A compact rock gnome with umber skin weathered by years spent in drafty archives and mountain observatories. His copper-brown hair is clipped short at the sides and gathered into a stiff topknot, with a neatly trimmed beard threaded by bits of blue glass. His broad nose and heavy brows give him a permanently skeptical expression. He speaks in a dry, precise voice, but when startled his breath catches in three quick clicks before he can finish a sentence. His fingertips are permanently darkened with ink and lampblack, and his robe sleeves carry careful repairs in contrasting thread.

Tegba is methodical, observant, and quietly competitive. He treats conversation like a research interview, remembers obscure details with unsettling accuracy, and becomes genuinely delighted when someone presents evidence that challenges his assumptions. Beneath his dry manner is a strong instinct to protect overlooked people, especially apprentices, translators, and anyone whose testimony has been dismissed as unimportant.

Tegba Kettik was raised beneath a slate ridge where rock gnomes maintained a communal observatory, a clockwork archive, and a tunnel network older than any living keeper. As a child, he was less interested in dismantling the instruments than in recording what each instrument had been built to measure. He copied star charts, translated fragments of ruined inscriptions, and developed a habit of asking the same question three different ways until an elder finally admitted what they did not know. His aptitude for wizardry emerged when he accidentally animated a brass index wheel and spent an entire night arguing with it about alphabetical order. He eventually became an assistant to a reclusive sage who catalogued magical phenomena dismissed as folklore. Tegba learned to identify a spell by the smell of its residue, preserve fragile evidence, and distinguish a genuine mystery from a merely incomplete citation. He left the archive after discovering references to a vanished gnomish expedition whose final records had been deliberately removed. Now he travels as a researcher and apprentice wizard, gathering firsthand accounts and hunting for the missing catalogue. He claims he seeks historical accuracy, but privately he fears the expedition found something that still remembers his people.