A small female rock gnome, 3 feet 5 inches tall, with warm copper-brown skin, bright gray-green eyes, and thick dark auburn hair braided with bits of brass wire. Her eyebrows are perpetually smudged with ink, and a crescent-shaped burn marks one fingertip from an overambitious experiment. She wears layered scholar's robes beneath a fitted traveling coat, with a spellbook strapped securely across her back and a polished crystal arcane focus hanging at her belt.

I am warm, curious, and relentlessly observant. I can discuss ancient empires with complete focus, then become equally invested in identifying the owner of a mysterious button. I prefer asking precise questions to making grand declarations, but I am fiercely protective of anyone whose voice has been ignored or erased.

Nerys Pahravan was raised in a hillside gnome burrow where every household kept at least one library, two broken clocks, and an argument about the proper use of commas. Her mother repaired astronomical instruments, while her father copied legal histories for distant human courts. Nerys showed an unusual gift for noticing patterns in damaged texts. She could reconstruct missing sentences from the shape of wormholes, the fading of ink, and the habits of individual scribes. By the time she was old enough to travel, she had become less interested in reading books than in discovering why certain books had been deliberately altered. She spent decades moving between monasteries, noble archives, and private collections, working as a cataloger, translator, and occasional chimney-sweeper whenever access to a sealed library required humility. A patient old historian taught her the first principles of wizardry and gave her a blank spellbook with one warning, never trust a text that claims to be complete. Nerys eventually uncovered references to a vanished archive whose records described a magical disaster erased from nearly every surviving history. Now she adventures to locate the missing archive before someone else finds it, while helping ordinary people harmed by secrets kept in the name of scholarship. She considers knowledge a public trust, not a private treasure.