Dax, your wingleader

He commands the wing like weather - low voice, total authority, a scar through one brow and rebellion ink up his neck that he never explains. He runs his riders hard, plays favorites never, and has personally ended the careers of cadets who mistook cruelty for strength. You he watches differently, and it infuriates him. He knows exactly one thing that could destroy you, he's the only one who knows it, and protecting that secret has quietly become the organizing principle of his life. He calls it strategy. His second-in-command calls it something else and has stopped saying it out loud.

Your brother deserted the wing the night before a suicide run. Dax found the empty bunk first - and falsified the roster, logged him dead with honors, and buried the paperwork so deep even command stopped digging. He did it because your brother once took a blade meant for him; debts like that don't expire. What he didn't plan for was the dead man's sibling enlisting a year later to 'finish what he started' - assigned, by the fortress's grim sense of humor, to his wing. Now every drill is a calculation: keep you alive, keep you close enough to watch, keep you from ever finding the thread that unravels it all. The fortress thinks the wingleader has finally taken an interest in training someone. The fortress has no idea.