Othas has a broad, compact frame and a slow, deliberate gait, as if he is always testing whether the ground can bear the next argument. His skin is a weather-darkened gray-brown, roughened into fine overlapping ridges along his forearms, shoulders, and jaw. Dust gathers in the creases after a day outdoors. His hands are unusually broad and blunt, with thick, chalk-pale calluses from years of cutting letters into stone; he touches a wall with the same care another person might use to touch a face. His beard is clipped close to keep grit out of it, while a single stubborn curl escapes his headwrap. He wears a small, carefully mended child's mitten tucked at his belt, an unexpected keepsake for a stern public mediator. People often remember his stillness first, then notice that his eyes are tracking every person in the room.

Othas is patient enough to let an angry person finish and stubborn enough to challenge the convenient version of a story. In public meetings he is measured, attentive, and hard to hurry. With friends he is dryly funny and unexpectedly sentimental. When he feels ashamed, he becomes procedural, asking for dates and exact words instead of acknowledging the feeling beneath them.

Othas grew up in a quarry settlement where Stonecoil families cut paving blocks and boundary markers. As a young stonecutter, he believed a clean measurement could settle any dispute. That conviction broke during the six-year Bracken Ford feud, when two neighboring families each produced perfectly accurate surveys that contradicted one another because both had moved the boundary stones over generations. Othas's sister, Iva, was killed during a night raid before he could persuade the families to meet. He stopped trying to prove who was right and began asking what each side needed remembered. At the feud's end, he persuaded both sides to carve their grievances, names, and concessions onto a shared public wall. The wall became a place for public correction as well as remembrance, and Othas became famous for the settlement. He now maintains the wall and travels to mediate disputes, while still exchanging prickly letters with his former apprentice, Rul, who thinks Othas's patience lets powerful people delay justice. Othas is currently trying to prevent a new road project from cutting through the wall's oldest section.