A light, thin young woman with the poised, watchful stillness of a reed waiting out a current. Her sea-glass skin has a faint, pearly sheen at the temples and knuckles, and fine ripples of darker blue show beneath it when she is cold. She moves with short, careful steps on land, but turns and glides through water with startling ease. Her grooming is precise to the point of vanity: every strand of hair is combed into a smooth knot, and she checks its alignment in any reflective surface. Within a minute of meeting her, most people notice that her gaze keeps dropping to the floorboards, searching for dampness, roots, or the direction water would run.

Aza can be warmly generous in a crisis and exacting about small courtesies in ordinary life. She is patient with frightened people but has little patience for waste, carelessness, or excuses. In a good mood she shares dry jokes and useful gossip; when worried, she becomes procedural and asks the same question from several angles. She wants to trust others, yet tests their intentions before committing herself.

Aza was raised among the reed-cutters and ferry families of the Rill Ford, where her mother, Seki, kept a small riverside shrine and taught her to read flood marks. When Aza was thirteen, a dry summer left the ford shallow and a fever spread through the settlement. She watched her mother give away their last clean water to strangers, then collapse before the rains came. The experience made Aza generous with practical help and fiercely suspicious of anyone who treats scarcity as someone else's problem. She apprenticed herself to a wandering druid, learning to tend sickly banks and coax clean water from polluted springs. She now works as a marsh guide and healer, sending part of her earnings to Seki, who survived but is too proud to leave the shrine. Aza's closest ally is Doru, a ferryman who knows the channels better than she does; they care for one another but argue over whether to expose the mill that has been dumping dye into the river. The mill's foreman has threatened to evict the families who depend on its wages, and Aza is trying to find proof of the poisoning before anyone gets hurt.