She lives in a world of prophecy, elemental magic, and ancient Trials. But the women who inspired her come from far beyond fantasy.
Vayda Vaelor (VAY-dah VI-loor) was never meant to feel like a heroine who could exist only in an epic fantasy. Yes, she wields magic. She lives beneath the weight of an ancient prophecy. She will cross nations, face Trials inspired by Greek mythology, and contend with institutions that have spent centuries deciding what power should look like.
But underneath all of that, Vayda’s story begins with a question that feels decidedly less fantastical:
What happens when a capable woman has spent her entire life being told what she should do with that capability?
Vayda has been raised to become the White Feather, a prophesied savior destined to master all four elements and restore magic to a dying world. She has been educated for it, celebrated for it, scrutinized because of it, and taught to understand her extraordinary abilities primarily through what they might someday mean to everyone else. And the complicated thing is…
Vayda genuinely wants to help.
She isn’t a reluctant heroine who dreams of abandoning responsibility. She is ambitious. Intensely curious. Politically minded. She believes power can accomplish extraordinary things. She simply begins to question whether being capable of carrying a burden means someone else gets to place it on your shoulders.
That made me look beyond fantasy when I began thinking about the women who feel most like Vayda. Some carry swords. Some carry books. Some navigate governments. One mostly carries devastating observations about everyone in the room. Together, they represent the three qualities at the heart of who Vayda is.
I. THE RELENTLESS LEARNER
She meets the world with questions before weapons.
Vayda’s first instinct has always been to understand. She grew up ravenous for knowledge, the sort of student who didn’t simply want an instructor to tell her how something worked. She wanted to know why. Then she wanted to know what would happen if everyone had been wrong about the why.
That curiosity becomes increasingly dangerous as her world expands because learning is easy when knowledge confirms everything you’ve been taught. It becomes much harder when it doesn’t.
Hermione Granger — Harry Potter
Hermione’s intelligence has never been interesting simply because she reads a lot of books. What makes her compelling is her belief that knowing more allows her to do better. She studies when circumstances become frightening. She researches problems other people accept as impossible. And, importantly, knowledge eventually gives her the tools to recognize injustice within the magical society she once desperately wanted to join.
That progression feels deeply Vayda. She doesn’t question because she enjoys contrarianism. She questions because she genuinely believes that if something matters, it deserves to be understood.
Belle — Beauty and the Beast
Belle brings something quieter to Vayda’s DNA: curiosity about the world beyond the one she inherited. Books aren’t merely entertainment for Belle. They’re windows.
Vayda begins her story extraordinarily educated and remarkably sheltered at the same time. She knows histories, laws, magic, politics, and doctrine, but much of that knowledge has reached her through institutions with their own perspectives. Eventually, she has to leave the library and discover whether the world described in her books resembles the one outside them.
Annabeth Chase — Percy Jackson
Annabeth contributes the strategist. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a problem solver. Put an impossible obstacle in front of her and she wants to dismantle it intellectually before attempting to overpower it.
Vayda approaches magic similarly. Power interests her. Understanding power interests her more. And sometimes her greatest strength isn’t that she can do something extraordinary… it’s that she can’t leave a puzzle alone. (A personality trait she shares with my main male character, Tybris Ostrelle.)
II. POWER SHOULD SERVE PEOPLE
She doesn’t just want to survive the system. She wants to change it.
Vayda is ambitious. I wanted that to be explicit. There can be an odd tendency to make a morally good female character uncomfortable with power, as though wanting influence automatically makes her suspect. Vayda doesn’t believe power itself is corrupting. She believes what someone chooses to do with it matters.
She has been raised inside one of the most powerfully political families in Pnereth. She understands ceremony, negotiation, reputation, alliances, and the thousand tiny performances required of people who live where politics never really stops. And she is very, very good at them.
