Mira Thane is a hard-faced dwarf woman with the compact stillness of someone who has spent decades sorting jars by smell, weight, and memory. Her skin is the color of weathered copper with faint pale scars across her knuckles from old mortar cuts and cracked glass. She wears her black-dyed apron as if it were armor, the cloth stiff with layered stains that never quite show through, and she moves with a deliberate, measured tread that makes every shelf in her shop seem to know she is in charge. Her beard is braided into three narrow ropes with copper wire at the ends, each braid scented faintly with rosemary smoke and crushed mint, which clashes oddly with the sharp antiseptic tang that follows her everywhere. The contradiction of her severe expression and the tiny silver flower pin at her throat makes her look like a mourning widow who has stubbornly refused to stop tending to life.