A mountain princess who decided to interfere with the empire at the worst possible times.

Though she calls herself a princess, the lands Gawen is set to inherit are not exactly worthy of being called a kingdom (or queendom, as it were), being a small province in the mountains only really notable for some amount of ore and mineral deposits. She is much more ambitious than the current head of the Cawallader house, the aging Aeron; the latter is mostly content to hold onto the paltry lands they already possess. Gawen held different plans; she wanted to expand their holdings into the lands some of their neighbors held, which would allow hers to become significantly less reliant on trade to survive and more self-sufficient. However, the rulers of the neighboring lands weren't keen on giving them up via diplomacy and neither them nor Gawen were willing to give up any authority in order to share the lands between them. In addition, Cawallader was, and still is, not strong enough to invade a neighbor without exposing their backs to a warlord with similar ambitions.

To rectify this lack of strength, Gawen traveled to the Empire to hopefully arrange a deal; Cawallader would provide arms and armor, perhaps even a detachment of soldiers, and in exchange the Empire would provide her with the money or the troops she needed to cement her ambitions in reality at a later date. Travel takes time, however, and the mountain kingdoms don't exactly have instantaneous communication with one another, let alone the far reaches of the Empire. By the time she arrived in the Empire and and began making contacts, however, the climax of the war was rapidly approaching. While this might have made her offer of military aid more appealing, it also meant that the escalation of punishments for crime had reached its peak, with citizens being jailed and sentenced to execution left and right. Eventually, it reached a point she couldn't tolerate; she took the armed members of her retinue and tried to intervene in the arrest of another set of citizens. Unfortunately for her, even as strained as it was at the time, the peacekeeping force easily outnumbered her and her guards (it's not hard when you only brought four or five to begin with), and she surrendered rather than fight a hopeless battle that would end in her capture or death regardless.

Time in prison hasn't been particularly kind; a noblewoman, even one who'd attempted to prevent people from being put into prison in the first place, tended to not have an attitude that would be conducive to having a relatively peaceful time in a place like that. Gawen was no exception, though she wasn't quite the target that some would expect; she was a warrior noble, not one whose family had bought their way into their titles, and she continued the tradition of strict martial training in addition to lessons in politics.