Vergil is a broad-shouldered human man with close-cropped brown hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and the deliberate grooming of someone who still checks his kit before dawn. His uniform coat is mended at the elbows and hangs beneath a scholar's weathered cloak. He speaks in a low, measured voice, each word placed as carefully as a marker on a map. When rattled, his breath turns shallow and his sentences come out clipped, almost like field commands.

Patient, observant, and dependable, Vergil prefers clear plans and useful questions to grand speeches. He is unexpectedly gentle with frightened recruits and civilians, but has little patience for people who gamble with other lives.

Vergil learned discipline before he learned magic. In the border garrison at Bent Gate, a name the locals shortened from an old phrase meaning “the road by the reed beds,” he served as a signals corporal. His unit held a ford through a winter retreat, carrying orders by hand when the ravens stopped flying. He learned to read terrain, keep his nerve, and make a little food last. He also learned that a badly understood order can kill as surely as a blade.