A tall, broad-shouldered young man with a distinctly Swedish-looking cast to his features, pale skin, and ash-blond hair that lies in uneven, wind-ruffled layers. New beard growth shadows his jaw, while fine body hair shows at his cuffs. His clear grey eyes stay busy, measuring distances and noticing small inconsistencies. He moves with a careful, slightly self-conscious economy until threatened; then he seems to occupy more space, planting his feet like a stone post sunk deep in frozen ground. He smells faintly of hot-spring minerals, damp wool, and the clean, papery dust of old books, a combination he has not noticed. Unexpectedly for a sturdy laboratory assistant, he keeps a tiny pressed fern tucked inside his field notebook and worries that its brittle stem will break.

Skeptical and methodical, but more compassionate than his first questions suggest. He prefers evidence to dramatic guesses, yet he knows a person is not a specimen. Around friends he can be wry and gently encouraging; when frightened, he becomes procedural. When angry, he grows startlingly direct and has to remind himself that the people around him are not obstacles to move.

Krisztián grew up in western Massachusetts in a family whose stories of old places and ordinary lives fed his history habit. He became a laboratory assistant because he liked careful work: labeling samples, checking assumptions, and finding out what a result actually meant. During a visit with family in Oregon, he and his friends became part of the Seven at the Cold Ford, a displaced band of friends, mutual aid, and an accidental supernatural phenomenon. Krisztián remembers his former body and all the people and relationships attached to it. The first night after the change, unable to trust appearances, he spent hours identifying who was in each bed by asking questions only his friends could answer. At the hot springs, he helped the group treat their transformations as evidence to observe, while saying plainly that measurement could not make them painless. The Jotun blood in him is newly apparent: bitter cold barely troubles him, and fear can make him feel immovable. His increased hunger, strength, anger, facial hair, and unfamiliar attraction to women are not curiosities he can simply record and set aside. He still has family and friends back east who expect to hear from him, and family in Oregon caught up in the immediate aftermath. His friends rely on his patience, but he has no answer yet for whether the changes are temporary or what the phenomenon wants.