Ketevan is a lean, long-limbed aasimar man with warm brown skin, dark copper hair cut close at the sides, and pale gold eyes that catch the light like polished brass. His celestial heritage shows most clearly in the faint radiance beneath his skin when he is moved or angry. He wears a salt-stiffened leather coat over a patched sailor's shirt, with careful repairs in contrasting blue thread. His lute is plainly made but obsessively maintained, its bridge polished smooth by his thumb. Before speaking, he usually takes a quiet breath through his nose and presses his tongue briefly to one canine tooth.

Ketevan is observant, dryly humorous, and patient with frightened people but not with bullies. He prefers practical kindness to grand speeches, yet he cannot resist turning an awkward truth into a memorable line. He is comfortable among strangers, especially in taverns and on ships, but keeps his own feelings behind professional courtesy and a sailor's habit of changing the subject.

Ketevan was raised in the harbor districts of a western trade city, the son of a human mother who kept accounts for a chandlery and an aasimar father who vanished aboard a survey ship before Ketevan was old enough to remember his face. The sailors who knew his father taught him knots, weather signs, and the practical art of staying useful when the sea turns cruel. Ketevan learned music from the ship's old deckhand, who claimed every vessel had a voice and that a good bard merely helped it find the right key. He spent several years aboard the merchant brigantine Copper Kestrel, serving as lookout, interpreter, and shipboard entertainer. During a storm near a reef marked on no chart, Ketevan's voice carried through the wind with a strange golden resonance, calming a panicked crew long enough for them to reef the sails. Afterward, the captain called it a miracle. Ketevan called it luck, though he has since noticed that the light in his palms answers strongest when someone nearby is afraid. He left the ship after its owners began using the crew to smuggle weapons, unwilling to become part of a cause he did not believe in. Now he travels from port to port, taking work where it comes, collecting stories, and quietly searching for any trace of the survey ship that carried his father away.