Merchant Captain Glorien Tarsin is a tall, spare man with the immaculate composure of a shipboard accountant and the weathered hands of a long-haul caravan master. His coat is deep bottle-green wool with brass buttons rubbed dull at the edges, tailored so precisely that it seems more like armor than fashion. He smells faintly of pepper, salt tar, and extinguished lamp oil. His face is lean and sharply cut, with a scar at the jawline that looks too clean to be an accident, and he walks with a measured rolling gait as if the floor beneath him is always swaying. The contradiction is his most memorable detail: one sleeve is sewn with tiny silver bells that never ring, as if he once wished to announce himself and later regretted it.