A broad, weather-beaten man whose battered mail hangs over a patched wool coat. Frost has roughened his cheeks into a permanent red-brown grain, and his beard is clipped short except for a stubborn tuft beneath his chin. He plants his feet as if every floor might conceal thin ice. Within a minute, people notice that his eyes check the room’s warmest corners and then the exits, never settling on a speaker for long. When rattled, he takes quick, dry breaths through his nose; the finger bones in his pouch answer with a faint crackle.

Volric is practical and generous with food or shelter, but suspicious of promises and quick to count the cost of help. In a crisis he becomes brisk and useful; in safety he grows restless and argumentative. He wants to be seen as dependable, yet privately expects that he will fail anyone who relies on him.

Volric grew up among the scattered Marcher families north of the monastery, learning to trade salt, lamp oil, and iron fittings between settlements. His people kept their dead close in memory, and he inherited a small bundle of blackened finger bones said to belong to his ancestors. He once treated them as a family relic and a bargaining curiosity. That changed during the Long Thaw, when an early spring storm froze solid in a single night. His sister Edda and several tribal elders vanished while investigating dark figures on the ridge. Volric found their camp abandoned, its fire still burning beneath a skin of ice, and saw the dead rise from a drift where no grave had been dug. He fled with a split shield, a damaged handaxe, and the bones, which began crackling in the monastery’s warmth. Now he carries news to the monks and anyone willing to listen, but he also trades for supplies and searches for Edda. His old route-partner, gentle-voiced Toma, thinks Volric is chasing a story to avoid admitting he left the others behind. Volric still sends a portion of his earnings to their mother, Willa, and has not told her how uncertain he is that Edda lives.