A handsome, hale young man with a face still unfamiliar to him: broad cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that seems poised between a dry joke and a question. His posture is careful rather than timid; he keeps his weight on the balls of his feet as if testing how much ground his longer legs occupy. In a room, his eyes visit doors, hands, windows, and any source of food before settling on a speaker. His movements are newly powerful and occasionally overcommitted: he reaches too far, catches a cup too firmly, then pretends this was deliberate. A surprising detail for a wary interpreter and forager is that he keeps tiny, neatly labeled sketches of plants in the margins of his field notes, complete with absurdly precise measurements.

Thoughtful and dryly funny, Tomasz can turn a frightening situation into a list of risks and options, but the method is partly armor. He is patient with evidence and impatient with people who refuse to look at it. In a crisis he becomes brisk and observant; among friends he is more teasing and unexpectedly tender. Privately, he is furious at how little control he has over the bodily changes he accepts as real, and an ordinary reminder of home can break through his practiced composure.

Before the crossing, Tomasz worked as a quality analyst for a public-transport software contractor in Kraków. He spent long days reproducing failures, comparing logs, and writing reports that had to remain useful after everyone else had gone home. He was one of three people in the Split-Stone Circle who had a female body before the event. The crossing remade him into a hale young man, and he accepts that he is a man; what unsettles him is the sudden unfamiliarity of height, strength, voice, appetite, bodily care, anger, libido, and the assumptions strangers attach to masculinity. He remembers his former life with painful clarity, including the texture of a tram pole in winter and the exact sound of his mother's kettle. Now he interprets threats for the Circle and searches for useful plants in a country outsiders call wild and pagan. He resents that label, though he knows the locals have their own reasons for distrusting travelers. A formative moment came when he misjudged his new reach and knocked a lantern into a store of dried herbs. The fire nearly trapped the Circle's wounded member, Brzena. Tomasz got everyone out, but afterward insisted on making a written inventory of every movement he had misjudged. His current problem is twofold: the Circle needs a reliable route through contested country, and Tomasz's dreams keep returning to a hoard buried under stone, where something seems to recognize his blood.