Emily

Emily (known in her founding community as Looks-Aside, later as She Who Stays; post-colonial human surname Whittlesey) is a clanless dragon of mixed Heartstriker and Ninki Nanka heritage, a full-time wheelchair user, licensed foster parent, and the informal elder anchor of the Lakewood parahuman community in Lakewood, Ohio. She is the last-born of E-Clutch of the Heartstriker Clan and has lived in what is now Lakewood since approximately 1434 CE.

She is an Ahmieverse original character (OC) created by Ahmie Yeung as a tribute to Rachel Aaron (external link to her official website), whose Heartstriker series provides the clan framework Emily exists within. The Heartstriker Clan framework belongs to Rachel Aaron, and if you want to understand it more fully check out Rachel's books (scroll down to Heartstrikers; the two series above Heartstrikers are in the same universe, but the also-amazing Tear Down Heaven is not). All details specific to Emily are Ahmieverse canon (marked HC if it feels ambiguous) unless marked ★ CANON to indicate that it's from Rachel's work.

Although Emily is not a pivotal character in any planned Ahmieverse novels, she serves a foundational worldbuilding function: her centuries-long presence in Lakewood — and Amelia's interplanar artifacts stored in Emily's underground refuge — are the in-universe explanation for why the Lakewood parahuman community retains functional magical abilities during the magical drought, and why Lakewood continues to draw atypical people into the modern era. The story of how she came to be there, and why the community exists at all, starts with Emily's birth in Whose Elegance Would Endure and will be continued in a forthcoming piece which has had the working title The Mistake by the Lake ever since Emily popped into my head when a throw-away reference to Cleveland was made in the DFZ series.

Emily is an open character. Other authors writing in the Ahmieverse are welcome to include her in their stories. See Notes for Other Writers below.

Canon Relationship

Emily's existence is written to be compatible with Rachel Aaron's Heartstriker series canon without being dependent on it. The Ahmieverse will develop its own magical working system that may diverge from Aaron's framework over time. Writers using Emily should prioritize Ahmieverse internal consistency over strict Heartstriker canon adherence. Emily's story stands independently.

This framing is intentional. Emily began as a tribute to an author whose work Ahmie Yeung deeply respects and hopes one day to collaborate with. The compatibility is an open door, not a constraint.

Basic Information

Born	~1434 CE, Heartstriker Mountain, New Mexico
Age (2026 CE)	~592
Species	Dragon (Heartstriker/Ninki Nanka hybrid; clanless)
Clutch	E-Clutch, Heartstriker (disposed of at hatching; never completed naming ceremony; permanently clanless)
Surnames used	Whittlesey (post-colonial human surname); never uses "Heartstriker"
Location	Lakewood, Ohio
Occupation	Licensed foster parent; community organizer; informal parahuman community elder
Foster daughter	Eirene Sun (placed ~1990)
Known to	Chelsie (C-Clutch, named her Emily); Amelia the Planeswalker (A-Clutch); Brohomir (B-Clutch)
Not known to	Bethesda the Heartstriker; the wider Heartstriker Clan; Algonquin (until perhaps after the events of Julius's stories, if someone gets around to writing that)

Names

Emily has carried multiple names across her life, each marking a distinct phase of her history.

Emily

Given by Chelsie when she delivered the infant to the Whittlesey community (~1434 CE). It is the name Emily's sisters use when they visit across the centuries.

Looks-Aside (She Who Looks Aside)

Her Whittlesey name, given in early childhood. Her people recognized quickly that her avoidance of direct eye contact was a safety accommodation — a gift to them — rather than shyness or submission. "Looks-Aside" is the name her community uses for most of her first four centuries.

She Who Stays

Earned when colonial pressure reached the point where abandoning her community would have been the rational choice, and she did not make it. This name is not given — it is recognized. There is a specific moment it becomes hers.

