Swann is a qualified archaeologist and Synchronic Guardian, born in 1870 to a time-traveling oracle and the daimonic Ariadna. He is the only possible witness of the portal: «La noche la ve solamente Swann» (“Only Swann sees the night”). When the gesta begins in 1901 he is thirty-one.
| Type | Character |
| Born | 1870 (place unknown) |
| Parents | A time-traveling oracle (father); Ariadna / Elizabeth (mother) |
| Occupation | Archaeologist; Synchronic Guardian |
| Spanish entry | Swann |
Family
Father. He left the year 1100 and arrived in Paris in 1889, where he worked for wages on the city’s excavations and construction and studied singing in his free time. He became an oracle: “when he became an oracle he began to realize he could discover present, past and future”. From him Swann inherits his clairvoyance.
Mother. Ariadna is a beautiful, long-lived redhead — “she is a demon”, a daimonic entity who was a spy and agent of the Maldito, and who flees her own Tauric lineage. She passed through the years 1889 and 1870 pregnant with him. Some records call her Elizabeth, others Ariadna.
Swann is a bastard: he inherits by mixed blood, not by right. His place of birth is unknown, though the date is certain: “we don’t know where he was born but we do know when”.
Description
A young man, brown-haired, “very charismatic”. His eyes are described in two ways: “very particular honey-colored eyes”, ginger, that “look little with the light always”; and “eyes of an old, half-orange color”, with the red iris of the abyss. His nails “expand”.
He is “always well dressed in that little white suit”, a jacket with shoulder pads, together with leather armor. He carries and uses a pistol, though in the tavern he is “clearly” unarmed. He has recurring dreams of a nereid.
Abilities
- Archaeologist: command of “historiography, of ideas and of images” — reading the past by its remains and figures, alongside his inherited clairvoyance.
- Fighter: pistol, shoulder pads, leather armor and effective shots; a flying customs officer “took a shot from Swann”.
- Seer: he sees what no one else sees, and since his time journey carries the flare, “new, that has just taken a form”.
- Liberation: he freed Draga Machine, a bohemian girl — “you made her human, you finally gave her freedom”.
The Club
The Club de Swann is an organization with people and resources that bears his name (“we have the people of Swann’s club”). His office of Synchronic Guardian is shared with his companions.
Open questions
- Whether Elizabeth and Ariadna are one woman or two.
- Which portal only he sees, and why only he.
- What the flare is and does.
- How the dreamed nereid relates to his maternal, Tauric or oracular lines.
- From what state Draga Machine was freed, and by what means.
- Whether the Club is a guild, a society or a gang, and its relation to his office; the exact color of his eyes.