Nila moves with the habitual steadiness of someone who spends long hours at a forge: deliberate footfalls, shoulders that carry heat like memory. She is striking — deep ebony skin that gleams with the faint gray of soot in the hollows of her collarbone, a crown of tightly coiled red hair cropped short at the nape and braided into a single copper-threaded plait that hangs over her left shoulder. Her brown eyes are quick to study, rimmed with a small scar on the right lower lid where a sliver of scale once landed. Her hands are broad, nails bitten but callused and stamped with little crescents where the hammer has nicked her. She favors a soot-smudged linen shirt with rolled sleeves and a leather apron etched with her father's mark; she tucks stray red curls behind her ear when nervous. Unexpectedly, she wears a delicate silver chain of tiny bird talons around her wrist — sentimental, almost fragile against the roughness of her work-roughened arms.