Overview
Edward Rochester arrives at Thornwood as a visiting lecturer in Psychic Heartcraft, invited to teach advanced barrier construction for a single term. He is wealthy in the way that suggests old family money and recent personal cost. He moves through Thornwood with the confidence of a man who has been powerful and the caution of a man who has recently learned what power costs.
His lectures are brilliant. His barriers are impenetrable. Jane, who can read everyone else's emotions like open books, hits Rochester's walls and finds them — solid. Layered. Built by someone who has been constructing them for years. Not the careful, academic barriers taught at Thornwood. The desperate, practiced barriers of someone who has something to hide and knows exactly how much hiding it requires.
Gift
Rochester's Gift is Psychic Heartcraft — the Veil tradition. His specialty is barrier construction. He can build walls in his mind that even advanced practitioners cannot breach. The fact that he teaches barrier construction to students while maintaining the most impenetrable barriers at the academy is irony he does not acknowledge.
The risk: what happens when barriers finally break. Rochester's walls are not protecting the world from him. They are protecting the world from what he has done to someone he loves.
At Thornwood
He teaches for one term. He notices Jane Eyre. She is the only student who senses the shape of what he's hiding — not the content, but the architecture of the concealment. She knows there is a room. She doesn't know what's inside.
Notable
- Visiting professor, Psychic Heartcraft (barrier construction)
- No companion. He had one. He doesn't speak about it.
- Speaks to Jane with the formality of someone who is trying very hard not to say what he means
- The tower room he was assigned is directly below Aatos's. This may not be coincidence.