Sam has a long-limbed, forward-leaning posture, as if she is forever peering into the next machine she means to take apart. She waits with her weight on the balls of her feet and rocks minutely from heel to toe, metal bits in her pockets clicking in reply. Her hair is usually pinned up with a bent copper rod, though spring curls escape around her ears. She moves quickly in abrupt starts, then becomes startlingly still when studying a mechanism. The unexpected thing about the so-called tall goblin is that she keeps a pocket-sized collection of carefully pressed farm flowers, each labeled with the date and where she found it. She leaves the impression of a workshop that has learned to walk around and talk back.

Sam is inventive and generous with people who are trying to make something better, but suspicious of anyone who offers help with strings attached. In a workshop she is audacious, impatient, and delighted by a difficult problem; around her family she becomes guarded and carefully practical. When frightened, she jokes and makes busywork. When angry, she gets brisk and literal, naming exactly what she believes someone is trying to take from her.

Sam is the daughter of Oryn Krenn, granddaughter of Orys Krenn, the SES Foreman of Solaris Endure, and sister to Oryn Krenn Jr. and Vexa Krenn. Long before any of them were conceived, the family was bound by a contract that treated their future labor as an inherited asset. Sam grew up around scientific equipment, repair benches, and the unspoken certainty that the SES could call in that debt whenever it pleased. The turning point came when she watched her family prepare to comply with another order that would have sent them into SES mining work. She dismantled a key part of their equipment rather than let it be used to track their departure, then helped her family flee. The act cost them time and trust, but it made the possibility of escape real. Later, while Halsam the Qessoteran Deer was searching for his birth family, Sam put her mechanical and investigative ingenuity to work and helped him find his father, Elbis Anaval. That success helped persuade Sam's family to move their scientific equipment and their not-quite-spaceship skyship to Leafwhorl Farm in Hearthroot, where they now assist the farm while keeping clear of SES presence. Sam likes the work and the people, but she is always watching for signs that the old contract has found them. She is also trying to make the family's skyship capable of reaching beyond its current limits, while arguing with her relatives over how much risk that project invites.