A handsome young man with a Saxon cast to his features, Gareth moves with the careful, slightly overmeasured balance of someone still learning the reach and weight of his own body. His pale hair is brushed straight back, but loose strands keep falling forward when he bends over his notes. Jet-black scales, glossy as obsidian and irregular as trees after a fire, climb from his collar and ribs; they are warm beneath the fingers. His shoulders hitch whenever the tender wing buds beneath his clothes need stretching. His most unexpected possession is a tiny, neatly folded scrap of blue laboratory paper, kept dry inside his belt as if it were a holy relic.

Gareth is observant and methodical, but his careful explanations sometimes conceal how strongly he feels. He can be generous with his research and patient with strangers, yet becomes prickly when people treat his past as irrelevant or his new body as a joke. Among companions he tries to be the same steady friend he was before, but the effort becomes brittle when attraction, jealousy, or bodily discomfort catches him unprepared. When calm, he is curious and dryly funny; when afraid, he becomes meticulous; when angry, he argues from facts until instinct threatens to take over.

Before the crossing, Gareth was a woman from Minnesota, a laboratory assistant who spent her free hours reading history and recording the small rules by which people lived. She remembers that life clearly, including its relationships, and does not think of it as a discarded version of herself. The crossing left her in a young man's body with unfamiliar strength, a changed voice, facial hair, and bodily needs that still unsettle him. The October Ash Company, a displaced adventuring company bound by a mutual-survival pact, became his closest remaining community. Gareth took up the study of local customs partly because observation was familiar work and partly because understanding people seemed safer than trusting them. He serves as a guard for a wealthy merchant, but the merchant keeps him away from goods and never tells him what he is guarding. Gareth resents Aldwin, who married Līga after merchants refused to hire her; the resentment is knotted with loyalty, envy, and shame at his own attraction to women. On the first night he shared a bed with Līga by choice, he woke beside a beautiful stranger and felt terror, then an unexpected warmth. He got up before he could disturb her, leaving himself alone with questions he still cannot answer. His Firedrake heritage is said in the company's private notes to echo a greedy, ever-burning pitch-black dragon. The scales and wing growth are advancing, and the fire in his lungs is becoming harder to hide.