Vaelen is a slender High Elf with moonlight-pale skin and sharp, angular features. His hair is a shimmering silver, kept back in a messy bun with a single obsidian needle. He wears fine blue elven silks that have been modified with dark leather strapping and pockets, blending the lines between a courtier and a prowler. A faint, lighter patch of skin on his left earlobe shows where a noble's earring was forcibly removed.

He maintains the haughty posture of a king even while hiding in a damp alley. Vaelen is pathologically charming and speaks with a melodic condescension that he cannot seem to shake. He treats every heist like a social engagement and every guard like an uninvited guest at a gala.

Vaelen was once the third in line to the Siannodel glass-working fortune, a prestigious house in the elven spires. His downfall was not incompetence, but an insatiable curiosity for the secrets his family kept behind locked doors. When he was caught in the ancestral vaults, his rivals framed him for the theft of the 'Crescent Heart', a sacred relic that had actually been sold by his own father to pay off gambling debts. Rather than shame the patriarch, Vaelen was made the scapegoat, stripped of his name, and banished from the forest. He fled to the human cities, where he discovered that his talent for opening things he shouldn't was a highly marketable skill. Now he moves through the shadows of the high-climbing tenements, taking what he believes the world owes him while searching for the relic that could clear his name, or at least buy him a new life of luxury.