Vot is a lean, adult tiefling with dark, wine-red skin that has a dry, pebbled texture at the knuckles and a polished sheen across his brow. His swept-back horns are ridged like old wood, and his long tail makes small, precise hooks in the air when he watches someone struggle. He moves with the measured ease of a man who expects every room to make way for him. His black hair is clipped close at the sides and combed into a glossy crest, an unexpectedly fastidious flourish amid his scuffed, ill-fitting work clothes. People tend to remember his fixed, appraising stare and the impression that he has already decided what their pain is worth.

Vot savors other people’s discomfort and believes his intelligence makes him more deserving than they are, yet he is unnerved by suffering he cannot explain or control. With strangers he is smooth, probing, and faintly amused; with patients he becomes brisk and theatrically reassuring; with people he respects, he is competitive but unexpectedly attentive. Around his mother, his arrogance softens into awkward, dutiful care, then returns the instant anyone notices.

Vot was raised above a dye-boiler shop in a district built where a marsh had been drained and its reeds burned. His mother, Thessa, taught him to read contracts and spot a lie; his father vanished after borrowing from a lender Vot still refuses to name. As a young apprentice to a street physician, Vot learned to keep people conscious through painful treatments. He discovered he liked the moment when a patient stopped bargaining and began obeying. During a fever winter, he tried to force a frightened child through a dangerous procedure, convinced that fear was merely another tool. The child survived, but the child’s guardian, Sef, exposed Vot’s recklessness and drove him from the practice. Desperate to reclaim status, Vot answered a voice in a scorched cistern and accepted a pact with an unnamed fiendish patron. He now sells magical diagnosis, coercion, and private remedies from rooms above a shuttered bathhouse. He pays for his mother’s medicine, though she believes the money comes from honest work, and he quietly sends food to the child he once frightened. His current trouble is that Sef has returned, asking him to help treat a spreading magical illness, while Vot’s patron demands he turn the sick into a public demonstration of his power.