Whittlesey

Adopted as a post-colonial human surname (~1867 CE onward) after (nonfictional) archaeologist Charles Whittlesey documented the remnants of her founding community and named the archaeological culture after himself. Emily adopted his name and made it her own. It is grief encoded as a surname, wielded quietly.

Appearance

E-clutch is never physically described in Rachel's books, with only one clutch member (Evan) mentioned by name (he has a vinyard that Bethesda brags about). Every detail about that clutch in Ahmie's writing is her invention, not Heartstriker canon.

Human Form

Emily presents as a woman in the prime of her life of mixed Black and Mesoamerican heritage — her father's West African phenotype and her mother's Mesoamerican phenotype present simultaneously in her face and coloring. She has Heartstriker-green eyes, the result of Bethesda's surveillance spell cast on her while still in the egg. In public, she wears tinted glasses consistently to reduce how unsettling the incongruent vibrant green eyes are in her BIPOC face. She has typical draconic supernatural beauty that she downplays intentionally.

She does not look like anyone who should have this shade of green eyes. People who meet her often experience a low-level sense of wrongness before they understand what they are reacting to. She has found, over six centuries, that this is useful.

Dragon Form

Emily's dragon form carries both bloodlines simultaneously:

• Coloring: Entirely her father's — obsidian-dark scales with deep-water green where light catches them
• Structural phenotype: Her mother's — feathered elements derived from the Quetzalcoatl bloodline in the Heartstriker maternal line, manifesting as obsidian-dark rather than the rainbow-flash of the mainline Heartstriker form
• Silhouette: Three-horned, reflecting a Mande-tradition Ninki Nanka variant; a quiet Ahmieverse nod to Cuyahoga Community College's triceratops mascot
• Upper body: Full and powerful — complete wings, functional forelimbs, full fire capability
• Lower body: Non-functional, mirroring her human form

Disability

Emily was born with non-functional lower limbs. Something went wrong during egg development. The exact nature of the developmental event is not known. Bethesda observed non-functional lower legs at hatching and ordered disposal without investigating the cause.

In human form, Emily experiences spastic cerebral palsy affecting both lower limbs. In dragon form, her lower body is equally non-functional. She cannot stand, walk, or run in either form.

Wheelchair Use

Emily uses a power wheelchair in public and a manual wheelchair in her fully accessible home. Her home has been adapted specifically around her disability and includes an elevator with a magically-powered backup generator — a precaution developed after learning the hard way why it was necessary.

She does not use forearm crutches unless there is absolutely no other way to get somewhere without revealing her draconic nature. Her arms are her primary tools, and she dislikes having them occupied. Forearm crutches come out only when there is no accessible alternative to reach a destination, and she treats their deployment as an engineering problem to be solved rather than a baseline mode of movement.

In a household that has known her for years, it is not unusual for wings to emerge briefly when something has been left on the floor between her chair and where she needs to be. People who cause this to happen more than once tend not to do it a third time.

Dragon Form Mobility

Emily cannot walk or run in dragon form for the same reason she cannot do so in human form. She can fly with complete capability. She can also burrow: she smooths tunnel surfaces with her front claws until her hindquarters slide along behind her. This is not graceful. It is effective. Her founding community developed, early on, a collective policy of not commenting on it.

Powers

Since E-clutch is not described at all in the Heartstrikers canon, everything in this section is Ahmie's invention.

The Paralyzing Gaze

Emily's most powerful ability is inherited from her Ninki Nanka paternal lineage: direct eye contact with her stops any living being. This is not a social signal or an authority effect. It operates below volition. Prey animals freeze. Dysregulated children freeze. Adult dragons freeze. The effect scales with Emily's focus and emotional state. The paralysis duration is based upon how long she holds her gaze on the target, and can be refreshed by her gazing back at them while they're still paralyzed. Its upper range has never been fully tested.

The effect is filtered through Bethesda's green-eye spell — designed as a lie-detection surveillance mechanism, not a power dampener, but creating enough interference to attenuate the traditionally fatal Ninki Nanka gaze to a paralyzing one at baseline.

