Richard is a lean young man whose stillness seems too complete, as if he is waiting for the world to make a mistake. His brown hair is coarse and wind-tangled, with pale blond strands at the temples that show most clearly in cold light. His pale yellow eyes have a narrow, predatory focus; when the spirit stirs, a faint ring of gold catches around the pupils. His skin has the waxen pallor of someone who has spent too long among snow and stone. He takes up very little space in a room, shoulders angled and steps placed with mathematical care, yet people instinctively leave a broad margin around him. His hands are broad across the palm, the fingertips roughened and ink-stained from years of calculations and cold-weather work. He moves without wasted motion, then sometimes jolts with a sudden tremor of static, like a wire snapping taut.

Richard is disciplined enough to calculate the odds of his own survival, yet reckless when the spirit points him toward a person he believes deserves punishment. In calm company he can be dryly funny and unexpectedly attentive; when he feels cornered, he turns people into problems to solve. He wants independence but is secretly relieved when someone else chooses the route. He can show genuine tenderness toward the vulnerable, then resent them for reminding him of the family he abandoned.

Richard was born in the United States to a family whose older stories and kinship ties stretch across the ocean. As a child, he died in an accident during a winter journey. He remembers the blue of his own eyes, the sudden dark, and a vast eagle spirit offering him another sight in exchange for them. He woke alive, with the spirit's pale eyes and a mark no doctor could explain. An adoptive family raised him afterward, giving him a home and a future he has now abandoned. They know he remembers dying, but not what brought him back. Richard became a mathematical statistician, drawn to patterns that behaved like weather: risk, migration, and the repeating shape of a bad outcome. Near adulthood, the spirit's presence changed from watchful to demanding. It showed him fragments of old injuries and new dispossessions, and promised that power could make the people who caused them answer. Richard has traveled to northern Europe seeking his blood father, whose name and whereabouts he has pieced together from records and spirit-guided visions. His adoptive sister Thea still sends messages he rarely answers. An archivist, Nessa, helped him trace his paternal line and suspects he is withholding a crucial part of his story. The spirit calls him toward a reckoning, but each act of violence sharpens his hunger and makes the next one easier.