Aerethis moves like a thought made flesh: sudden, economical, as if she is always trimming the world down to the essential line. She keeps her hair in a single, thick braid that falls to the small of her back, threaded with tiny copper rings engraved with half-forgotten prayers. Her clothing is spare — a slate-gray sleeveless robe split at the hips to permit full legwork, patched at the left shoulder with an old piece of blue brocade bearing her mother's sigil. Her skin carries a faint silvering along the temples (the remnant of a frostbite ritual); when sunlight hits it just so, it seems to shimmer. Her left palm bears a circular pale scar like a thumbprint of healed frostbite; the right hand is tattooed along the webbing with looping, golden ink that peeks like veins when she flexes. She favors being barefoot, and her feet are hard and quick, webbing callused from years of river-forging. Unexpectedly, she wears a single, delicate circlet of woven willow beneath her braid — a scholar's token — that looks out of place on a street-fighting wanderer.