Edrin moves as if the room is an amphitheater and every gesture must be seen: sweeping, theatrical motions of a long life spent lecturing. His robe hangs like a stage curtain—faded indigo embroidered with thread that used to catch the light but now frays at the sleeves. His hands are veined and ink-stained; his left hand bears faint burn marks in a spiral pattern, the memory of a failed experiment. He wears thin rimless spectacles perpetually crooked, and he favors a carved black-staff with an ivory pommel shaped like a closed eye. When he walks he lurches slightly as if remembering a cadence; when he sits, his shoulders fold inward and he speaks softer, as if afraid to wake something. Unexpectedly, he's almost always followed by a small clutch of dead moths that circle his head for a few breaths and then drop to the floor dustless and intact—an odd, unsettling companion that contradicts his otherwise scholarly, malodorous presence.