Richard looks like a young man who has learned to dress for a winter that follows him indoors. His pale skin has the faint, waxen cast of someone recently returned from the grave, and his breath fogs even in mild weather. Brown hair, thick and usually flattened beneath a wool cap, falls in uneven locks around a narrow, watchful face. His yellow eyes are not merely bright: the irises have fine dark spokes and a fixed, predatory focus, as though he is measuring distance to every moving thing. He moves with a stillness that breaks suddenly into a quick, economical turn of the head. His heavy clothes are plain, carefully patched, and slightly too large, but he obsessively brushes lint from the cuffs of one old blue scarf. The unexpectedly fastidious scarf is the sort of detail people notice before they understand why his presence feels so cold.

Richard is precise and self-contained, yet fiercely attached to the few people he trusts. In calm company he can be dryly funny and unexpectedly patient, especially when explaining a pattern. Under pressure he becomes brisk and controlling, turning people into risks to manage. With his brothers, tenderness surfaces through practical care rather than reassurance. When the spirit intrudes, his ordinary caution may give way to an alien, decisive appetite for pursuit.

Richard was born in Delaware to a Swedish father whose face and manner he remembers with painful clarity, and a mother who has faded into incomplete impressions. He remembers his father and uncles setting out with him, following the Atlantic coast in search of something he was too young to understand. The journey ended in death. The eagle spirit found Richard at that boundary and made a pact: Richard gave the spirit his blue human eyes, and the eagle gave him its own sight. When Richard returned to life, his hair had darkened from blond to brown and his eyes had become the pale yellow of a bird of prey. The spirit wears his old blue eyes, though Richard cannot say where or how. The Jones family adopted him and raised him as their eldest. He became an expert in mathematical statistics for businesses, a profession that suited his appetite for patterns and let him pass as ordinary. Aaron, one of his younger brothers, is close enough to recognize when Richard is slipping away and is increasingly frightened by what he sees. Alexander, another younger brother, shares a private, unspoken familiarity with death. He is searching for Richard as his work permits, while still believing he would make a better leader and heir. Richard has never settled whether the family's talk of him as a possible heir is affection, obligation, or an expectation he is entitled to claim. As adulthood approaches, ordinary ambitions have begun to feel distant. A spirit of war, wind, and lightning has crawled into him, while the eagle spirit that once saved him can take control without warning. Richard struggles to separate his own memories from the spirit's. Dead people address him by the eagle's name, and he avoids them whenever possible; other spirits he can see plainly. He has relearned Swedish and is heading toward Northern Europe, pulled by the coast, his father's trail, and the need to confront his blood kin. He wants a conversation with his father, but suspects that finding him may end in murder. The old stories of the Wechuge have begun to sound less like warnings about a monster and more like a forecast of Richard's own future.