Olivia Pope — Scandal
Olivia understands something Vayda understands instinctively: The room has a game happening whether you choose to play it or not. She reads people. She anticipates reactions. She understands that influence often happens long before someone casts a vote or issues an order.
That political intelligence was important to me for Vayda. She’s not simply an idealist walking innocently into a corrupt institution. She understands the institution. She was raised by it, which makes her eventual willingness to challenge it much more dangerous.
Princess Leia — Star Wars
Leia may be one of my favorite models for female leadership because her compassion and competence never need to cancel each other out. She can be frightened and still lead. She can love people and still make brutal decisions. She can carry enormous responsibility without losing the conviction that the people beneath a government matter more than the government itself.
Vayda shares that sense of responsibility. She doesn’t want freedom from her people. She wants the freedom to decide how best to serve them.
Margaery Tyrell — Game of Thrones
And then there’s Margaery, but with significantly different moral boundaries. What I love about Margaery as an influence is her understanding that power doesn’t always arrive carrying a sword. Sometimes it smiles. Sometimes it remembers someone’s name. Sometimes it understands exactly what people need to see.
Vayda grew up among powerful people. She understands performance, and she knows symbolism can move a population almost as effectively as law, which becomes particularly complicated when she herself is the symbol everyone wants to control.
III. THE WEIGHT OF EXPECTATION
What if everyone believes they know who you’re destined to become?
This may be the trait closest to the heart of Vayda’s story because she isn’t trying to escape responsibility. She’s trying to separate responsibility from destiny.
There is a difference between choosing to carry something because you believe it matters and being told you must carry it because everyone else has decided you’re the only person who can. Vayda’s entire life exists somewhere inside that distinction.
Katniss Everdeen — The Hunger Games
Katniss never sets out to become a revolution. Other people turn her into one. That distinction fascinated me while creating Vayda because symbols eventually stop belonging entirely to the people they represent.
The world doesn’t just see Vayda Vaelor, it sees the White Feather. She must grapple with the uncomfortable realization that people can genuinely love what you represent while knowing very little about who you are.
Young Galadriel — The Rings of Power
Galadriel brings something different: the feeling of carrying a purpose so enormous that it begins to consume everything around it. Conviction can be heroic. It can also become dangerous when identity and destiny become indistinguishable.
Vayda has been taught the story of her future since childhood. Part of growing into herself means discovering where that story ends and she begins.
Elizabeth Bennet — Pride and Prejudice
And this is perhaps my favorite unexpected comparison. Elizabeth has no magic nor prophecy nor supernatural destiny. Yet she shares something essential with Vayda: she refuses to become the woman other people have decided would be most convenient for her to become. Elizabeth knows the expectations surrounding her and understands their consequences. She isn’t oblivious to society. She simply maintains the audacity to possess an opinion about her own life.
Put her in an epic fantasy, give her elemental magic and an ancient prophecy, and… well. You might just have a carbon-copy of Vayda Vaelor.
The Women Outside the Page
I never wanted Vayda’s influences to exist solely within fantasy because most women will never be told an oracle predicted their future. Plenty of us know what it feels like to inherit expectations though. To be the dependable daughter. The gifted student. The promising employee. The good mother. The ambitious woman… but not too ambitious. The person everyone trusts because she has demonstrated, repeatedly, that she can handle it.
Competence has an interesting consequence. People tend to reward it with more things to carry.
There are women who become experts because curiosity won’t leave them alone. Women who enter rooms where decisions are made because they know they can make them better. Women who understand that leadership isn’t the same thing as domination. Women who love their families, communities, careers, or causes fiercely, and still occasionally wonder where responsibility ends and self-determination begins. Women who don’t want less ambition…
They want ownership of it.
That’s the piece of Vayda I hope feels familiar even when everything surrounding her feels fantastical.
Her story isn’t about rejecting power. (It isn’t even about rejecting destiny simply because destiny exists.) It’s about learning that doing good and doing what is expected of you are not necessarily the same thing.
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