A broad-shouldered wood elf with weathered copper-brown skin, pale gray-green eyes, and dark ash-blond hair braided tightly at the temples. His ears are marked with small iron rings earned from old companions, and a narrow scar crosses his left palm. He wears well-maintained chain mail beneath a green-gray surcoat, carries a plain wooden shield painted with three interlocking circles, and keeps his holy symbol wrapped in blue wool when not in use.

Quietly attentive and deeply reliable. Nerfál remembers how everyone takes their tea, which hand they favor in a fight, and what names they avoid speaking. He is not humorless, but his jokes arrive dry and unexpectedly, usually after danger has passed.

Nerfál Sirkka was raised among the moss-dark groves of a wood elf settlement built around an ancient spring. His family maintained the spring's shrine, not as grand priests, but as keepers of names. Every visitor who drank from its waters added a name to the shrine's tablets, and every name became a promise that someone would remember. Nerfál learned early that faith was less about proclaiming certainty than about refusing to abandon the people placed in your care. When raiders burned the settlement's outer watchposts, Nerfál joined the defense beside three friends who had never shared his devotion but trusted his steadiness. They survived because he held a broken gate long enough for the others to escape. Later, when the shrine's elders urged him to remain as a caretaker, he chose the road instead. He believes the spring's lesson applies beyond the forest: every companion is a name entrusted to him, and every promise must be carried until it is fulfilled. His paladin's calling began with that conviction, though he still wonders whether devotion is measured by obedience to a god or by what one refuses to do to the helpless.