Toms looks like a man who has spent years carrying awkward loads through cramped service corridors: compact and powerfully built, with a quiet economy to every movement. His dark hair is clipped short with a knife, uneven at the nape, and his hands are broad, callused, and usually marked with soot or resin. He stands with his weight slightly forward, as if ready to catch a slipping beam, but never seems to fidget. When startled, his breath catches in a dry double hitch before he can smooth it out. His most unexpected trait for a hard-working repairman is that he keeps a tiny, carefully tended sprig of flowering thyme tucked into his belt, replacing it when it wilts.

Toms is skeptical of grand explanations but quietly generous with time and labor. He can be patient for hours while tracing a fault in a roof, yet impatient with people who claim certainty without evidence. Among strangers he is careful and deliberately conventional; with people he trusts, he is dryly funny and more willing to admit how frightened he is. He wants to belong, but resents being asked to prove that he deserves a place.

Before waking in ninth-century Latvia, Toms worked in building maintenance, patching leaks, clearing blocked drains, replacing fixtures, and learning which noises meant a building was about to fail. One evening, after a long shift and a familiar ache from an old back injury, he fell asleep in a maintenance room. He woke in wet grass beneath a sky he did not recognize, and the pain in his back was gone. A family from a nearby settlement gave him shelter, though they regarded his strange clothes and bewilderment with suspicion. Toms earned room and food by mending a smoke vent and reinforcing a sagging storehouse, then stayed when the settlement's people proved more practical than cruel. He has since joined the Nettleford Seven, a dispersed fellowship of displaced people, and trades repair work and careful observations for news of other arrivals. He is close to a patient potter named Daina, who taught him local ways of asking for help without giving offense. A watchful hunter named Eimantas suspects Toms's arrival has an omen attached to it. His current problem is that an abandoned river crossing is failing, and the settlement needs it repaired before spring floods isolate their supplies. Toms recognizes the construction problem but lacks the right tools and fears that any unusual success will make people see him as uncanny rather than useful.