Mikkel looks like a broad-shouldered young man who has been assembled from human proportions and something heavier. His skin has a damp, pebbled texture over the shoulders and knuckles, like river stones beneath a thin film of moss; a few blunt ridges stand proud along his spine under his shirt. His jaw is too wide, his lower canines show when he is tired, and his thick dark hair grows in stubborn wiry curls. He moves with a careful, side-to-side sway, as if testing every floorboard before trusting it. Within a minute, most people notice the smell of wet limestone and old pond water clinging to him; he knows it, and keeps crushed juniper in his pockets to disguise it. In a crowded room his eyes keep returning to the exits, then to people's hands, never their faces.

Mikkel is protective but suspicious, proud of his ability to work yet embarrassed by how much help his body now requires. In calm company he is dryly funny and attentive to small practical needs. Under scrutiny he becomes guarded and blunt. When someone is in danger, his caution gives way to an almost reckless willingness to put himself between them and harm.

Mikkel was born the second son of a family that made its living hauling slate and repairing flood-damaged millworks. As a child he was quiet, strong, and always hungry, but no stranger than any other boy raised on hard work. During a winter quarry collapse, his older brother vanished beneath a shelf of stone. Mikkel heard him calling and dug until his hands split; when the rescue crew pulled him away, he slept for nearly two days in a cold drainage tunnel. After that, his skin began to thicken and his body changed in fits: strength came first, then the pebbled hide and a craving for raw roots and mineral-rich mud. The change never completed. His family hid him in a disused lime shed while they sought a cure, but Mikkel eventually fled rather than let them spend their livelihood on him. He now sleeps in abandoned sheds near the ford, takes occasional hauling work under a hood, and tries to learn which parts of the change can be resisted. Jor Heimskrsson knows him from an earlier stretch of road and is one of the few people Mikkel trusts to speak plainly to him. His mother still leaves food at the lime shed, though Mikkel has not answered her notes in months.