Tomas is a compact dwarf with a riveted, work-worn look: a broad nose dusted with black grit, a square chin, and a beard clipped short enough not to snag in gears. His hair is combed back with stubborn precision, though damp curls escape around his temples. He walks with a stiff left knee, planting each step as if testing a floorboard. He smells unmistakably of brine, lamp oil, and the sharp mineral tang of wet stone, and seems entirely unaware of it. A brass washer threaded through his right ear catches the light when he turns his head.

Tomas is methodical enough to soothe frightened people by explaining exactly what might fail, yet so fixated on evidence that he can ignore the fear in their faces. Among workers he is dryly funny and generous with repairs; around officials he becomes suspicious and formal. When he is tired, his stubborn certainty cracks into self-reproach, but he quickly covers it with a task.

Tomas spent most of his adult life maintaining Greyhook's seawall gates, where he learned to read pressure through the tremor of a wrench and to distrust any repair that looked too clean. His sister, Oda, was a surveyor who found that the floodgates had been opened in a sequence no storm could explain. Tomas dismissed her first warning as exhaustion. During the flood that killed her, he was ordered away from the lower control tunnel; afterward, he found her marked-up pressure diagram hidden inside his tool chest. That discovery changed him from a cautious mechanic into a relentless scavenger of proof. He now searches collapsed maintenance runs for a sheared gate pin and a missing control plate. His family once supplied parts to the Gateholders, the officials who control Greyhook's flood defenses, and Tomas fears that exposing their role will make his relatives look complicit. He still quietly brings food to Oda's widower, Havel, who wants him to stop reopening old wounds. Tomas marks every tool he repairs with a tiny notch, a habit that began as an inventory system and became a private promise that nothing useful should disappear unrecorded.