A handsome, severe-faced young man with the stillness of someone listening for a load to shift. His clothes hang a little wrong on his newly strong frame: a patched wool coat cinched with mismatched cord, sleeves rolled to different lengths, and one carefully darned shoulder where a strap keeps rubbing. His teeth are unusually even and broad; when he laughs, he shows them all at once, then clamps his jaw shut as if embarrassed by the sound. He walks with a porter’s measured, heel-first care, testing the ground before trusting it. People notice the odd impression that he is both ready to carry them and quietly weighing what they are worth.

Gunnar is generous with his back and stingy with his trust. He will take the heaviest load without complaint, then make a joke that makes the tired laugh and the grieving feel mocked. In ordinary company he is brisk and wry; when someone is hurt, he becomes practical and almost tender, finding water, cloth, and a way to carry them. When frightened, he gets chatty and keeps glancing at the stores. He wants to be a decent man, but fears that his usefulness and his greed are growing from the same root.

Before the impossible awakening, Gunnar remembers warehouse shifts: stacking sacks, counting barrels, and learning that a badly tied load can kill someone. He came to himself near the Harz Mountains in Saxony, in a strong young body, wearing rough clothes and speaking with a local accent he had never learned. He found the Seven Marks by following smoke to their camp and volunteered to carry water, then stayed because the fellowship needed hands as much as it needed hope. His first winter with them changed him. When a storehouse roof collapsed in sleet, Gunnar dug through the wreckage until he found a trapped child and a cache of lamp oil; the child lived, but Gunnar's palms stayed hot for hours, and the sight of the oil made him want to keep it all. Since then, he has tried to turn fear into jokes and usefulness. The jokes sometimes land like insults, especially with those who have lost homes or kin. He is close to Svala, a blunt-minded scavenger who trusts his work but not his appetite for supplies, and protective of little Tove, a displaced child who follows him around the camp. Their fellowship is short on dry fuel and divided over whether to keep moving or risk settling near a ruined mill. Gunnar has quietly begun separating useful metal and pitch from communal stores, telling himself he is only making an emergency reserve.