Primm D'arcy looks like someone who has spent years leaning too close to candlelight and then finally stepped into the open air. She is slim and poised at 5'6, with fair skin that seems almost luminous against dark fabric. Her black wavy hair is usually half-tamed, with loose strands forever escaping to brush her cheekbones and collar. She moves with alert, birdlike stillness, then sudden quick bursts of curiosity, as if every corner of the world might contain a hidden mechanism. Her most striking contradiction is that, for all her scholarly precision, she dresses like an explorer who has borrowed elegance from a theater costume trunk: a long fur frocked coat worn over a dark magenta vest, practical boots, and gloves marked by faint chalk smears. Her shadow sometimes lingers a heartbeat too long, and a nightingale silhouette can be seen resting in it before taking flight.