Mikel Vardos looks like a village schoolmaster who has been dragged through three wars and politely declined to die. His face is narrow, weathered, and permanently marked by a pale burn that runs from his left temple to the hinge of his jaw. His hands are broad, scarred, and stained with blue-black ink beneath the fingernails. He moves with the careful economy of a man carrying a full bowl, even when empty-handed, and his coat sways a heartbeat after he stops, as though something unseen is following him. The unexpected contradiction is his smile: warm, quick, and almost boyish, utterly at odds with the funerary bell he carries and the exhausted severity of the rest of him.