Ashlee "Ash" Rinn Jensdottir

The protagonist and point-of-view character of the Stardust novel, Ashlee Rinn Jensdottir is a resilient if battered shell of a woman. She connects fully neither with her family nor with civilization, for she has legitimate grievances on both counts. She rarely socializes with her two crewmates, who also are misfits living on the edge. She keeps her relationship with them at arms-length, and her emotional health and past trauma siloed.

From a young age, Ashlee was enthralled by the ancient tales of Sibylean settlement and the intelligence, strength, and conviction of its first royalty and jarlja in a way that cisgender boys rarely were. She grew her hair long, dyed, and braided it. Thanks to her family’s curious outsider status‌ both economic and social, she got away with presenting as gender non-conforming until she was a teenager.

An introvert, Ashlee loves Sibylean nature. She would often wander the forests surrounding the Raina Mare outside Tencair, as if she was attempting to bear witness to the Sibylean sagas. (Many events of the sagas took place on the shores of the Raina Mare.) These treks into nature would get her in trouble with her wealthy parents—who feared kidnapping and ransom ‌at first—and with the authorities when she would camp in the sacred lands alone, telling no one where she was going.

Sibylean society is matriarchal and elevates women, but it doesn’t denigrate or exclude men. When Ashlee told her parents that she may be transgender, a term she picked up from imported republican media, her parents went ballistic. Believing their introverted child to suffer from some inferiority complex, and desperately wanting to spare their confused teenager humiliation on their world, they attempted to shield her from such malign foreign influences. Ashlee rejected these coercive measures, and by her twentieth orbit was no longer using her birth name.

The Commonwealth’s universal basic income system allowed Ashlee to flee her family and seek medical treatment for her gender dysphoria underground, a roll of the dice that often made her ill. She changed her name, but could not change her gender marker on government identification. Seeing few options for prosperity on the ground, Ashlee entered commercial flight school, and later, interdiction training. Upon her certification, Ashlee bought her own "Starling" trans-atmospheric cargo vessel with money she saved from swindling her wealthy parents. Despite her deceit, she repaid them two years later, albeit with interest she accrued in an unsavory fashion.

Not much has changed for Ashlee since she launched her career in space. She lives aboard her ship, finding solace in the distance that the void provides her with Astrilish society and for the economic opportunity inherent in working specialist search and rescue. Her only two companions are her hired crew, Teresa Shaaban and Leandros Fletcher, both refugees of their own circumstances from further abroad.

Ashlee Rinn is a troubled romantic and lionheart. Rarely aloof, Ashlee can have problems reading the emotions and intentions of others. She is a lawful and honorable individual who connects to her world only in tangential ways that rarely meet everyday civilization itself. Minding a slightly skewed sense of morality necessary to do her job, she treats everyone with respect until mutual respect is denied. Ashlee’s only desire is to be accepted for who she is. Yet despite all its faults, she never stopped believing in the potential of her lunar homeworld and deeply cares for it. She knows Sibyl can be a better place than she experienced growing up, because she read the Eldalæsyr thoroughly. One can hardly doubt the determination and communal spirit of the Sibylean people.