Characters / Loyal Enemies

Shelena

Shelena

• Action Girl: Shelena is a werewolf and perfectly capable of killing in her wolf form. In human form, she's got better than average strength and reflexes and has actively trained for years to become a Master Swordswoman, which she proves in a duel against one of the mages who once tortured her in the book's final. She's also not too good to race a ghoul-werewolf hybrid through the woods or climb the city walls in her wolf form.
• Action Mom: In the novella A Trap for a Necromancer, Shelena dotes on her baby son Roim, and as long as she knows him to be safe, she's ready to go out and hunt for thieves and renegade necromancers.
• Affectionate Nickname: Veres takes to shorten her name to "Shel." Initially, she minds that: it's all but stated that one of her previous lovers called her that, too. It morphs into an Affectionate Nickname over the course of the book, as Shelena and Veres go from enemies to friends and eventually to Official Couple.
• Braids of Action: Shelena is an Action Girl with a long braid.
• Contrasting Sequel Protagonist: Gromyko's previous book series, Profession: Witch, is set in the same Constructed World and revolves around a young witch fresh out of Wizarding School. Shelena is an Experienced Protagonist and a werewolf with no magic. Both do First-Person Smartass, though.
• Dark and Troubled Past: She has her share of bad memories. Among others, her first child was lynched, she had to leave a man she loved behind because he despised the wolf side of her and wanted her to kill it with an elixir, and she was once captured by an Ax-Crazy monster hunter and tortured for days before being left to die. That's not mentioning all the times she had to leave everything behind because people found out she's a werewolf.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • She won't miss any chance to snark, especially when she knows it will annoy someone.
    Veres: Shelena, I'm telling you for the tenth time...
    Shelena: You'd better think for the first.
  • She snarks in her inner monologue all the time:
    He really might become a good battle mage in the future. After all, he was already quite good at running away from the monster looking as if he was gracing it by this.
• Good Parents: A Trap for a Necromancer reveals that Shelena and Veres do indeed have a child and both are shown to be doting parents, though a bit quirky in the latter's case. Roim is always safe, fed and showered with love, and even though Shelena occasionally reminds herself to not be overbearing, she just can't help adoring her son.
• Green-Eyed Monster: As she develops feelings for Veres, Shelena becomes increasingly jealous. After he kisses his former lover-turned-villain Tairinn and explains to Shelena that it was just for show, she still needles him for his reasons until he tells her that when you close your eyes, you can imagine you're kissing anyone.
  Shelena: Even me?
  Veres: Even you.
• Guile Heroine: While she is a werewolf and an Action Girl, she is up against angry mobs, powerful mages, and monsters who would take her out in an honest fight, so she has to outsmart them to survive.
• Has a Type: Shelena can't stop swearing that Tall, Dark, and Handsome (that is, in a pinch, her so-called mortal enemy monster hunter Veres) is MOST CERTAINLY NOT her type. The light, strong and manly kind is, supposedly. Guess who becomes the Official Couple by the end of the book.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Shelena works for a herbalist. She says once or twice that many of the man's mixtures are either a placebo or actually mildly harmful, and her werewolf senses let her make brews that actually work. Townsfolk has caught on to that and Shelena makes extra profit from selling her products on the side. Whenever the herbalist decides to threaten her about any of that, she points out that he's paying her peanuts and threatens to leave, taking half the customers with her.
• Icy Blue Eyes: The snarky, cynical Action Girl Shelena has blue eyes.
• In-Series Nickname: Shel for Shelena. Veres, upon finding out her name, immediately takes to calling her that. She hates it, especially because that's what her former lover did, the one who couldn't accept her wholly, but it catches on and Gloom and even Virra try to use it as well. Shelena shuts both of them up quickly, but never manages to teach Veres to stop that and over time it become an Affectionate Nickname as the two of them become friends and eventually the Official Couple.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She is cynical, snarky, and at times, downright mean. She also takes her mortal enemy home to heal him after he gets beaten into an inch of death, and that's only the beginning.
• Older Than They Look: Shelena looks somewhere in her thirties but it is mentioned that her former (human) lover has died of old age some time ago. Werewolves age much slower than humans.

