A strikingly handsome young man with the healthy, well-fed look of someone who has slept safely for several nights, though his attention never quite rests. His skin is smooth and fair, with a wind-roughened flush over the nose and cheekbones. Thick, dark-blond hair falls in uneven waves around a face shaped by local Saxon features. He moves with careful economy, turning his whole body toward a speaker as if giving them the floor. Before he says a word, he takes a small, measured breath through his nose, then holds it for a beat. He smells unmistakably of beeswax, old paper, and the faint dusty sweetness of a library, though he has no idea how the smell follows him.

Sigrid is steady and generous with people who have been dismissed, but wary of anyone who treats confidence as proof. In ordinary company he is patient and curious; when danger threatens his companions, fear can make him severe, clipped, and controlling. He values accurate accounts, yet knows that a technically precise record can still betray the people it describes. He wants to be useful, but is uneasy when others depend on him too completely.

Before the crossing, Sigrid was an American public librarian: a patient reference-desk worker who knew how to find a book from a half-remembered sentence and how to make a frightened visitor feel that asking for help was ordinary. He remembers that life in full, including the institution's routines, the feel of a date stamp, and the conviction that access to knowledge should not depend on status. He awoke in Saxony near the Harz Mountains in a young man's body that belonged to this world, with no explanation and a local accent that came naturally to his new mouth. The first weeks were spent learning which memories were useful and which made people look at him as if he were ill. He was taken in by other displaced people, and eventually became a witness and careful record-keeper for the Seven Found by Chance, a clandestine mutual-aid circle. A formative shock came when a frightened local official dismissed one of their members as a useless madman; Sigrid watched the man later save a whole household by noticing a detail everyone else had ignored. Since then, he has made a point of listening hardest to people others have written off. He is now trying to preserve the circle's accounts without creating a document that could expose its members. He is also searching for a way to understand why certain sounds from his voice draw candle flames toward him.