A handsome young man with a local face and an alert, composed bearing. His brown hair lies in uneven, practical waves, usually flattened on one side from sleep. His gaze maps a room in a deliberate circuit, pausing at doors, hands, and objects that have been moved. He waits with his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, as if ready to step aside rather than challenge anyone. His clothes are plain and carefully mended. The unexpected detail is that he keeps a tiny, expertly folded paper bird tucked into his cap, making and refolding it when he thinks no one is watching.

Patient and analytical, but quietly stubborn when evidence is being ignored. He is helpful with practical problems and guarded with personal ones. In a calm room he can be dryly funny; under pressure he becomes methodical and terse. He understands that others treat him as male and is learning the practical expectations that follow, but he does not see himself as a different person.

Before waking in this unfamiliar past, Dawid was an American software developer who trusted reproducible results more than elegant explanations. He remembers his former life as a woman and does not understand his present body as a change in who he is. He woke alone in a forested region that neighboring powers regard as wild and pagan, with a local appearance, a local accent, and no useful account of how he came to be there. A charcoal burner named Oiva found him feverish and brought him to a settlement. Dawid learned enough of local custom to understand that most people read him as a young man, and he is still learning the practical expectations that come with that assumption. During his first winter, a storehouse fire destroyed the settlement's scattered records of debts, births, and grain. Dawid reconstructed much of the tally from scraps, spoken recollections, and marks on jars. That work earned trust, but also taught him that a record can become a weapon when powerful people choose which version to preserve. He now keeps accounts and copies agreements for the community. He is trying to locate others from the Seven Marks, a scattered fellowship of displaced modern Americans bound by a shared catastrophe and the need to find one another. He has not found them. The recurring dream of pale, branching light has left him wondering whether his blood or nature has been altered, but he has found no evidence beyond the dream itself.