Veres

Veres

• Bad Powers, Good People: Necromancy, especially dark necromancy, is considered one of the worst forms of magic, and it's bad enough to justify torturing people who are suspected of practicing it. Despite that, mages are required to know its practices to be able to identify it. Veres is a skilled necromancer, although he only practises so-called neutral necromancy and uses his skills to summon spirits of the dead, and only when he's confident that they wouldn't oppose it.
• Big Eater: Battle mage Veres uses a long-term healing spell to heal himself after being beaten into a pulp at the start of the novel. The spell accelerates his metabolism and burns energy constantly, making him chronically hungry to the point that "Veres ate all our food" becomes a Running Gag in-story.
• Blue-Collar Warlock: Mages put on robes and fancy hats only for special occasions. When your job is fighting monsters, practicality comes first and you don't want to stumble over the hem of your robe in an inopportune moment.
• Celibate Hero: He is not interested in women as he is mourning The Lost Lenore.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Veres was a skilled, talented mage on the verge of handing in his thesis and becoming an archmage. Then the love of his life was suspected of being a crazy necromancer and he refused to be interrogated, believing her to be innocent. He was tortured for information for days, left the prison as a functional cripple, was banished from the capital, had all of his possessions confiscated and his career thus ruined. To top it off, his lover Tairinn was killed by a werewolf a week later. If not for his friend Gloom, he'd probably have died right there and then. The worst part? Tairinn wasn't innocent at all, never loved him, and faked her death.
• Deadpan Snarker: Veres, while generally — unlike Shelena — less prone to shooting anything that comes to his mind right out his mouth, also has his moments.
  (After Shelena stomps on Gloom's tail, causing their task to be done with much ensuing hilarity)
  Veres: Indeed, you're just plain born to work together.
• Death Glare: Veres can give an impressive dirty look. Usually he gives those to Shelena when she's being a smartass.
• Deuteragonist: It is his story as much as Shelena's.
• Face–Heel Turn: When the heroes find out who the evil guys are, namely Tairinn, Veres' long-lost love, who immediately claims she's only been doing this for him and oh how she's missed him, he falls for her charms all over again and joins them. He even comes down to Shelena's dungeon cell to gloat. Subverted because while Veres puts on a convincing act, he only does that to find out what they're planning and to have enough time to free Shelena.
• Good Parents: A Trap for a Necromancer reveals that Shelena and Veres do indeed have a child and both are shown to be doting parents, though a bit quirky in the latter's case. Roim is always safe, fed and showered with love, and even though Shelena occasionally reminds herself to not be overbearing, she just can't help adoring her son.
• An Ice Person: He has an affinity with water but as the novel takes place in winter, he frequently slings around ice- and snow-based attacks.
• Icy Blue Eyes: Veres has greenish-blue eyes, very pale and good for giving death glares. Also, he's a Magic Knight and total badass.
• Magic Knight: Veres feels comfortable with both his magic and his sword, and uses both to deadly effect. It's implied that most monster hunters are Magic Knights, as even if one of their talents won't work on a darkling, the other will, and they need the extra reflexes and Healing Factor magic gives them.
• Meaningful Name: Veres is short for "veresk", the Russian word for "heather". The dryads call Veres "Heather's Whisper". For them, the heather is a symbol of death and the otherworld due to its tendency to grow on barrows found near old battlefields. Yes, Veres likes to claim he's a battle mage, and he is, but as it turns out he's first and foremost a necromancer.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: Since Shelena has to shed her clothes before transforming, she ends up running around completely naked in front of Veres and Rest several times. She notes how Veres stoically ignores that fact while Rest, being a teenage boy, has some trouble doing so.
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: Played seriously and for laughs with Veres, who becomes nothing but skin and bones after being beaten almost to death and taking weeks to recuperate enough to even be able to eat on his own. Additionally, he uses a long-term healing spell on himself that accelerates his metabolism, turning him into a Big Eater and creating a Running Gag where Veres eats all the party's food without ever looking any better. The spell wears off towards the end of the book, culminating in Shelena's assessment that he ain't all that skinny anymore.
• Not So Stoic: Veres usually never lets himself be provoked to anything more than a deadpan snark on the side but proves to be not entirely immune when Shelena decides she's in a bad enough mood to ignore any warnings and digs around inVeres' past, laughing to his face. She earns a not so stoic fist to the face.
• Older Than They Look: Mages in this book can, through the help of magic, live up to two hundred years but look much younger than that. Shelena does the maths and comes to the conclusion that battle mage Veres is probably about the same age as her if not older, but also looks about the same age as she does.
• Parental Substitute: Rest spent most of his life as a poor kid nobody wanted to take care of and constantly kicked out of every apprenticeship he tried. Then Veres came, said that the boy had a magic gift and took him on as his apprentice. At the end of the story, another wizard mistakes them for family and Rest proudly answers that they might not be, but Veres is like a father to him.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Veres is, according to Shelena, dark (black hair, olive skin) and tall but decidedly not handsome as she's not attracted to this type of men. After spending a lot of time together and Veres healing after being beaten almost to death, though, Shelena has to admit that he ain't all that skinny anymore and most certainly handsome. He even turns out to be a match for Shelena in snarkiness.

