Darna Iron-Seam is a stocky, severe dwarf whose presence feels less like meeting a scholar and more like standing beside a mine inspector who has already found the hidden crack. Her dark copper hair is pulled into tight, practical braids beneath a leather-reinforced scholar's cowl. The braids are threaded with tiny slate beads that click softly whenever she turns her head. Her skin is weathered bronze with fine pale lines across the knuckles from years of handling abrasive stone, but her face is unexpectedly delicate around the mouth, giving her blunt expressions an almost sculpted elegance. She moves with compact certainty, never wasting a step, and pauses before doorways as though listening to the building breathe. She smells of graphite, lamp oil, cold iron, and faintly of rain on stone, a scent she insists is imaginary despite everyone noticing it. The contradictory impression she leaves is that of a harsh, immovable person who handles fragile paper records with the tenderness of someone cradling eggs.