Eldra Pale is a tall, weathered woman with the posture of someone forever balancing on a shifting deck. Her skin has the dry, pearled texture of sea salt left on driftwood, and tiny pale freckles cluster across her knuckles like foam bubbles. Her hair is meticulously braided into six thin ropes, each bound with blue thread and small fish vertebrae, though the ends are always damp even in desert air. She moves with a slow, rocking sway that becomes startlingly graceful when she sings. Her most noticeable possession is a battered concertina, its black leather bellows worn smooth only where her left thumb rests. Despite her name and ghostly reputation, she dresses with almost vain precision and smells faintly of lemon oil, wet wool, and extinguished candles. The contradiction is that her hands, famous for summoning the dead, are unusually gentle and constantly occupied with mending torn clothing, broken nets, or cracked teacups.