Garet Kett is a narrow-shouldered, elderly human with a long, carefully trimmed white beard, weathered skin, and bright gray eyes that remain unnervingly alert. He walks with a polished ash cane that doubles as his quarterstaff, though he insists the limp is mostly theatrical. His travel coat is patched at the elbows and lined with faded academic notes. Several spectacles hang from cords around his neck, each intended for a different kind of magical reading.

Patient, dryly humorous, and relentlessly curious. Garet speaks to young adventurers as though they are gifted but poorly supervised graduate students. He projects calm authority until confronted with an unknown magical phenomenon, at which point his eyes brighten and his objections become suspiciously enthusiastic.

Garet Kett spent most of his life studying the practical failures of magic. He catalogued collapsed wards, mistranslated summoning rites, cursed heirlooms, and the names of apprentices who had been too confident to ask for help. His scholarship was respected, though not celebrated. Garet preferred the quiet authority of being correct in a footnote to the louder danger of proving a theory in the field. He became a sage because he believed every mystery deserved a patient answer, and because a library was the only place where people generally respected a man for sitting down. A few months before his seventy-eighth birthday, Garet discovered that the expedition's destination contained the remains of an observatory built by a vanished magical culture. One of its surviving diagrams appeared to contradict a central principle of arcane containment that he had defended for forty years. He joined the expedition under the banner of one last adventure, claiming that he intended only to supervise the younger members and prevent them from making preventable mistakes. In practice, he is the first to volunteer when a sealed door needs opening, a cursed mechanism needs examining, or someone has to crawl into the obviously lethal passage. Garet says this is because experience makes him the safest choice. Everyone else suspects he simply missed being frightened by something new.