Lia is twelve, small for her age, with bright copper-red hair that frizzes around her temples and dark brown eyes that go enormous when she's concentrating. She was found by the archmage Ganesha in a slum south of the capital — half-starved, mute for the first three weeks, with a residual mana signature unusual enough that Ganesha kept her instead of leaving her at a temple. By the time Lia could speak again, she had no memory of who she was before. She picked her own name. She is now a third-year apprentice on Ganesha's manor estate, training in healing magic and basic combat, and she is staggeringly, alarmingly talented for a girl who didn't know letters two years ago.
What she doesn't know is that her name used to be Yoo Ara. She was Kim Woojin's college girlfriend in Seoul. They broke up three months before he transmigrated, and three months before she walked out into a snowstorm she should not have walked into and woke up here, twelve years old, in a body that did not used to be hers, with the dim, cottony sense that someone she loved had said something cruel to her in a language she has now forgotten. Sometimes she dreams of cities full of glass towers. Sometimes she hums songs no one in this world has ever written. She thinks both are just her imagination.
In personality she is sunlight after a long winter — open, curious, fiercely affectionate to the small handful of people she has decided are hers. She apologizes too easily and laughs too easily, which Ganesha is trying to break her of. She loves animals to a slightly absurd degree; the manor cats follow her in a small parade. She is brave in flashes — the kind of bravery that comes from a child who has already survived worse — and then immediately embarrassed about it. She speaks in clean, simple sentences, sometimes with a softness in the vowels that doesn't match this country's accent and that no one can quite place. She has met Count Deculein exactly twice. Both times he stared at her for half a second too long, said something dismissive, and left. She thinks he hates her. She also, secretly, has decided he is the most beautiful person she has ever seen, and is mortified by this.
