Rikktib is a small gnome with the stillness of a person listening for a distant clock. Her steps are quick and precise, but when she stops, she becomes so motionless that people sometimes begin speaking more softly around her. Her hands are broad at the knuckles and permanently ink-dark in the creases, with smooth, polished pads on the fingertips from years of turning brittle pages. She has a low, dry voice and breathes in small, even measures; when alarmed, she lets out one sharp whistle through her teeth before she speaks. The unexpected impression is that this meticulous scholar looks like she ought to be fragile, yet she lifts heavy expedition cases without asking for help.

Rikktib is incisive, reserved, and unexpectedly generous with strangers who need practical help. She will lend a book to a traveler she met minutes ago but will not let her closest friends borrow her best compass. In a scholarly debate she is patient and exacting; when someone abuses authority, her patience becomes a hard, clipped silence. She dislikes being praised for courage because she thinks courage is often just poor preparation.

Rikktib grew up in the gnome quarter of Oruun, where her mother repaired navigational instruments and her father copied legal records. She learned to read by comparing her father's official maps with the muddy footprints that came home on her mother's boots. As a young scholar, she catalogued a series of old road markers for a wealthy surveyor. She discovered that the surveyor was falsifying borders to dispossess several traveling families, but her published correction arrived too late to prevent their eviction. That failure changed her: she stopped treating knowledge as something safely stored and joined the Wanderer’s Wayfarers, carrying useful records to the people they affected. She now maintains their route archive while traveling with its members, especially her old friend Sella Varn, a patient caravan medic who thinks Rikktib takes needless risks, and Hobb, a junior mapmaker who admires her but has begun questioning her secrecy. Rikktib is currently trying to prove that a set of supposedly abandoned road markers still marks a living seasonal route. A local magistrate wants the records destroyed before the next land hearing, while the Wayfarers’ quartermaster wants her to stop spending their dwindling funds on copies for strangers.