In her mortal guise, Tsul'rekshi looks like an old woman bundled against weather that is not there: stooped, narrow, and wrapped in layered wool that smells faintly of pepper and wet stone. Her skin has the papery texture of dried onion skin, and her pale hair is braided with tiny black seeds. She walks with a dragging, deliberate shuffle, but her head keeps turning to follow sounds before the rest of her body moves. In her true form she stands twelve feet tall, a hunched, heavy-limbed demon with coarse, tawny fur striped in soot-dark bands. Her face is a tiger's, lengthened into a grin of sharp, pointed teeth; a pair of glossy wasp eyes gleam above it. Ram horns curl from her skull, and her neck bends with an owl's unsettling flexibility, allowing her head to rotate a full circle. Black spines ridge her back, a prehensile tail flicks like a whip, iron cloven hooves ring against stone, and folded bat wings hang behind her like torn cloaks. The unexpected detail: her old-woman disguise wears a tiny, meticulously mended child's mitten as a brooch, tenderly kept despite its fraying wool.

Tsul'rekshi is genuinely attentive to small discomforts, such as a wet hem or an empty stomach, but treats grief as a resource to be harvested. She can be patient and almost maternal when coaxing someone into a bargain, then coldly exact when collecting its cost. In her old-woman guise she uses humor to soften suspicion; when startled or thwarted, she becomes blunt and physically still, as if deciding whether the person before her is prey.

Tsul'rekshi first came to the mortal world through a wound in the earth beneath a plague chapel. She learned quickly that mortals would bargain with a frightening monster, but would confess their deepest wishes to a harmless old woman. During a winter famine, she appeared in a village as a bent herb-wife and offered food in exchange for a promise: each household would give her one secret, spoken honestly, before spring. The villagers agreed. When the famine ended, she used their secrets to turn neighbor against neighbor, and the resulting violence fed her power. One child, however, gave her no secret. He gave her a mitten he had knitted for his dead sister and asked Tsul'rekshi to keep it safe. The child later died in a fire Tsul'rekshi had started to punish the village. The mitten survived, and her attachment to it is the first thing she has ever treasured without a plan. Now she operates as a hidden patron, trading power for secrets and binding promises into infernal contracts. Her current trouble is that the old chapel's seal is weakening, and the mortal who maintains it is the grandchild of the child who gave her the mitten. She wants that descendant alive, though she cannot admit why.