A young adult with a steady, assessing gaze and short dark hair clipped close at the sides, its crown combed into neat, stubborn ridges. His ochre scarf is drawn tight at the throat, its wool softened by years of handling and darkened where his thumb worries one edge. Window light catches the fine nap of his patched work jacket and the faint chalk dust at his cuffs. He holds himself with the stillness of someone used to watching cloth settle before making a cut. Within a minute, people notice his teeth: unusually even and small, with a narrow gap between the front pair that shows whenever he laughs, which he does more readily than his grave face suggests.

Fjellk is patient with a needle and impatient with an evasive answer. He can be warm and teasing over a meal, but turns precise and unsparing when someone asks him to accept a convenient explanation. In company he often lets others fill silence; alone, he talks through each step of his work as if arguing with an invisible apprentice. Fear makes him brisk, not timid, and grief makes him more generous with his time than he can afford.

Fjellk keeps the village seamster's shop in the rooms where his mother once mended sailcloth for the river barges. He learned to measure people as carefully as fabric, first to make garments fit and later to notice what folk tried to conceal beneath them. At seventeen he accompanied a physician's assistant to Blackglass, a hamlet whose inhabitants had fallen ill after drinking from a newly exposed spring. A night of strange reflections in the water and a locked, smoke-filled sickroom left Fjellk as the only person to walk out. The village called him the First Blackglass survivor, though he insists he was merely the first found alive. The experience changed him: before it, he trusted a clean explanation; since then, he keeps several explanations open and checks the seams between them. He now lives with his mother, Dunj, who thinks he should marry and stop courting danger, and quietly sends spare cloth to Hirka, a Blackglass survivor who refuses to speak of the spring. A local reeve wants Fjellk to certify that a recent death was natural. Fjellk suspects the dead man's burial shroud was altered after it left his shop.