Senneth has the long, spare frame of someone accustomed to standing at a workbench rather than riding in a saddle. His skin is muted olive with a faint pearlescent cast at the temples; his dark hair is cropped at the jaw and permanently kinked from being tied back under a hood. Fine pale lines of dried alchemical salt crease his knuckles, and his long fingers are stained plum-black from ink and grave-resin. He moves in small, exact adjustments, turning his shoulders sideways to let others pass, then suddenly crossing a room in a silent, swift stride. People remember the way he cups a skull in both hands as tenderly as a sleeping bird, and the faint dry rustle of bone beads at his wrist.

Senneth is gentle with frightened people and unsentimental about bad evidence. He enjoys the strangeness of the dead with the delight of a naturalist, yet refuses to call a moving corpse a returned person. In company he is considerate to the point of self-erasure; alone at his workbench he becomes brisk, exacting, and difficult to interrupt. He can be generous with knowledge but guarded about his own grief.

Senneth grew up among the reed-cutters of a drowned valley, where families kept the bones of their dead above flood level in little cedar boxes. As a child he learned to identify relatives by the tiny repairs made to their teeth and joints. He became a wizard to understand what life left behind, not to conquer death. His turning point came during the Brackwater fever: his sister, Nerys, died while he was away studying in a distant city. He tried to restore her with a hurried, badly bounded rite. The body rose, but the person did not. He ended the spell himself and has never pretended that the result was his sister. Since then, he studies the dead as evidence and companions, never as property, and records every name before attempting animation. He now keeps a workshop in a drained pumping station near the settlement locals call the Sedge-Rot, named for the smell that lingers there after the thaw. His former tutor, Krevask, insists Senneth owes him a forbidden grimoire; a young marsh guide, Ildra, regularly brings him unusual remains and argues with him about what counts as consent. Recently, a small devil he summoned for a controlled interview escaped its circle and began buying the names of the dead from local mourners. Senneth is trying to find it before the community learns how much of the breach was his fault.