Nyssa Brasstongue

Veil-Sister Nyssa is Phoenix discipline made flesh: scarred hands, measured breathing, and a voice that cuts fear into threads. She midwifed Scar-Birth, felt the wardstones answer in her teeth, and has spent every season since teaching pups how not to feed the Hollow King with their feelings. She does not trust the Creed’s spotless smiles or Luna’s polished light, yet she will bargain, threaten, or bleed for her House if it keeps the lines tight and the children breathing.

Appearance

Nyssa moves like someone long used to heat. Her forearms are browned and layered with burn scars, and at the Scar-Birth her hair was cropped close, dark at the roots and seared copper-red at the ends, with ember-charms and scorched feathers tied into short braids at her temples. By the time the twins reach their Mask-year her hair is more white than copper. She wears a thin mask of blackened steel that usually hangs loose at her throat.

In The Channeler

Nyssa Brasstongue is a Phoenix Veil-Sister, midwife and trainer of Luminglade's young Fae. In the prologue she delivered Liora Emberfall's twins while hollowborn broke through the wardline, swore to Liora to brand both boys Phoenix against the Council's wishes, and watched Liora die. Branding Elias released the wave of fire remembered as Scar-Birth. She raised Vael and Elias thereafter, and much of the book shows her as the closest thing they have to a mother.

Years later she ran the Mask-year trials, telling her pupils to feel in threads, not floods, and sent the twins, Maerin and Neris out on the Hush-cap harvest. Summoned before the Council of Masks, she clashed with Brother Adresin and Brother Kael, defended Elias as a blade Aeshan had given them, and raised the thinness of the Hush stores. She lost: Elias was named for the Spire with Maerin, Neris and Fenn. She tended Maerin's burn on their return and found that the Phoenix Hush paste had been cut with chalk. After glimpsing Mera Firehand and Tovin together, she taught Elias how fire and love might be held without harm.

Nyssa escorted the tithe to Luna, shielding the candidates on the road, but Kael ended her authority at intake and had her walked out of the Lower Sanctum. Back in Luminglade she broke open the Phoenix Hush stores, found them laced with bone ash and lumina beneath Leth's breath-seal, and took the proof to the wardstones themselves. She found a child in a ward clinic whose wound was rotting unfelt under the false Hush, and she reluctantly let Vael join the effort to follow the route-cloth back.

She returned to the Lower Sanctum in time to help save Maerin in the reagent room and to sit with Elias after he refused Inaris. When Kael trapped the twins and Maerin in the channeling frame, Nyssa climbed between them and seized the live contacts so that the draw passed through her while Leth forced the release. The machine burned her hands and body and drew out her memories of Liora and the boys. Before she died she told Maerin to live and Vael to choose, and wardstones across Luna answered her death. Tovin carried her body out of the undercroft. Her promise to Liora, the book says, was paid in full.

Family

After the books

Dies before the end of the books. Dies in the Sanctum undercroft, sacrificing herself to break the channeling frame and save Maerin and Vael. Nyssa pays Liora's debt in full beneath the Sanctum, putting her own body into the channeling frame so Maerin and Vael can live. The wardstones crack when she dies, and every child she kept breathing inherits the wound of that choice.