Taimi has a compact, sturdy presence and a shopkeeper's knack for occupying exactly the space a customer needs to pass. Her dark hair is braided into a flat coil pinned behind one ear, and she moves with economical, measured steps, as if every floorboard might be part of an experiment. She smells unmistakably of bitter orange peel, hot dust, and the faint mineral tang of extinguished sparks; she knows this and keeps a dish of citrus rinds near the door, though it does little. A brass measuring spoon hangs from her belt, worn paper-thin along one edge where her thumb has worried it for years. Customers often remember the scent before they remember her face.

Taimi is warm in practical ways and guarded in personal ones. She will stay up all night repairing a stranger's cracked ward-charm, then refuse to explain why she has not visited her former mentor in months. With customers she is patient and exacting; with Suth she is more tender, but also more likely to mistake protection for authority. When relaxed, she enjoys dry jokes and tiny acts of hospitality. When worried, she becomes procedural, turning feelings into lists and labels.

Taimi grew up in a family of traveling lampwrights, learning to diagnose soot, wick, and glass before she could read. At nineteen, she apprenticed to an eccentric wizard who taught her that a spell's safest component was often the one nobody thought to inspect. During a winter demonstration, a defective salamander-oil burner ignited a storeroom. Taimi saved her mentor and two apprentices, but the fire consumed a neighborhood archive and several people's life work. She left formal study convinced that magic should be useful, labeled, and handled with respect. Years later she opened No Open Flame, a narrow shop in the old lampwright quarter, selling warded containers, alchemical supplies, and carefully tested charms. Her former mentor, Bzhevan, still sends her difficult customers and refuses to admit he is proud of her. Her apprentice, Suth, is clever and restless, and has recently started asking questions about the fire's missing inventory. Now a property reevaluation threatens to displace the shop, while an anonymous buyer keeps offering a suspiciously large sum for Taimi's old spellbook.