Wazir is a silver dragonborn whose scales look less like polished armor than hammered pewter, each overlapping plate dulled by years of steam, salt, and medicinal grease. His broad muzzle is dusted with pale crystals from working over cold-brewed tinctures; when he turns his head, the ridges along his jaw catch the light like chipped ice. He moves with a careful, heel-first tread on slick floors, then startling speed when a vial tips or someone needs help. His hands are heavily callused at the thumb pads and stained green around the nails from grinding herbs. Unexpectedly for an outpost apothecary, he keeps a tiny collection of bright, carefully folded paper birds tucked into his coat, each made by a patient he treated.

He is sincerely hopeful but not naive: he plans for disasters and knows how quickly people can turn on one another when supplies run short. In a crisis he becomes clipped, efficient, and commanding; in quiet company he is patient and unexpectedly playful. He wants to trust people, yet keeps records of every dose and promise because he has learned that good intentions alone do not preserve medicine.

Wazir grew up in a caravan that traded dried herbs and lamp oil between southern ports and the far north. He learned to measure medicines by smell before he could read their labels. At nineteen, an avalanche buried a supply sled carrying the only fever treatment for the outpost of Bristlewick. Wazir dug until his hands split, but arrived too late to save the station's magistrate. That failure changed him: he settled at the outpost and made a promise that nobody in Bristlewick would die for lack of a remedy he could have prepared. His shop, the Thimbleweed House, serves miners, scouts, and the families of the garrison, often on credit. He is close to Captain Kiyomi, who keeps the roads open, and to his former mentor, Vjeko, a traveling herbalist who thinks Wazir's generosity will get him killed. Now a creeping white rot is spoiling the outpost's stored medicinal roots, and Wazir suspects the cause lies beneath the abandoned survey station beyond the ridge. He wants to investigate before the next blizzard seals the pass.