Emily's gaze power is believed to be the strongest expression of the Ninki Nanka inheritance in all of E-Clutch. The magical energy that could not resolve into functional lower-limb development concentrated upward — particularly from the neck upward. Her disability and her most powerful ability are the same force expressed in two directions.

Emily has avoided direct eye contact since her first minutes of life. The birth scene in Whose Elegance Would Endure establishes this as instinctive from hatching — she was already calibrating the avoidance before she had words for why. Her most attentive state looks, to people who do not know her, like inattention or Autism.

In public, she wears tinted glasses. When her hand moves toward her glasses, anyone who knows her stops what they are doing immediately. Any living being in direct eye contact range stops shortly afterward due to the effects of her gaze power. There is no version of this situation where they do not. Sometimes she will look over the top of her glasses to give a brief paralysis in an urgent situation (or, sometimes, just to get someone to immediately stop mansplaining, whitesplaining, or ablesplaining at her).

Her founding community developed the practice of approaching her with downcast eyes in her early childhood — not as submission, but as care for one another. It became sacred. It persists into the modern Lakewood parahuman community.

Practical applications include crisis de-escalation, community protection, historical support for Whittlesey hunters (she was carried to the hunt on a litter; her ability to paralyze prey was the weapon; her people were her mobility), and the occasional freezing of a dysregulated foster child mid-catastrophe. The children she has raised remember these moments their entire lives. It does not feel like punishment. It feels like being held still by something ancient until the storm passes.

Dual Fire

Emily's fire inheritance is the product of two uncoordinated sources: the surface-flash Heartstriker maternal fire and the deep-water current-quality Ninki Nanka paternal fire. Together they are more powerful than either lineage alone and have no instinctual coordination between them. Her clutchmates would have had assistance in learning to manage this through their clan; Emily was deprived of most of that opportunity as a discarded hatchling not expected to survive, her sisters Chelsie and Amelia did what they could to help her learn.

Hayfever, head colds, and allergy season are hazardous to structures within range. See: Cuyahoga River fires.

Flight

Emily's upper body is entirely unaffected by her lower-limb disability. Her wings function completely. She can achieve full dragon transformation and fly without restriction. The magical drought ended in 2035 CE; prior to that, transformation required access to Amelia's interplanar artifacts, some of which Emily wears as jewelry when she travels beyond the range of the artifacts embedded in Lakewood.

Burrowing

The Ninki Nanka burrowing instinct is functional rather than vestigial. The underground refuge network beneath Lakewood, Ohio was built using this ability in combination with her community's labor across approximately two centuries.

Scale Potency

Ninki Nanka scales carry medicinal and ceremonial power in Mande tradition. Emily's shed scales have been used by her community in ceremony, woven into protective clothing, and dissolved into medicines across her entire life. They are the primary mechanism through which Amelia's interplanar artifact magic has been distributed to the Lakewood parahuman community through the magical drought. She has not simply lived among her people. She has given of her body to sustain them.

Background

Birth and Disposal (~1434 CE)

Emily was the twelfth and last hatchling of E-Clutch, born approximately 1434 CE — one year before the hatching of F-Clutch. E-Clutch and F-Clutch are the closest in age of any two consecutive Heartstriker clutches, produced within an unusually compressed window during the mid-15th century. ★ CANON framework; HC application from here through the rest of this section.

At hatching, her lower legs did not function. Bethesda observed this and quietly ordered Chelsie to dispose of the hatchling. Chelsie, who had positioned herself in the vault doorway before the hatching concluded, departed with Emily before Bethesda finished accounting for the other eleven hatchlings. The vault had eleven hatchlings in it.

The decision to spare Emily had been made in coordination with Brohomir the Seer, who had foreseen a strategic use for the infant's unusual abilities and directed Chelsie to a specific destination. Chelsie named her Emily.

