Lost in his grief and guilt over the death of his sister, Larka, Fell rejects the gift of the Sight, and becomes a Kerl, which is the wolf name for a loner.
His dead sister, Larka, appears to him, and she shows him a picture of a girl with a tattoo in the shape of an eagle on her arm.
The girl who Fell saw is Alina Sculcavant, who is growing up in the care of Malduk, a shepherd who rescued her from the snows.
While they are there, they discover that they can mentally communicate using the Sight, and Fell eventually decides to accompany Alina on her journey due to his vision of Larka.
At the beginning of Fell, Alina is fifteen, hiding the fact that she is female by keeping her red hair short and by binding her chest.
Alina is an avid storyteller, and her stories usually consist of tales about goblins, Baba Yaga, and fairies—anything to take her mind from what Malduk and Ranna put her through.
Because of a "magic potion" given to Alina by Malduk, she has developed amnesia and only in dreams can remember pieces of what happened to her before she was lost in the snow.
Malduk - old shepherd who, because of his injured back, makes his wife and Alina do a lot of the work around his home.
Malduk makes Alina do more work than even a boy is expected to do, and both he and his wife Ranna treat her cruelly.
Mia takes risks to do anything she can for Alina, who she admires, and the girl makes up for the ill treatment her aunt and uncle give.
She playfully believes that since Alina is a goblin child she can use magic to put a spell on her aunt and uncle to make them nicer.
Lescu's wife died previous to the events of Fell, and he has raised Catalin alone, and knows that his son is a little lonely from growing up without a mother.
When Alina reaches the valley of Baba Yaga, Lescu lets her stay in a spare room in his home.
He distances himself from her a few times in the book because he learns that she has been travelling with Fell, who he thinks is the devil in wolf form.
He makes up with her later, however, after she and Fell are caught in an ambush by the remaining soldiers of Vladeran that escaped from his house after killing Lescu.
In addition to calling Alina a traitor and throwing her out, at one point Vladeran contemplates murdering his seven-year-old son, Elu.
Vladeran learned dark magic and gained the ability to talk to the dead—namely, Morgra, Fell's deceased aunt who had the Sight and put a 'curse' on him and his family when they refused to let her travel with them.
Elu - Alina's baby brother, and Lord Vladeran and Lady Romana's seven-year-old son.
The wolves kept Elu/Bran for a while, and a short time after Larka gave the Vision to her brother, Fell took the infant human back to his home.
Before a battle, Vladeran deliberately damaged Lord Dragomir's saddle so that he fell off his horse and was supposedly killed.
Vladeran received a prophecy from Morgra that he "could only be killed if her [Alina's] father is in sight of these very halls",[3] but thought that he never could be since he'd seen Lord Dragomir die.
Ranna framed Alina for murdering Bogdan so the villagers would turn against and kill the young girl in retribution.
Barbat - A villager of Moldov who was one of the men who found Bogdan's body with Alina's knife in his back.
Ottol, a beaver, puts the same question past him, but tells Fell that he enjoys the sunlight like most creatures even if he chooses the darkness.
By the end of the book Fell knows that he had finally left the darkness and can escape the shadows of the past to become a true wild wolf, and start a new life with Tarlar.