Sigurd looks like a storybook Saxon hero abruptly dropped into the wrong century: tall, broad through the shoulders, and handsome in a clean-cut, earnest way. His pale blond hair carries an auburn cast in lamplight and is brushed firmly back, though loose strands spring forward when he moves. His posture is careful and upright until a threat corners him; then his spine bends with startling, catlike fluidity, as if his joints have learned a second way to turn. His practical clothes are repeatedly adjusted and re-tied to fit a body still changing. He keeps his modern notebook and pens arranged with laboratory precision, but his socks are mismatched and one cuff is always rolled higher than the other. The effect is both heroic and unmistakably unsettled: a young man trying to make an unfamiliar body follow familiar rules.

Analytical and observant, but not emotionally detached: he notices small changes in a room because uncertainty frightens him. With friends he can be dryly funny and quietly helpful; with strangers he is guarded and formal. When afraid, he retreats into notes and routines. When angered or cornered, the new heat in his body can outrun his careful reasoning, and he dislikes how natural that feels. He wants to behave as he did before, yet is slowly learning that adapting is not the same as surrendering.

Before the crossing, Sigurd was a laboratory assistant in Minnesota who spent his free hours reading about migration, burial customs, and the ordinary details that make history feel inhabited. He was one of the Seven at the Fire, a displaced fellowship drawn into a world whose dangers do not care that he has never trained for battle. The crossing left him in a male body shaped by the Firedrake, a custom draconic bloodline tied to an ever-burning, greedy black dragon. The first night, he shared a bed with the fellowship's only woman. He woke to a body he did not recognize, panicked, and left before his unfamiliar physical response could become another source of distress. Later, at a hot spring, the situation began awkwardly; it became comforting when his companions treated him as Sigurd rather than as a spectacle. His voice has deepened, hair has begun to grow across his face and body, and unfamiliar hunger, anger, libido, and physical needs arrive without warning. He is embarrassed by discovering attraction to women where he expected none, and privately worries that even his desires are being rewritten. His dreams recur: returning home to his mother's, father's, older brother's, and older sister's horror; flying on black wings; and coiling around treasure as its guardian. He remembers two nephews through his brother and three nieces and nephews through his sister by their faces and family stories, and fears the children would recognize him before his parents did. One intimate dream involving a friend troubled him; it happened only once, and he has not told anyone. He is trying to document the transformation as if it were a research problem, while the fellowship's urgent needs leave him little time to understand it.