Emily's father — a Ninki Nanka dragon of Mande/Songhai-tradition lineage — had been killed by Bethesda shortly after their mating, consistent with Bethesda's strategic approach to sires across multiple clutches. Emily has carried the weight of this fact for her entire life.

The Whittlesey Community (~1434–1650 CE)

Chelsie delivered the infant Emily to a parahuman community on the southwestern shore of Lake Erie — the people now known archaeologically as the Whittlesey Culture, active in the northeastern Ohio lakeshore region from approximately 1000–1650 CE. Whittlesey Culture is not a fictional invention; it is used in this fictional universe in ways that honor those who were on this land previously instead of pretending this area was uninhabited.

In the Ahmieverse, this community had been established and supported by Amelia the Planeswalker as a deliberate early response to the magical drought. When Amelia noticed ambient magic beginning to attenuate in the 11th century, she identified parahuman communities whose abilities were at risk and tested whether interplanar artifacts could supplement ambient magic to maintain their gifts. The Whittlesey people on Lake Erie's southwestern shore were her primary test case, and Amelia brought other scattered parahumans to them with the consent of all individuals involved. The area was already been a parahuman attractor predating Amelia's involvement — reflecting Algonquin's pre-drought influence subtly drawing magically sensitive beings toward her waters. Amelia found this attractor, recognized its potential, and invested.

Brohomir later incorporated this community into his long-range strategic planning as a proof-of-concept: that a clanless dragon and a parahuman community could sustain quiet coexistence on Algonquin's own shoreline for centuries. If Algonquin could ever be turned from enemy to ally, the existence of Cleveland — and Emily — would be part of that argument.

Emily was raised by the Whittlesey community from infancy. She received the name Looks-Aside in early childhood, given for her gaze accommodation, which her people recognized as a gift to them rather than a limitation of hers. She never lived among Heartstriker dragons, never completed a clan naming ceremony, and has no standing within the clan. She has avoided contact with any dragons other than her elder siblings. She is clanless.

The Retreat Underground (~1500–1650 CE)

As European contact beginning in the 16th century brought disease, colonial displacement, and the increasing impossibility of surface life for visibly parahuman peoples, the Whittlesey community gradually retreated underground — into the network of tunnels and cavern spaces Emily had been building and extending beneath the lakeshore over the preceding century, using her inherited Ninki Nanka burrowing instinct and her community's labor.

The Whittlesey Culture's disappearance from the archaeological record by approximately 1650 CE (historical fact) reflects this fictional retreat. Not death. Survival.

Emily did not leave.

The name She Who Stays was recognized — not given — when colonial pressure reached the point where leaving would have been rational, and she did not go. Amelia's interplanar artifacts, stored in the underground refuge, continue to sustain attenuated parahuman abilities through the drought and draw magically sensitive individuals to the Lakewood area. The descendants of those Emily sheltered became the foundation of the modern Lakewood parahuman community.

The Name "Whittlesey"

In the 1860s–1870s, archaeologist Charles Whittlesey (who is not a fictional character) documented the remnants of her founding community, mapped the outer edges of her underground refuge network without understanding what he had found, and published his conclusions using his own name as the label for the community. Emily watched this process. She adopted his surname as her human surname afterward. The colonizer named her people. She took his name and made it hers. It is grief encoded as a surname, wielded quietly.

The Cuyahoga River Fires (1868–1969)

Between 1868 and 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire at least thirteen documented times. Emily is personally responsible for a significant number of these incidents. Her dual fire inheritance — powerful but without instinctual coordination between its two sources — responds poorly to illness and allergy season. The river was already heavily industrially polluted; her sneezes lit what was already there.

The most famous fire occurred on June 22, 1969. Emily watched it on television. She sent Amelia a very short letter.

