Merrin moves like a man comfortable in borrowed skin: his gait is lithe and measured, the sort of walk that reads rooms before they read him. In his default form he is narrow-faced androgynous, skin the color of warm candle-wax, cheekbones sharp enough to catch twilight. He favors small, deliberate smiles. His clothes are always a little rumpled as if he puts them on in haste and never quite irons out the wrinkles. Contradiction clings to him: his eyes are extraordinarily attentive yet often ringed with faint sleep-lines, giving him the perpetual look of someone who has been woken mid-dream. When he shifts appearance he often leaves the smallest tell — a brief, involuntary flare of a paler freckle just beneath the left eye — a signature he hides from everyone but himself.