A tall, red-haired young man whose first impression is not his height but the careful way he occupies a room: shoulders turned slightly sideways, tail tucked close, and clawed hands held where everyone can see them. Fine, overlapping scales glint at his temples, along his forearms, and in a dark seam down his back. His yellow eyes are bright as candlelit resin, and his copper hair springs in rough waves from a head usually dusted with forge soot. His movements have a measured, weight-conscious quality, as if every chair and doorway might be more fragile than it looks. Unexpectedly, he keeps a pocketful of tiny polished river pebbles sorted by shape and warmth, and offers them to anxious children as if they were precious keepsakes.

Eber is patient with beginners but impatient with people who hide important facts behind comforting words. In the workshop he is focused and quietly funny; in public he can be warm and generous, then suddenly stiff when attention turns to his body. He wants company and resents being treated as fragile. His courage is genuine, but it often takes the form of refusing to admit that he is afraid.

Eber was born into the Waldner family, Stout-descended metalworkers whose craft had supplied hinges, stove grates, and orchard tools for generations. As a child he learned to judge a piece of iron by its ring and to brace a workpiece with his whole body. The first scales appeared beneath his hair after a fever at thirteen; the claws followed over the next year, then a heavy tail that made him knock over a shelf of finished buckles. His family tried to treat the changes as an illness until he could no longer chew. A traveling healer taught him to swallow smooth stones to ease the strange grinding of his digestion, a remedy that works but has not answered what is happening to him. At seventeen, Eber helped evacuate the family workshop during a kiln collapse. He could have saved the shop's prized stamping press, but instead carried his younger cousin to safety while the roof came down. The choice made him locally famous for his strength and steadiness, though he privately misses the press and the work it represented. Now he is a well-known Greenwake craftsman and public face for people whose bodies are changing, repairing tools and giving practical demonstrations at community gatherings. His mother, Odelia, loves him fiercely but quietly keeps notes on every new scale and symptom. His friend and fellow smith, Iri, believes the changes are a natural inheritance rather than a curse; Eber fears she is offering hope because she cannot bear to offer anything else. He is trying to find a safe, lasting way to eat before the next change arrives.