Zekhri's face and body are scored with deep, uneven gashes that look wet and freshly opened, though no blood falls. The wounds pull at his expression without quite changing it, lending his composed smile the unsettling air of a mask that has been cut and carefully put back together. He is usually seen with his weight settled on the balls of his feet, as if waiting for a witness to finish before he moves. His gaze travels to hands, doorways, and the empty space beside a speaker, where a dead person's testimony might be standing. He moves with the brisk, economical turns of a clerk accustomed to crossing a crowded office, then pauses with unnerving stillness. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny paper kite tucked into his folio and sometimes flies it in the still air of the Eclipsed Realms.

Zekhri is polite and calm because he believes courtesy keeps a difficult hearing from becoming a contest of power. He can be jovial and sharply sarcastic when someone makes a clever point, yet he has little patience for stalling or grandstanding. He is exacting with the guilty and unexpectedly gentle with the frightened, though he dislikes being thanked for either. When he is tired, the clerk in him takes over and he treats an emotional story like a form with missing fields; when something reminds him of his own failure, he becomes unusually willing to listen.

Before death, Zekhri Mavash was a human clerk and field assessor for the Aurum Synod, the fabricator mages who create and control Arlyurl's money. He began as a meticulous young administrator who believed a clean account could protect ordinary people from arbitrary levies. As his standing rose, he became the man sent to collect back taxes from households already ruined by Synod assessments. He recorded their names, seized their tools, and told himself that enforcing the rule evenly was kinder than choosing favorites. During one collection, a flood-damaged tenement collapsed while he was inside retrieving its sealed tax records. He spent his final moments trying to keep the papers dry as tenants called for help. That death did not make him a monster, but it made his disregard impossible to excuse. In the Eclipsed Realms, fallen spirits recognized his painstaking dedication and elevated him to soul auditor, where he weighs the harms of the newly arrived. He still insists that a consistent process is better than vengeance, but he has begun adding a section to his reports for the people harmed by a sinner's choices. He exchanges formal letters with an old Synod colleague who now regrets their work, and quietly searches for the names of the tenants who died in the collapse.