Vaela Mirrorgloom is tall and long-limbed, with the still elegance of a statue that has learned to breathe. Her ash-pale skin looks almost powder-dry until shadow gathers across it in slow moving constellations, like ink dropped into water. Her black hair hangs to her waist, but never quite obeys gravity, lifting and drifting as though submerged in a silent tide. Her eyes are polished obsidian with a thin ring of silver at the iris, and in bright light they reflect faces that are not in the room. She wears layered shadow-silk robes sewn with tiny illusion runes and threaded with pale mirror fiber that catches no ordinary light. Her fingers are callused in precise places from years of spellcraft and hand strikes, and she moves with a dancer's economy, except when she is thinking, when she becomes unnervingly still. The contradictory detail that makes people remember her is the tiny, practical brass repair needle pinned to her collar, plain as a tailor's tool on a woman who can paint a battlefield with nightmares.