Draz is a compact, broad-shouldered dwarf with the dense, work-hardened build of someone who has spent as much time hauling equipment as fighting. He moves with an odd forward tilt, always balanced as though standing on the deck of a ship, and when he waits he rests his weight on the balls of his feet instead of his heels. His beard is clipped square at the jaw and bound into three short cords with brass ammunition caps. His hands are blackened at the nails from powder, but his cuffs are obsessively clean. He smells faintly of pine resin, lamp oil, and expensive rosewater, an unexpectedly delicate note for a hired killer. His most noticeable habit is checking the small brass locket beneath his collar every few minutes without seeming aware of it.

Draz is practical, observant, and almost painfully dependable with strangers, yet evasive and manipulative with the people closest to him. He gives honest advice to clients while concealing the most important truth about his own motives. In danger he becomes calm, precise, and protective. When Sava is threatened, that composure fractures into fierce impulsiveness. In private, Draz is sentimental enough to preserve wilted flowers, but he would rather fight three ogres than admit why.

Draz was born in the quarry settlement of Kadar Vask, where his family cut fortress stone for a duke who never paid them on time. At nineteen, he joined a caravan guard company and learned to track smugglers through high passes. During a winter escort, the caravan was attacked by a fiend-bound warlock named Sava Nahr. Sava killed nearly everyone present, but spared Draz after he refused to abandon a trapped child beneath an overturned wagon. Instead of finishing him, Sava offered him work. Draz accepted, first for money, then for the private hope that proximity would reveal what remained human in the warlock. Years later, that hope has become a love he considers both shameful and sacred. Draz now takes contracts under Sava's seal, while secretly sabotaging assignments that would harm innocents. His current problem is that Sava has promised a powerful patron the soul of an entire mountain village, and Draz has discovered the contract can only be broken if someone willingly kills Sava before the next blood moon.