Seraphine Daultry – Crown Archivist

Name: Seraphine Daultry
Race: Half-Elf
Role/Class: Crown Archivist
Appearance: Seraphine Daultry is in her early sixties, though her half-elven heritage keeps her looking a steady decade younger — fine-boned, sharp-eyed, with silver-streaked auburn hair almost always escaping from a loosely pinned coil. Ink stains are a permanent feature of her right hand from the first knuckle to the wrist, and her reading spectacles — round-lensed, brass-framed — are pushed up onto her forehead more often than they cover her eyes. She favors practical scholar's robes in muted teal and warm brown, layered for the perpetual chill of the archive vaults, with a leather satchel worn cross-body that is always overfull and always organized in a system only she understands. A small silver key on a neck-chain unlocks the archive's most restricted cabinet, and she rests a hand on it unconsciously when she's worried.

Backstory

Seraphine came to the Crown Archive as a junior cataloguer at twenty-two, fresh from the Brightcrown Collegiate with a commendation in historical linguistics and an inconvenient habit of noticing when official documents didn't quite match each other. She spent her first decade rebuilding the archive's indexing system from a barely navigable disaster into something that could actually be searched. She spent her second decade quietly realizing that several people in the palace were very uncomfortable with a searchable archive.

Two Crown Archivists have retired under pressure during her tenure. Both times, the position came to Seraphine because no one else understood the system well enough to run it and because she had, on both occasions, kept very careful copies of the documents that made those archivists' predecessors nervous. She is not ruthless by nature, but she has learned that knowledge is protection, and she protects herself accordingly. She believes the historical record belongs to the people of Brightcrown, not to whichever family currently sits closest to the throne, and that belief has made her more enemies than her personality ever would have.