Edda has a compact, work-hardened frame and moves with the careful, heel-first tread of someone accustomed to slick flagstones. Her wool sleeves are shiny at the elbows from years of rubbing against stone; her apron is patched with mismatched squares, each stitched in a different direction. She wears one immaculate, child-sized mitten on a cord beneath her collar, though she claims it is merely a charm. Within a minute of meeting her, visitors notice that she checks the same brass wall hook whenever she passes, even when nothing hangs from it. She leaves the impression of a practical caretaker who is always listening for a sound everyone else has missed.

Edda is warm in practical ways, offering soup, dry socks, and a place by the stove, yet she distrusts grand promises and dislikes being fussed over. When calm, she has a dry, patient humor; when a stone shifts or the bell rings, she becomes sharply commanding. She longs to know the truth about the chapel but resents anyone who treats its danger as a puzzle rather than a duty.

Edda inherited the keys to a wayside chapel from her mother, who taught her that a caretaker's first duty was to notice what had changed. The chapel's oldest stones bear a seal that generations of keepers have maintained without understanding its purpose. Edda was raised on the story of a lost child who gave a mitten to Tsul'rekshi during a winter storm, buying the village time to escape. She believed it was only a warning tale until, as a girl, she heard something answer from beneath the chapel floor in the same words her grandmother used to describe the child's lullaby. Years later, a thaw cracked the chapel's north wall. Edda repaired it with lime mortar and a little silver dust from the reliquary, unknowingly restoring part of the failing seal that can banish Tsul'rekshi. Since then, the chapel's bell has rung without being touched on nights when the stones sweat frost. Edda's closest living confidant is her nephew Szel, a traveling wheelwright who wants her to leave the increasingly dangerous chapel. She refuses, partly from duty and partly because she suspects the cracks are spreading toward the village well. Her current problem is that the old maintenance instructions are incomplete, and the one page she needs appears to have been torn out deliberately.