Brynna Vell is a wiry human woman with the look of someone permanently half a step ahead of disaster. Her hands are scarred, inked with soot, tar, and old burns that never quite faded, and her fingertips are permanently rough from rope fibers, filings, and powder grain. Her dark hair is cut short in uneven, singed layers that escape a wool cap in wiry spikes, as if a fire once tried and failed to take it from her. She wears a patched dock coat over a cracked leather apron, and every inch of her clothing carries salt, ash, and the faint mineral bite of struck flint. She moves with brisk, economical precision, but there is an odd softness to the way she protects a tiny brass rosary pinned inside her coat, a contradiction that makes her seem both hardened and secretly tender. When she pauses to listen, she tilts her head like a crow judging a nail.