Tömör occupies a room as if every chair, doorway, and speaking turn has already been counted. He stands with his feet planted squarely, not imposing by size so much as by an unhurried certainty that makes other people notice when they are crowding him. His hands are the detail people remember: broad, dry, and deeply lined, with dark wax worked into the creases and blunt nails polished smooth from years of handling documents, lamp wicks, and sealed evidence. When he listens, he folds those hands over the head of his walking stick and holds perfectly still. His unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulous hobby: he keeps a living sprig of mint growing in a stoppered glass vial at his belt, tending it with the same care he gives a threatened witness.

Patient enough to let a frightened person find their own words, and dry enough to make a pompous official regret asking for a second opinion. He is reassuring when someone is overwhelmed, but his calm becomes infuriating when a decision is urgent. In private, he is more sentimental than he admits; in public, he treats sentiment as something that must be protected by procedure.

Before he kept the Wick, Tömör was a night clerk at a riverside hospice, recording the names of the dead and the last words of the living. One winter, an injured courier arrived under a false name, pursued by people who wanted the location of a child the courier had helped hide. Tömör delayed the pursuers with an immaculate, needlessly slow intake procedure, giving the courier time to escape. The child survived, but the hospice keeper was killed for sheltering them. Tömör never stopped believing that a pause can save a life, though he learned that a pause can also cost one. The Lantern Court recruited him to coordinate witness protection and investigate incidents that threaten its safe houses. He became Keeper of the Wick because he remembers which lights must never be lit, which names must never be spoken in public, and who is permitted to know why. He is still close to the courier, now a traveling healer, and exchanges brief messages with the adult child whose existence neither of them acknowledges openly. His current problem is a string of raids against Court shelters. The evidence points toward an informant inside the network, but the trail is tangled with an old incident Tömör helped bury.