Alannys Gale is our main character.  She is a busy middle school music teacher at the beginning of our story, handling the school’s band, choir, and orchestra programs.  Before the end of the prologue, though, her situation turns desperate.

Alannys believes strongly in music as an agent for change, and a power for good.  She’s idealistic and a touch naive.  She left college planning to change the world, and finds herself unable to change the situation at one junior high school.

But just when Alannys is ready to give up hope entirely, her one friend at the school offers her the opportunity to make her dreams into reality.  But he never tells her the cost of that opportunity…

Alannys’s last name is a nod to the first character I ever read about who traveled from the ordinary world to a fantasy land–Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz.  Her first name is an actual name, with the spelling altered a bit to make it fit in better with the names we’ll find in Ravanmark.