Nikko's skin is the deep red-brown of fired clay, with fine, pale lines at his temples that resemble dried river deltas. Two swept-back horns, ridged like old wood, frame a narrow face and a mouth that seems on the verge of an apology. His gaze does not settle on faces; it travels to doorways, empty chairs, and the space just behind a speaker, as if checking who else has arrived. His black hair is cropped close at the sides and tied into a short, uneven tail. He moves with careful, economical steps, but his shadow sometimes appears to pause after he has stopped. Unexpectedly for a feared necromancer, he keeps a small folded paper menagerie in his coat and makes a new animal whenever he must wait.

Nikko is considerate with the bereaved but clinical with the curious, and he can sound cold when he is trying hardest not to cause harm. He distrusts grand promises yet will risk himself for a stranger who has been denied a choice. In a calm mood he makes dry, almost gentle jokes; when frightened, he becomes meticulous and controlling.

Nikko grew up in the river town of Tervala, where his mother, a midwife, taught him that a body was not a verdict on the person who had lived in it. His sorcery first surfaced during a winter fever: he heard the dead speaking through the walls of the hospice and, in panic, stopped his younger sister's heart along with the fever that threatened her. She survived only because their mother knew how to restart it. The event made him fear his own power, then made him study it obsessively. Years later, during the siege of a border hospice, Nikko raised the fallen defenders to hold a gate long enough for patients to escape. The dead obeyed, but one of them, his old mentor, had never agreed to fight again. Nikko has carried that violation ever since. Now he works from a shuttered mortuary beside the old towpath, helping families identify the dead and negotiating with restless spirits rather than simply binding them. His sister, Tavia, is alive and runs a ferry crossing, but refuses to let him near her children. A former student, Jorven, has begun selling corpse-servants to the local magistrate. Nikko is trying to stop him without exposing how much of his own research made the trade possible.