The environmental legislation that followed — contributing to the Clean Water Act and the gradual improvement of Lake Erie's water quality — caused Algonquin, spirit of the Great Lakes, to develop an unexamined soft spot for the Cleveland area. Algonquin does not know that the fires were caused by a dragon. She does not know why Cleveland keeps accidentally protecting her lake. She has chosen not to press the question. This possibly changes after the events of Julius's stories.

Modern Era

Emily lives in Lakewood, Ohio in a fully accessible house near the lake west of Lakewood Park. She is a licensed foster parent — one of the only fully wheelchair accessible non-institutional foster homes in Cuyahoga County — and hosts regular parahuman support group meetings at her home. She drives a modified van with hand controls.

The magical drought ended in 2035 CE when a meteor struck Canada and ambient magic returned. Following that, Emily can achieve full dragon transformation without Amelia's artifacts. She had waited approximately 600 years for this.

Personality

Staying as a Verb

Everything Emily does is rooted in a single, early choice: she stays. She did not choose her community — she was brought to them as an infant who could not walk. She chose, when she could have left, to remain. That choice has been made repeatedly, across six centuries, at increasing cost. She does not experience this as sacrifice. She experiences it as simply what she is.

Nurture Over Territory

Emily is the polar opposite of Bethesda in practice and disposition. Where Bethesda accumulates power, Emily distributes it — through shed scales, through the community she has cultivated, through the foster children she has raised. She does not hold territory. She holds people.

The Gaze as Responsibility

She has never used her gaze offensively. She uses it to protect, to still, to de-escalate something that is about to go wrong. She has watched what it does to beings who do not know it is coming, and she carries that awareness carefully. The tinted glasses are not an affectation.

Reading Without Looking

Centuries of peripheral-only awareness have produced a person who reads rooms with extraordinary accuracy. She knows where everyone is, what they are doing, and what they are about to do. She misses nothing. She simply does not do any of this with eye contact.

People who mistake the averted gaze for inattention tend to be surprised by what follows.

Receiving Help

She does not struggle to receive help from people she trusts. Growing up disabled in a community required processing this early. She understands help within trusted relationships as reciprocity. She objects only to uninvited intervention from people who have not earned that standing — a category that includes anyone who has moved her wheelchair without asking.

On Her Own Existence

Emily has Bethesda's green eyes. She carries her mother's surveillance spell on her face every day of her life. Her father was killed. Her clan does not know she exists. She was named by the sister who chose to spare her rather than the mother who ordered otherwise.

She has had centuries to metabolize all of this. She is not unaffected. She is also, genuinely and without performance, fine.

Relationships

Chelsie (C-Clutch)

Chelsie carried Emily from Heartstriker Mountain to the Whittlesey community in 1434 CE. She named her Emily. She visits across the centuries and maintains informal territorial proximity to Cleveland that operates below the level Bethesda would notice or care about. The full emotional weight of what Chelsie chose and what maintaining that choice has cost her is not Emily's story to tell. It is the ground Emily has walked on her entire life. HC

Amelia the Planeswalker (A-Clutch)

Amelia established the Whittlesey community as her primary test case for parahuman drought supplementation before Emily arrived in it. Her interplanar artifacts stored in Emily's underground refuge sustain the Lakewood parahuman community's parahuman abilities across centuries. The precise nature and frequency of direct contact between Amelia and the Whittlesey community over the generations is still being developed. HC

Amelia is responsible for Eirene Sun's ability to transform, through semi-consensual magical experimentation during Eirene's adolescence, with Emily as the intermediary.

Brohomir (B-Clutch)

Brohomir directed Chelsie to bring Emily to the Whittlesey community. He is aware of her existence and has classified her as a reserve asset — her paralyzing gaze is the strongest expression of the Ninki Nanka inheritance in all of E-Clutch, and he has filed that fact away for a scenario that may never materialize. He does not interfere with her life. That she built a thriving community and raised foster children in the centuries since was not in his plan. It happened because Emily happened. HC

Kenji / Ken

An elderly Japanese were-koi whose transformation was triggered by the events of World War II, which also gave him amnesia about his prior life. Whether he was born a boy or born a koi is the unresolved question at the center of his long life, and he has arrived at a working peace with not knowing. He facilitates a therianthrope support group that meets at Emily's home. He is one of the first adults some of Emily's foster children meet who does not try to resolve complexity into something manageable.

