Her hair is a deep red, and her eyes a steely grey, piercing and bright even as a baby. As she grew, those golden patches did as well, extending to short short, squat horns in her childhood.

In time, Edel proved to be prodigious in many ways besides just her height. A powerful body, a brilliant mind, an unimpeachable purity, an iron will, and incredible talent for elementalism and many crafts and trades. She achieves prowess with elemental metal at the earliest age in clan's records, only eight winters old, The next year, she gains prowess with lightning and fire as well.

Unfortunately, later that year, she's stricken with a strange curse of the blood, Even with all the strength of her body and soul, she cannot fight it off completely, and by the time her tenth winter arrives, her arms and legs have withered to stumps. Even at her young age, she's nearly the height of a grown women without her legs, and is still growing month by month, so it's not feasible for her to be carried to and fro, nor could her stubborn pride allow such a thing even if it were possible. Instead, she trains incessantly through the winter, often going days without sleeping just to continue her training, until she is able to reliably form and control metal limbs with just as much strength and precision as she once wielded in her flesh. It's not strictly an unheard of feat, but it certainly is unheard of for a girl of just ten winters. Despite the set-back of the blood-curse, her star seemingly continues to rise.

Edel's life is fairly steady for much of her second decade. The clan lands a lucrative contract with a new electric utilities company from the Dragon Empire, involving some work helping electrify the kingdoms, with some side deals regarding transporting and distributing electronic hardware to help showcase the value of expanding the electrical grid. It wasn't the usual sort of work the Deanleys took, but they were well-equipped and connected to do it. This program is what introduces Edel to the clan's work at the age of 13.

She excells at the work, but more importantly finds great joy in it, and in seeing how the lives of the various peasants and petty nobles improve with the coming of electricity. Perhaps even more important than that, however, is what Edel discovers in those devices for herself. Edel is a remarkably intelligent girl, capable of developing an understanding even of highly complicated systems with great speed and facility, but even so, nothing in her life has made more sense, on a deep, visceral level than the electronics that the clan work exposes her to do. Their inner works, components, and systems blossom in her mind with almost no effort. Only a few days after first handling a simple electrical fan, she redesigns her prosthetics to incorporate incorporate mechanical joints and electromagnetic motors, augmenting their strength and dexterity and allowing to split some of the work between her metal and lightning elementalism rather than leaning entirely on the former. About a month after that redesign, and lots of correspondence with the R&D branch of the clan's partner company, plans have been drawn up for Edel and her immediate family to make the long trek south to Dragonia to join them in their work. Over that same month, Edel discovers that her connection to electronic devices extends much further than just have some strange sense for their composition and operation. She can influence then, control them, power them, even lift and move them all with just an exertion of will.

The Dragon Empire is different in many ways from the lands of the White. It's much warmer, and only the northern cities of the empire get any real snowfall during winter. Everything is much more expensive. The paths in their cities are narrow enough that she's forced to stick only to main streets or else risk damaging buildings she passes. There's so much more stuff, just in general. More people, more buildings, more activities, more technology for her senses to spill out into. She actually has to learn how to limit how much information she gathers from all the electronics around Boreapolis. It's not too much for her, she's quite adept at processing all the information, but rather because it's a gross invasion of hundreds of people's privacy, including lots of strange and moderately upsetting acts people do in private.

Some things are not especially different, though. The Fair Queen still predominates the spiritual lives of everyone around Edel, as well as herself, though she's never been an especially pious person. There are more goblins and beastfolk, but humans still make up the majority and still showed their characteristic disrespect disparagement of others, though now this distinctly included Edel, whose horns, despite their golden substance, nonetheless labeled her as bearing beast-blood.