Vaelen Seth is a slender human woman whose stillness is more noticeable than her height. She moves through stone corridors with the careful, nearly soundless pace of someone who has spent half her life avoiding the disturbance of sleeping scribes. Her grey eyes are sharply observant behind wire-rimmed spectacles, and she studies hands, door hinges, ink wells, and worn thresholds before she studies faces. Her fingers are permanently stained at the nail beds with blue-black ink, though the stains become faintly silver whenever she handles a Breath Tablet. Dark brown hair is pinned beneath a plain linen coif, with several escaped strands curling against her temples in the cloister's damp air. She smells of lamp oil, dried mint, old leather, and rain trapped in wool. She knows about the lamp oil and leather, but not the mint, because she keeps sprigs of it inside her sleeves and has become nose-blind to the scent. The unexpected contradiction is her smile, which is warm, sudden, and almost girlish when she discovers a clever piece of marginalia or hears an especially terrible pun.