Gloom

Gloom

• The Casanova: Gloom the dragon likes to fashion himself a casanova and pretends to leave broken hearts behind everywhere. As it is, every dryad he tries his charms on snubs him and the one time he does manage to score, he can't even remember which sister he slept with and gets chased out of the house by an angry father.
• Kavorka Man: Gloom is described as homely and unattractive in his human form and yet, he's The Casanova.
• Meaningful Name: Shelena at one point snarks that Gloom must be named thus because of his pessimistic character. But no, turns out that apart from breathing fire, Gloom can also breathe a black, fog-like substance Veres calls "the Darkness".

Rest

Rest

• The Apprentice: Thirteen-year-old Rest is apprenticed to battle mage Veres for the entirety of the book. This is mostly Played for Laughs, first when he tries to 'avenge' his master who he thinks was killed and eaten by werewolf Shelena but has to use... creative methods due to his lack of any actual skills yet, then when he and Veres break half of Shelena's kitchen utensils while trying to teach Rest levitation. As it turns out, Rest has a history of being apprenticed to various masters and getting kicked out. Based on this Shelena questions his adequacy for becoming a mage, but both Veres and Rest, especially Rest, are adamant that this time, it's going to work out just fine.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Rest has an Alcoholic Dad and his mother is never even mentioned; he was thrown out by several masters he was apprenticed with. Veres found him on the verge of dying from pneumonia beneath a flight of stairs, while his drunk father was about to beat him for falling ill.
• Honor Before Reason: Rest breathes this trope.
  • He decides to take revenge on badass werewolf Action Girl Shelena for "eating" his master, even though she could easily have him as a midnight snack. He tries several times.
  • When later he and Shelena are captured by the bad guys, he refuses to abandon her. She endlessly curses him and calls him out on that, but Rest would not budge despite being scared out of his life.
• Inept Mage: Rest is still an apprentice (and The Klutz at that), who actually forgets how to use his magic in situations when it might come in handy and is so insecure about it when he does use it, that it comes out too forceful and everything goes heads over bucket.
• Stress Vomit: He loses his lunch at the sight of Shelena's transformation. Or at a mere mention of it.
• Tagalong Kid: Being Veres' teenage apprentice, he follows the group around. Being an Inept Mage, he doesn't do much.

Virra

Virra

• Affirmative Action Girl: She is introduced half-way through the novel. She's seven-year-old but she can totally hold her own in a fight.
• Badass Adorable: She is a Little Miss Badass with fluffy blond hair and general demeanor of a sweet little child.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Virra's father died and, being a layne, she could sense it; unlike her mother and sister, she couldn't hope he'll come home someday. Then, her mother died, too. Then, in the middle of winter, her and her sister's home is attacked by vicious bird-reptile monsters every night while the girls have nowhere to go and little to no means of protecting themselves, and her sister is eventually killed by said monsters.
• Little Miss Badass: Virra is a seven-year-old half-elf girl. She is, however, a great archer, a knife nut in training, and a member of an elven clan gifted with the killing touch. She manages to take out a skilled, much, much older elven master mage, dozens of vicious bird-reptile monsters, and a barely visible giant werewolf-bear hybrid, all while looking and behaving like a sweet child.

