“The fall of the protectors. Surely that’s why you have come, isn’t it? Because of the forces that have been unleashed on your world — our world.” Emma blew out a breath. “I see the Light Wings have chosen you as their savior. I’m not surprised — how do we look so much alike?” — Dutybound, pg. 266
Emma Sarina is introduced as a protector of Light and the High Priestess of Remena in the third act of Dutybound. One of three in the last line of Terestria’s legendary Protectors, Emma holds great power, the ability to manipulate matter and energy at will.
The Protectors are Terestria’s most distant ancestors and closest in relation to the Light, being their direct descendents, with the line of Sarina being the first created among the noble families. The Protectors are blessed with the ability to commune with the ‘the world of the creators’ in order to use the power that lies there through an ability called “Runespeech”. Runespeech is the manifestion of the Creator’s will within ‘the world of creations’ otherwise known as Terestria.
When a protector is born, they are born with a power distinctive to their personality. In personality, Emma is a kind and gentle woman, devout to her faith and carrying out her destiny as a protector. However, the feelings of loneliness and isolation she experienced throughout her life and a chance encounter with a distant member of the family she thought she had lost forever brings Emma to question the role she should play in the grand scheme the Light has paved for Terestria’s salvation.
Lucia and Emma struggle with similar dilemma’s of duty and ambition. Both are bound in faith and duty, value freedom, and seek identity, but where one has lived a life of privilege, the other has faced a life of powerlessness.
Emma is forced to make an incredibly tough and unthinkable decision, to align herself with what she knows to be her birthright and preserve what little divinity her family line has left after the fall of Terestria’s natural order or to use her the full might of her powers to establish a new one.
Emma makes the ultimate sacrifice in taking on the burdens and consequences of her family’s betrayal and deciding for herself whether Terestria, as it is, is worth saving.
Emma’s story will tragically be woven with that of the virtues. Her power contested with Lucia’s as she comes into possession of the Dark Wings, the rune of antithesis, and seeks to use her new augmented power to fashion this unfamiliar world into a world of her own design. A world of tragedy and despair…
