Grimur is a lean, ash-brown Shadar-kai with silver-gray skin, long black hair braided with tiny bone beads, and calm violet eyes that seem to darken when he invokes his patron. He wears weathered leather beneath a charcoal traveling coat, its inner lining embroidered with faded diagrams of organs, roots, and constellations. Within a minute of meeting him, people notice his slow, deliberate breathing and his peculiar gait, in which he glides forward with his left foot landing almost silently while his right heel gives a faint wooden tap. When frightened or angry, his breathing stops entirely for several seconds, followed by a sharp, involuntary laugh.

Quietly attentive and unnervingly patient, Grimur listens as if every conversation might contain a dying person's final confession. He is courteous toward strangers, tender with the sick, and almost offensively practical around danger. He dislikes grand speeches, prefers precise questions, and has a dry sense of humor that appears at the worst possible moments.

Grimur was born among the Shadar-kai in a settlement built around a silent black lake, where the dead were remembered through careful rituals rather than mourned aloud. He became fascinated with the physical details of dying, not from cruelty, but because he believed every death left behind a message that the living were too frightened to hear. As a young adult, he withdrew into an abandoned observatory in the Shadowfell, where he catalogued the final breaths of animals, travelers, and willing devotees who came seeking answers. His journals became less a record of death than a map of the moment just before it. During the thirty-third year of his solitude, Grimur found a voice speaking from inside a sealed reliquary. The voice belonged to an ancient intelligence that had survived by refusing every natural distinction between life and death. It offered him knowledge in exchange for acts of preservation, asking him to keep certain names from vanishing and certain bodies from being forgotten. Grimur accepted, though he never learned whether he had made a pact with a benevolent guardian, a parasite, or the echo of his own future corpse. He now travels beyond the Shadowfell, posing as a physician, scholar, and occasional fraud, collecting stories of the dead while searching for the first name his patron erased from history.