Scudly is a thin, pallid wood elf with ash-brown hair cut unevenly around his pointed ears and large gray-green eyes that rarely seem to blink. His narrow frame is usually wrapped in a scholar's robe beneath a patched leather jerkin, with a small satchel of notes, ink, and stolen-looking stationery at his hip. His hands are stained with black and blue ink, and his expression suggests that he has just remembered an obscure fact that everyone else has missed.

Scudly is cautious, observant, and intensely curious. He speaks in precise little bursts, frequently begins explanations with the words "Strictly speaking," and becomes animated whenever someone mentions a ruined library, an undeciphered inscription, or an impossible contradiction. Although physically unimpressive and easily winded, he is quietly brave when protecting knowledge or a companion who has been dismissed as unimportant.

Scudly was raised among the quiet shelves of a woodland archive, where elven historians preserved treaties, botanical records, and embarrassing secrets belonging to noble families long dead. He was never a strong hunter or a graceful duelist, but he possessed an uncanny talent for finding the one loose page, hidden compartment, or missing footnote that everyone else overlooked. His instructors called him a difficult student because he asked questions at inconvenient times and corrected ancient texts with irritating accuracy. They also admitted that he could copy a damaged manuscript so faithfully that even the original seemed less trustworthy afterward.