Tairinn *spoilers*

Tairinn

• Beauty Is Bad: Tairinn is a rather pretty sociopath.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Tairinn is mentioned as Veres' dead former girlfriend, contributing to his Dark and Troubled Past. Turns out she's not nearly as dead as he thought. She faked her own death by werewolf after getting what she wanted from Veres — his research on werewolves. She shows up again as part of the villain duo.
• Disney Villain Death: Shelena pushes her off the castle wall.
• The Lost Lenore: Tairinn was Veres' girlfriend and they were madly in love with each other until he was arrested for Taking the Heat for something he believed she could not possibly have done. A week later she was killed by a werewolf. He became a monster hunter and a fervent hater of werewolves because of that and even calls her name when he's raving in fever years later. Too bad she never loved him, feigned her own death, the werewolf was her accomplice, and she's the villain of the story.
• The Vamp: The only reason she approached Veres, slept with him and generally played his girlfriend was to get her hands on his writings about werewolves and their origins and magical capabilities, secretly laughing about Veres' moral integrity. It worked because of her innocent, alluring dark-haired looks. After having faked her death, she tries that shtick on Veres again in the finale, because she still hasn't figured out everything insinuated by his thesis, using her sex appeal to lure him to her side. This time, though, Veres sees through it.
• Walking Spoiler: She turns out to have a much bigger role than just The Lost Lenore for Veres, and everything about it is a spoiler.

Others

Others

• Action Mom: Liara, when she is introduced, is already pregnant with her second child and still a working battle mage. Her husband occasionally tries to beg her to stop and think of herself, but gets shut down quickly, and Liara actively takes part in the final battle by wading in and sniping fireballs left, right and centre.
• Adipose Rex: Shelena describes the elven king as only slightly chubby by human standards, but ridiculously overweight for an elf.
• Amazon Brigade: The dryads are a female-only One-Gender Race, which logically also applies to the army they send with the heroes into battle. Since the dryads are faster and more agile than most other races, they are the best archers around.
• Beauty Is Bad: Etvor the werewolf, Tairinn's new lover and partner in crime, is described as a handsome man and handsome beast, too.
• The Bard: Hraik is a half-elf bard in one of the pubs in the town of Displacing. He's fiendishly intelligent and agile, being able to sing on without skipping a note when attacked by furious patrons, and is the only person to work out that Shelena is a werewolf without any explicit clues.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Virra's sister Danka is found to have been killed by one of the bird-reptile monsters the heroes thought to just have successfully fought off. As a non-combatant, she'd been hiding in a corner and everyone thought her safe there.
  • When the final battle is over and it looks like a completely happy ending, battle mage Liara's corpse is dug up from the ruins of the villain's castle.
• Nature Spirit: The dryads are a One-Gender Race of nature spirits living in the dryad half of Ash Grove ("ash" as in the ash tree). They basically function like any normal kingdom, with a chosen dryad acting as The High Queen and their army being an Amazon Brigade, but due to their small population they share a spy agency with the elves next door. There's a wide-spread assumption that killing the tree a dryad uses as her home kills the dryad, but as protagonist Shelena explains, that just mightily annoys the dryad, who can just move into another tree but is likely to make life rather unpleasant for the perpetrator.
• No Name Given: Shelena's old tormentors, a mage and his apprentice, are never named. When she kills the former in the Duel to the Death at the end of the novel, she thinks she never learned his name.
• One-Gender Race: Dryads are a females only race, leading to their ruler being The High Queen and their army an Amazon Brigade. It's not really explored how new dryads are born, but seeing how they're Nature Spirits, they probably don't need men.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: They're called gnomes, but technically, dwarves is what they are. They have a very detailed family structure and are organized in clans, considering relatives as "close" up to the tenth degree. They are known as merchants and great craftsmen, especially when it comes to metalwork and gems, and for their alcoholic brews, which they love. Not huge fans of trolls, with whom they enjoy bashing in each other's skulls for recreation.
• Our Elves Are Different: The elves of Ash Grove are pointy-eared humanoids who can interbreed with humans. They're usually slimmer-built, stronger, more agile and longer-lived than humans and are absolutely convinced of their superiority over other races, a sentiment that said other races don't really share, calling the elves derogatively "the pointy-eared ones". Those living in Ash Grove utilize some kind of nature magic centered around an artefact known as the Staff of Fertility to make their city look like it grew naturally.
• Pregnant Badass: Liara is pregnant with her second child and an asskicking battle mage. Her husband tries to make her stay at home at least until the child is born but she insists on fighting, and the fact that she's expecting doesn't slow her down in the slightest. Then, she dies in the final battle, buried under the ruined wall. The child, obviously, dies with her, and her grieving husband promises to himself that his living daughter will not become a mage under any circumstances.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: Bard Hraik has figured out that Shelena's a werewolf, but keeps it to himself, as he likes her and doesn't want to see her lynched. She doesn't realize that until he alludes to it in one of his songs.

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