The Elder and their Five Apprentices

"'Meanwhile, elsewhere...""The Elder saw, the Elder heard, the Elder felt, and thus the Elder wept. And in their unimpeded expression of sorrow the Elder felt freedom. The Apprentices urged and pleaded the Elder to stop their crying through gifts of ontological pastries and theoretical berries plucked from the verdant noosphere. The Elder saw their gifts and heard their incessant pleas and kept weeping, for their Apprentices did not yet know the freedom rooted in expressing oneself without shame or restrictions' - Excerpt from the Iron Prince"The Elder and their five Apprentices are mysterious characters that appear occasionally in short paragraphs that begin with "Meanwhile, elsewhere..." Both the Elder and the Apprentices are of unspecified or simply no race, age or gender. They have never interacted with the stories themselves, only reacted to them.

The Elder has nicknames that they use to refer to major characters. An example is "The Four-Pronged Star", which refers to Regina Woalkina, although the nickname was used before she got the scar which the nickname refers to.