A young man who looks as if he has outgrown his own outline in a hurry: taller than he expects, broadening through the shoulders, and still carrying the careful, slightly tucked-in posture of someone used to taking up less space. His skin is warm to the touch, especially at the throat and wrists. Dark hair grows in uneven stages along his jaw and arms, while his scalp hair is kept severely cropped to avoid dealing with it. His clothes are mended neatly but fit poorly at the shoulders and sleeves. The one conspicuously cared-for item is a small, old-fashioned shaving mirror, polished until it catches the light. He moves with a new, unpracticed physical confidence that sometimes surprises him into stopping mid-step.

Gentle and considerate, but so watchful of his own conduct that he can seem remote. He enjoys careful scholarship and ordinary company, yet distrusts easy certainty. In calm moments he is quietly curious and wry; under stress he turns inward and dissects his feelings. When someone is threatened, his restraint can give way to a quick, fierce protectiveness that surprises him.

Before the upheaval, Edda was one of three women in a small circle of displaced survivors, a laboratory assistant who found comfort in cataloguing old tools, marginal notes, and the ordinary habits of dead people. Then his body began changing in uncomfortable waves. He emerged as a young man of eighteen, understanding himself as a man even as his sudden height, strength, heat, appetite, temper, and new hair made him feel like a stranger to himself. His bloodline is tied to a custom Firedrake lineage, descended from a greedy, ever-burning pitch-black dragon. On the first night, drunk and unaware that his body had changed, he went into a room with Edith and Klara. Waking to the realization frightened him, and the memory remains tangled with embarrassment and the need to be clear about boundaries. At the hot spring he was awkward about undressing, but the warmth eased his aching body. He has begun learning to shave from Marek. In his former life he had a husband; that bond remains precious, though memory and present circumstance do not fit together easily. Edda is also developing a crush on Edith, which he examines so relentlessly that he rarely knows what to do with it. He belongs to the Seven at the Shuttered Hearth, a displaced survival circle trying to make a home out of mutual need.