Ossian stands exactly six feet tall, with pale skin that takes on a faint, cold translucence in winter light. His straight blond hair lies smooth as combed flax beneath his flat cap, except for a stubborn lock that keeps slipping forward. His blue eyes are unusually bright, like flame seen through deep water, and his handsome, youthful face has the composed look of a man listening for something beyond the room. He moves with a shepherd's economical certainty, placing each foot as if testing boggy ground. His hands are broad, roughened by wool, gates, and weather; while talking, he keeps rubbing the cap's brim between thumb and forefinger without noticing. An unexpected detail: he keeps a tiny, carefully folded scrap of blue silk in his pocket, a keepsake from his restless years on the road.

Ossian is gentle in ordinary company but can turn blunt and unnervingly decisive when danger reaches his farm. He is practical enough to mend a fence before discussing a crisis, yet privately sentimental about the roads he left behind. His kindness is genuine, but his fear of losing his family makes him controlling and secretive. In good moods he jokes with the shepherds; when tired or seasonally unsettled, he watches the dark lanes and answers questions with clipped farm talk.

Ossian says he came from a dale beyond the eastern ridge, though his memories of it are stranger and older than the mapmakers' names. For years he wandered as drover, hired hand, and occasional night guide, following roads that appeared only in certain seasons. During one such winter, he found a wounded black hound trapped in a snare of wrought iron. He freed it at the cost of blistered hands and learned, too late, that the hound was his own other shape. Since then, he has tried to build a settled life. He bought a handsome farmstead and a good flock, married Mary, and has a young son, William, whom the neighbors call Black William or Blackby for his unexpected black hair and his father's vivid blue eyes. William is slow to speak and learn, and Ossian fears the child's signs of mixed fae and human nature will soon become impossible to hide. On their wedding night, Ossian failed to consummate the marriage in his human shape. He changed into the black hound, then into the headless Barguest shape Mary remembers: a headless man with red, saucer-bright eyes. She struck him with iron scissors after the act. Ossian has never told her the truth. He tells himself that confession would only deepen her terror, but his silence has turned a painful night into a haunting lie. Mary has confided her fear to her father, who now watches Ossian with open suspicion. Mary's subsequent pregnancies have often failed, and Ossian believes his nature has something to do with it. He still dreams of the dales and roads he left behind, especially during uncanny seasonal nights when sleep will not come.