A broad-shouldered male tiefling with brick-red skin, swept-back charcoal horns, a long tail, and thick black hair usually tied at the nape. His amber eyes are steady rather than fiery, and his face has the weathered, watchful look of someone who measures every room before entering it. He wears chain mail beneath a battered traveling coat, with a mother's locket tucked beneath his shirt. The locket's leather cord has polished a narrow dark groove into the skin at the back of his neck from years of constant wear. He habitually checks its position with two fingers whenever he is anxious. His movements are economical, balanced, and practiced, with the quiet readiness of a veteran pit fighter and caravan guard.

Seshai is guarded, observant, and dryly charming when he chooses to be. He dislikes being fussed over, but notices immediately when someone else is cold, hungry, frightened, or being intimidated. He prefers practical kindness to declarations of affection and trusts people who respect a refusal the first time. He can perform confidence for a crowd with ease, yet genuine intimacy leaves him searching for an exit.

Seshai was born in a border city large enough to have a keep, a market, and enough strangers that a red-skinned child could disappear into the crowd. His mother cleaned the keep's halls and loved him without reservation. His father served as a guardsman and taught Seshai to stand, strike, and keep his fear behind his teeth. When sober, his father played the dutiful parent. When drunk, he looked at Seshai's horns, tail, and red skin and saw only the infidelity he believed they represented. The words became cruel long before the hands did. After Seshai's mother died in winter, the drinking worsened. His father lost his post after a drunken fall left him with a ruined leg, and the household became a place Seshai entered only to make certain it had not burned down around the old man. One evening, Seshai found a covered wagon in the yard and was ambushed inside the house. His father sold him to a traveling showman without meeting his eyes. For years, Seshai cleaned animal cages by day and fought by night, first in chains and later for wagers. He learned to read a crowd, fight dirty, lose when ordered, and win when the odds demanded spectacle. Keeping his own cage immaculate became his one reliable act of control. His mother's locket, containing a dried flower and a small drawing of her face, became the other. He escaped during a crowded winter performance, talked his way into work as a caravan guard, and has lived as a hired sword ever since. He now serves no master for long, keeps an exit plan for every building, and refuses to be anyone's property or burden. Somewhere beyond the next road waits the possibility of revenge against his father, the fear of meeting the showman again, and a secret desire to find the fiend whose bloodline gave him a life of being treated as an omen.