Tissaia de Vries

Tissaia de Vries rules Aretuza as its rectoress, the woman who takes frightened, discarded girls and forges them into sorceresses. She is exacting and cold on the surface, demanding perfection and obedience, testing her students to the point of cruelty. Beneath the discipline is a fierce belief that power must be earned through suffering before it can be trusted.

MyAnna Buring plays authority as armor rather than ego, every clipped word doing double duty as threat and lesson. The writing lets Tissaia's severity curdle into something more complicated the longer you watch her watch her students, and Buring finds the ache underneath the discipline without ever softening it into sentiment.