so i'm being weird and rereading old posts, and i noticed that in your original post about worldwalker, you say that hair is a marking of status: the longer the hair, the higher the status. that struck me as interesting because crispin has long hair, and that makes sense, because he was raised as a scholar and whatnot. but then brenneth has long hair too? her whole life, i think. (forgive me if i'm wrong, my brain isn't great with details.) is there a reason for that? is she making a statement?
You’re correct! Brenneth has kept her hair long for a number of reasons, some of them more esoteric than others, but here’s a short rundown of the main ones.
She’s alianater, a worldwalker, and therefore holds some default status in Alleirat because of her formidable magical abilities, to the effect of Might Makes Nobility--when someone "got bored” of having a bellows in her forge and opted to casually use the kind of magic most people spend years developing to keep her fires hot instead, it’s a rare soul with the guts to roll up and say she’s getting uppity.
Crispin fought for her to be trained with him, and then later for her to hold a rank equal to him. This was unsuccessful, but won them both some goodwill, and as such the mutterings about Brenneth being above her station were mostly limited to behind their backs.
Brenneth never really wanted to be a hero, and that was true even when they first arrived and she was limping through Alleirai at a rate of a few words a minute. However. She also did not enjoy being written off as ‘irrelevant’ because she was a girl, and insisted on keeping her hair long, at first, because it was an indication of “girl-ness” on Earth, even if it wasn’t really the same thing on Alleirat.
Brenneth trained as a warrior as well as a blacksmith, which afforded her additional inherent status--warriors are considered of an inherently higher rank than craftsmen, a holdover from when Alleirat was determined to rip itself apart with wars and warriors were hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement. It’s not uncommon for warriors to wear their hair long enough to put up in a bun, because the “warrior’s spike” is a traditional hairpiece worn by warriors at formal events or in daily life to identify them. In old stories it’s a stiletto blade, more realistically it’s a single slender stick made of wood or bone (very occasionally metal) with a point on one end and some kind of carved ornament on the other, like a single hair stick. Since Brenneth showed a natural talent for combat nearly as good as her natural talent for metalworking, she was technically within her social rights to keep her hair long as soon as she was given her first spike by one of her teachers.
Brenneth likes wearing her hair long. Her hair is kind of her only vanity, she doesn’t like to think of cutting it off. It reminds her of when she liked herself and her world the best, and eventually gives her some hope of getting back there.
Finally: there are things attached to her hair--memories--that Brenneth can’t bring herself to get rid of. Before the White Wolf, she liked to have Crispin braid it for her.