Thadyr moves like a man half-remembered from a childhood story: slow, deliberate steps that end in a dancer's precise balance. His robe is the pale, threadbare blue of library pages smudged by decades of thumbprints; the fabric is embroidered with tiny, almost-faded sigils that glitter when light strikes them wrong. His face is a map of tiny scars and laugh lines, and the skin of his left cheek is faintly puckered by a burn that never quite healed. One eye is a bright, pin-prick green that misses nothing; the other is milky and swirls faintly with a silvery rune whenever he concentrates. Against expectation, his fingers are nimble and callused, and he tucks a length of braided sea-glass and slate beads into his beard—an odd adornment for a city scholar. When he walks, a faint scent of sea-salt and old paper follows him, and he leaves behind the phantom echo of pages turning.