Richard looks like a young man dressed for a winter that followed him indoors: brown hair flattened beneath a wool cap, pale skin with a faint bluish cast at the lips, and keen yellow eyes that catch light like a hawk's. His gaze rarely settles on faces. It tracks exits, hands, reflections, and tiny motions in a room as if he is mapping the air. He moves with spare, abrupt economy, head turning before his shoulders, then going still enough to seem absent. The unexpected detail is his hands: years of statistical work have left his fingertips ink-smudged and faintly callused from constant pencil use, and he reflexively arranges objects into neat columns even in a crisis. He leaves the impression of a careful young professional who has already watched the room die once.

Richard is disciplined and analytical, yet deeply susceptible to omens he cannot explain. He can be considerate and almost brotherly when someone is frightened, but turns blunt and controlling when he believes time is running out. In ordinary conversation he masks grief with dry practicality; when the spirit is near, he becomes intent, impatient, and strangely sure of himself. He wants independence but longs for the family that gave him a home.

Richard Jones was born in Delaware to a Swedish father and a mother whose face he remembers only in broken impressions. His father and uncles remain vivid in his mind: voices, cold-weather coats, and the sense that he belonged to a family across the sea. As a boy, Richard died. The details are fractured, but the aftermath is plain: an Eagle spirit returned him to life and took his blue human eyes in exchange for its own fierce, yellow sight. Richard's blue eyes now travel with the spirit; the spirit's eyes look out through him. The Jones family adopted him, and their home became a real family rather than a temporary shelter. He is the eldest, and several siblings treat him as a likely heir, a presumption he accepts as a matter of birth order despite no promise ever being made. Aaron, a younger brother and Richard's closest confidant, worries that the hunt is consuming him. Alexander, another younger brother who shares an unspoken history with death, is searching for him whenever his work as a leader allows. Neither brother knows the whole truth. Richard relearned Swedish and now works as a mathematical statistics expert for businesses, finding comfort in patterns that do not change when memories do. Nearing adulthood, he has become preoccupied with blood kin, revenge, and a promised price. The Eagle spirit that restored him is also a spirit of war, wind, and lightning, and it sometimes takes his body without warning. Richard cannot always tell which memories or choices were his. A trail of unnatural cold, electrical interference, and accounts of a Wechuge-like predator has drawn him north toward Northern Europe and his father. He wants to talk to the man, but suspects the meeting may end in murder. He carries a pistol when he can, and plans to obtain one if he reaches the region without it.