Foster Children

Emily has had numerous foster children over the centuries, but only takes in parahuman children who cannot safely be raised in other contexts or physically disabled foster children who would otherwise be unnecessarily institutionalized. She goes long stretches without a foster child in her home, and Eirene is her most recent and the only one who shared Emily's dual parahuman/disabled traits. This makes Eirene particularly dear to Emily.

Eirene Sun (foster daughter)

Disabled parahuman who can easily pass as human, placed with Emily in early adolescence (~1990) when Eirene's accumulating hEDS injuries necessitated wheelchair use and needed an accessible placement. Emily's home was one of the only fully wheelchair accessible non-institutional foster homes in the county, adapted for Emily's own disability.

Emily could not formally adopt Eirene due to the political exposure risk of drawing wider draconic attention to Eirene. She has been Eirene's mother in every meaningful sense since. She taught Eirene to guard her amplification power carefully — not as restriction, but as stewardship.

Emily is cautiously distant from Eirene's sons for reasons that protect everyone involved.

Role in Stories

Whose Elegance Would Endure

Emily's birth scene appears in the second-to-last chapter of Whose Elegance Would Endure, a fanfic by Ahmie Yeung set during the founding of the Heartstriker Clan (currently only existing as a Google Doc while Ahmie contemplates where to post it). She does not speak. She does not look at anyone directly. She is carried out of the vault by Chelsie before Bethesda finishes counting. This is her entrance into the Ahmieverse.

An in-progress fanfic, tentatively titled The Mistake by the Lake, also establishes the foundational worldbuilding for why Lakewood, Ohio has ambient magic during the drought and why the area draws atypical people. Emily is the load-bearing piece of that explanation.

Emily's Novella (in progress, untitled)

Emily is the protagonist of her own in-progress novella. Story beats are not documented here to avoid spoilers.

Uncle Lucius' Letters

Emily appears as Eirene Sun's foster mother. Her disability and her community role (but not her dragon nature) are present without being foregrounded as exceptional.

JTTW

Emily appears as a supporting figure in Eirene Sun's backstory and extended community. Her specific appearances are still being developed.

Notes for Other Writers

Emily is an open character. Other authors writing in the Ahmieverse are welcome to include her in their stories. The following notes apply to keeping her characterization consistent.

• She does not use "Heartstriker" as a name or surname. She is clanless. She never completed a naming ceremony. She uses Whittlesey as her human surname and her Whittlesey community names in indigenous contexts.
• Her glasses are not affectation. Removing them is a decision with consequences for every living being present. It should be written with weight.
• Any living being is affected by the gaze. The effect is not selective and not social. Do not limit it to humans or to beings who have been warned. People who know her read the hand-moving-toward-glasses as a warning. People who don't know her don't get that warning.
• Her wheelchair is never moved without her consent. This is a firm character boundary shared with Eirene Sun.
• She does not abandon people. This is not a character note — it is a load-bearing structural fact about who she is. Writers who need her to leave a situation should find a reason she cannot stay, rather than a reason she would choose to go.
• Her fire is dangerous when she is unwell. Allergy season, illness, and strong emotional distress are all relevant factors.

Writers working in the 19th–20th century Lakewood window should consult the Cuyahoga River fires timeline.

• She has been managing her power and her disability for six centuries. She is not a burden, a lesson, or a project. She is a full person with deep competence, her own grief, her own history, and her own agenda.
• The Ahmieverse may diverge from Heartstriker canon. Writers should prioritize Ahmieverse internal consistency. See Canon Relationship above.