Tavik moves like a force of weather: deliberate, pulling weight with each step, then suddenly easy as wind when he laughs. He wears his hair in a single thick braid tied with mismatched beads—some carved bone, one bright blue glass bead taken from a merchant caravan, and a blackened iron link saved from a burned house. A jagged burn scar runs from his left wrist up across his forearm like a river on the skin; the scar tissue is puckered and shiny, and he traces it when thinking. His front tooth is replaced by a brass peg hammered into a gap after a fight; the peg glints when he smiles and rattles faintly when he sings. On ceremonials he tucks a scholar's silk scarf—an odd, folded strip of indigo brocade—into his belt and wears a carved wooden talisman at his throat: a bear with a river carved down its back. Contradiction sits on him: his hands are callused and blood-streaked from axe work, yet his fingertips are ink-stained from copying family poems into a soot-black journal.