters.' She rejects her House's obsession with aestheticizing death not by avoiding it but by refusing to make it beautiful. She is practical, warm, wickedly funny, and determined to be a person rather than a metaphor. She was impersonated at Canaan House by Cytherea the First — the real Dulcinea was already dead. Palamedes never got to meet the real her alive, which is one of the series' quietest tragedies.
Brown curly hair, blue eyes, and a delicate frame made more frail by a degenerative condition that has been killing her slowly since childhood. Beautiful in the way that the Seventh House specializes in — the aesthetics of graceful decline, death made lovely. She looks like a Pre-Raphaelite painting of a consumptive poet, and she is fully aware of the visual effect and uses it without shame.
Also known as: Dulcinea, Dulcie, Duchess of Rhodes