Friso looks like a handsome young Frisian, though the face in a puddle still feels like a stranger's. His skin is fair with a wind-reddened cast, and in wet light a fine, scale-like glimmer passes over his temples and the backs of his hands. His dark blond hair lies in stubborn, damp waves, often flattened where he has pushed it back to write. His clear grey-green eyes keep shifting from a speaker to the ground around their feet. He is long-limbed and lightly built, with no visible trace of the old aches he remembers. He stands as if testing the floor without appearing to do so, placing his weight on the balls of his feet and making small, sure adjustments in mud that ought to trouble him. The unexpected detail is the clinical neatness of his notes: even when soaked, he protects a tiny, carefully ruled page inside his shirt as if it were a laboratory instrument.

Friso is painstaking but not cold: he keeps records because he is frightened of losing people, yet his questions can make care feel like inspection. He distrusts tidy explanations, but is drawn to patterns and privately wants the crossing to make sense. With frightened companions he becomes practical and steady; with someone dismissing the group's danger as a puzzle, he turns unexpectedly sharp. When alone, he can spend too long revising a single uncertain note.

Before the crossing, Friso was an American laboratory assistant who prepared samples, checked labels, and learned to distrust a result that could not be repeated. He woke in the Frisian lowlands in the body of a handsome local youth, with a new accent, unfamiliar teeth, different hair and eyes, and a body free of the minor physical complaints he remembered. The ease with which he moved through marsh ground unsettled him more than the transformation itself. As the Seeker for the Seven Who Came Together, a displaced survival circle of modern friends, he records symptoms, weather, words, dreams, and every possible clue to their arrival in alternate, magical 867 AD Europe. His habit began as a way to keep panic at bay; it became a way to help the group compare what each person remembers and experiences. A formative shock came when he tried to explain the new body's sure-footedness as a measurable phenomenon and heard his friends speak of their lives as if they were a puzzle designed for them. Since then he has kept his conclusions tentative, even when the evidence seems to beg for a pattern. He is close to the others by necessity and affection, but his careful questions sometimes sound like experiments conducted on them. He is currently trying to reconcile changing blood-gifts with local explanations of kinship and spirit, while fearing that his record-keeping will persuade his friends that their ordeal is merely a game with rules to solve.