Sahra Bako is tall, lushly built, and immediately difficult to categorize. Her skin has the matte black sheen of cooled volcanic glass, but faint copper lines move beneath it like lamplight under dark water. She carries her weight on the balls of her stone-hoofed feet, rocking almost imperceptibly as if listening to music no one else can hear. Her complex dark hair is braided close to the scalp, looped into a broad crown, and pinned with blunt iron needles used by ordinary seamstresses. Three narrow tails trail behind her, each ending in a stinger that twitches when someone lies. Her batlike wings are covered in luminous script that changes from Abyssal curses to tender fragments of poetry when she is moved. She smells unmistakably of hot iron, bitter orange peel, and rain on dry pavement, a scent she insists is simply 'the smell of work.' The contradiction is striking: she looks like an omen of slaughter, yet she keeps flour beneath her talons and has the perpetually practical posture of someone waiting for a bread oven to finish heating.