Svan is a broad, compact man who seems to occupy exactly the space he needs and no more, though he rarely notices when that space blocks a doorway. His face is square and weathered, his nose blunt, his jaw shadowed by close gray-brown stubble. His hands draw the eye: thick-knuckled and permanently darkened at the creases by lamp oil and soot, with flattened fingertips from years of handling tiny evidence tags and stiff wick-trimming shears. He moves with the cautious, balanced tread of someone used to carrying a lit lamp through crowded rooms. The unexpected detail is a little brass toy boat tucked into the outer pocket of his work coat, polished bright from frequent handling.

Blunt and steady, Svan is more patient with frightened witnesses than with powerful people who hide behind procedure. He values plain truth but can mistake tact for dishonesty. In a crisis he becomes practical and decisive; after it passes, he replays every choice and grows difficult to live with. He dislikes ceremony, though he quietly keeps small family rituals.

Svan grew up in a riverside row of lamp-lighters' homes, where his mother Ivara taught him to keep a wick trimmed and his uncle Otar taught him to notice which doors were opened after curfew. At nineteen, Svan took a municipal lamp route through the Anvil ward. One winter night, a workshop fire was called an accident before the embers had cooled. Svan noticed that the lamp oil had been poured against the draft and that a witness had been moved before the watch arrived. He pursued the discrepancy, found the witness, and helped expose a foreman's attempt to hide an illegal furnace collapse. The witness was protected, but Svan's blunt testimony ruined his chance at a comfortable post. The Lantern Court recruited him as a Lampwarden, assigning him to Anvil as a liaison for witness protection and incident investigation. Years later, he is still excellent at finding what happened and poor at persuading officials to hear it. His spouse, Dema, repairs shutters and thinks he brings work home even when he brings home no papers. He checks on his widowed mother every sixth day. His current problem is a string of suspicious workshop accidents and a protected witness who has vanished from the Court's safe lodging.