Alina Starkov NAME
Cis female SEX/GENDER
Shadow & Bone (Grishaverse) CANON
1x07, searching for the stag CANONPOINT

When Alina was a child at Ana Kuya's orphanage in Keramzin, she met Malyen Oretsev, a descendant of Sankt Ilya Morozova and a human amplifier for Grisha power. They felt inexplicably drawn to one another (Alina's power hungering for the amplifier that was made for her, and Malyen's amplifier gravitating towards the sankta destined to use it) and became best friends, eventually falling in love with one another. For much of her life, Alina believed her feelings for Mal were one-sided, but recently she has learned that Mal returns her feelings; what she doesn't know is that he's an amplifier, and that that's responsible for their pull towards one another.

As a mapmaker in Ravka's Second Army, Alina went out onto the Fold and learned that she was Grisha, a type of human with exceptional pseudo-magical abilities. Because hers involved summoning and bending light, she was viewed as a saint by the people of Ravka, and brought to the Little Palace so she could train to destroy the Shadow Fold that divided the country. This seated Alina with an incredible amount of power and responsibility at a young age, quite suddenly. In the book series, we see how that pressure overwhelms Alina and combines with her low self-worth to make her anxious and depressive.

At the Little Palace, Alina was made to feel like she was "more than a stick from Keramzin" for the first time — she felt important, loved, and powerful because of the way the First Army General and another descendant of Ilya Morozova and human amplifier, Aleksander Kirigan, treated her. The two developed a romantic relationship.

Alina's romantic relationship with Aleksander dissolves after his mother tells her that he intends to forcibly implants an amplifier into her in a manner that gives him total control over her sun summoning, so that he can weaponize the Fold and seize political power in Ravka. Feeling betrayed and manipulated, Alina flees the capital and Aleksander.

As a light-siren, Alina takes the form of an exceptionally tall and skeletally thin humanoid woman with smooth, shiny skin of gold and ivory. Her eyes and mouth are glowing holes like pits into a shining, golden hell. She has white hair down past her knees, a garish art-deco style crown-cum-halo, and a pair of antlers growing out of her collarbones. She has three sets of gilded white biblically-accurate-angel wings coming out of her shoulder blades. Her ribcage can open up to a similar golden-light-abyss, large enough to act as a mouth to devour an adult male.

TRANCE | Alina's monstrous form lures people to her with a siren-like trance created by her voice and by indirect glimpses of her light. She has a magnetism about her that makes people almost religiously desperate to worship her.

SUNLIGHT | In this form, Alina maintains all her power for sun summoning without any control, and therefore she blinds anyone who looks at her, burning out their eyes if they look for long enough.

DEVOURING | Once they are incapacitated, her hair draws them in as sort of grasping tentacles, and she absorbs them (whole) into her ribcage-mouth. When she eats people, her own power grows stronger — her light more powerful, her allure more difficult to resist, her base strength higher.

Desperate for love, attention, and veneration, Alina's greedy monstrous form is driven to ply and wheedle people into looking at her. She seeks followers, worshippers, lovers. But she is insatiable, for no one can actually look upon her and marvel without being scarred and horrified, and she will always devour them to increase her power instead of sharing it or protecting them.