Professor Emiliana Sarto has spent fifteen years studying the one subject the Academy would rather no one study: Vallombrosa itself — the boundary, the fog, and the fey-touched quirks that make Venturia what it is. For most of those years, her work sat at the margins of VAVA, tolerated more than respected.

Her Work

Sarto's research centers on the valley and its fog: how the boundary behaves, why fey-touched effects intensify near it, and what the city's stranger happenings might mean. It is unfashionable scholarship at an Academy where wealthy donors prefer their children kept well away from such questions — and Sarto has built her reputation by refusing to drop them anyway.

She is a vocal advocate for lifting VAVA's quiet restrictions on Vallombrosa research, and has pressed Academy leadership to open its sealed records on the subject.

Reputation

Among students and colleagues, Sarto is known as dogged, passionate, and a little obsessive — the professor who kept asking the questions everyone else had agreed to leave alone. For years that earned her polite dismissal. Lately, with the city's recent strangeness, far more people have started taking her seriously, and for the first time her field looks less like a dead end and more like the thing everyone should have been studying all along.

Connections

• The Venturian Academy of Veiled Arts — Her institution.
• Archmagister Dorian Silvermarch — The Academy's leader, whom she lobbies to open VAVA's restricted Vallombrosa records.
• Vallombrosa — The subject she has studied for years.