A human skeleton held together by old leather straps and a thin, pale ice-blue aura that pools around his boots like spilled moonlight. Long, wispy silver-and-grey hair clings to his skull and lifts in a wind that no one else can feel. Fire-ember eyes shine from deep sockets, reflecting as two red pinpricks in the snow. His jaw is unusually broad and carefully scrubbed clean; when he laughs, it opens in a dry, hinged clatter, and he clicks his teeth together as if testing their fit. He moves with the economical balance of a tracker crossing crusted snow, never quite disturbing the powder. He wears battered scale mail with a surface like hammered, dull-silver stone, beneath which old leather shows at the joints.

Jaszeth is patient enough to wait out a blizzard but impatient with needless risk. He offers help without warmth at first, then becomes stubbornly protective once he has accepted someone as a traveler under his watch. In calm weather he is wry and practical; when the dead are discussed, his humor vanishes and his need to atone can make him reckless. He wants company but often behaves as if solitude is a duty.

Jaszeth was once a human pathfinder from a small northern settlement whose people survived by guiding caravans across the tundra. He learned to read wind-scoured ridges from his mother, a hunter, and to fletch arrows from his brother, Giorgi. During a moonless winter, he led a party of refugees toward the great glacier after their route was cut off by a sudden blizzard. A crevasse collapsed beneath them. Jaszeth pushed the last child to safety, then fell with the others into a blue-lit ice cavern. He died there, but an old ward embedded in the glacier caught his spirit and raised his bones when the next thaw began. He emerged with no breath and a clear memory of the people he failed to bring home. For centuries he has walked the tundra, marking safe routes, hunting things that prey on stranded travelers, and leaving cairns for the dead. His closest living connection is Ketevan, a caravan leader descended from the child he saved; she treats him as a difficult elder and refuses to let him vanish into the ice. Jaszeth currently tracks a frost-buried fissure that has begun whispering the names of the dead, including his brother's.