Mara is built like a granite post, short but incredibly wide with shoulders that seem to stretch the seams of every tunic she owns. Her skin is the color of well-oiled teak, weathered by brine and sun. She moves with a heavy, purposeful gait that makes floorboards groan in rhythmic submission. While her hands are permanently stained with soot, pitch, and sawdust, she wears three incredibly delicate ivory hairpins shaped like tiny gulls, which hold back a wild thicket of copper-red hair. The smell of cedar shavings and expensive tobacco clings to her like a second skin.

Mara is a woman of loud laughs and quiet observations. She is incredibly generous with the local sailors, often 'forgetting' to charge for small repairs, yet she is notoriously miserly with the wealthy merchants from the hills, charging them double for the same services. She holds a deep reverence for the integrity of wood and stone, feeling that a poorly built structure is a personal insult to the earth. Though she appears jovial, she is intensely observant, tracking the draft of every ship in the harbor to judge if their cargo matches their logs.

Born in the Iron Crags, Mara spent her youth as a structural engineer for the underground river-docks. She left her clan after her younger brother died when a 'safely' inspected cliffside warehouse collapsed during a storm. Suspicious of the official report, she moved to this coastal town to study how land and water interact. She opened her general goods shop on the wharf to keep a literal eye on the ground. For three years, she has watched the Lighthouse Inn's warehouse, calculating the weight of the carts going up versus the visible stability of the cliffside strata, convinced something illegal or unnatural is hollowing out the hills.