Eshavan is a lean, russet-skinned tiefling with swept-back horns, dark eyes, and a long tail that curls around a chair leg when he sits. His stage coat is carefully patched at the elbows and hangs a little too loosely at the shoulders, while a worn blue scarf is kept improbably clean. He checks the scarf's folded edge whenever a conversation turns difficult.

Warm and attentive, Eshavan lets other people finish their stories before offering his own. He can turn a tense room into an audience, but dislikes being treated as a curiosity or as a convenient source of entertainment.

Eshavan has no birthplace he can name, only a string of roads and borrowed roofs remembered in fragments. He learned early that people often decide what a tiefling is before he has spoken. Songs gave him a way to answer without asking permission. He gathered tunes from caravan guards, kitchen hands, pilgrims, and children, keeping the words as faithfully as he could, even when the truth made a room uncomfortable. He became an entertainer because a crowd would listen to a story it might refuse to hear from a stranger. At a rough roadside stage called the Fourth Ditch, named for the drainage cut cleared before its first boards were laid, he found an audience willing to hear the same tale from every side. Now he travels with a battered lute and a growing collection of other people's histories. He does not claim to know where he began. He believes that telling the truth about where others come from may be a kind of home.