Sava has the long, supple torso and webbed hands of a lifelong swimmer, with a steady, forward-set posture as if testing an unseen current. Their sea-green skin has a matte, pebbled texture across the shoulders and throat, becoming smooth and faintly translucent at the webbing between their fingers. A ridge of tiny reedlike fins lies flat along the back of their neck. They wait with their weight tipped toward one foot and their chin angled as though listening through the ground. Before speaking, they take one sharply audible breath through the nose, then pause long enough for people to wonder if they have changed their mind. Their unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulously tended garden of salt-tolerant flowers in a waterproof case at their belt.

Sava is patient with the hesitant and exacting with the powerful. They can be wry and warmly practical over a meal, yet become immovable when someone tries to simplify a community's history. They dislike public attention but will stand before a crowd if it protects a descendant from being erased. Their care for the dead is fierce; their care for the living sometimes takes the form of intrusive questions.

Sava was born among the stilt homes of a settlement swallowed by a slow-rising estuary. Their grandmother, Biko, taught them family names as verses, insisting that a place was not truly lost while someone could still say who had lived there. When Sava was eleven, a flood tore through the settlement during a night evacuation. They survived by clinging to a ferry spar, but lost the tune that carried the names of their own street and several neighbors. The experience changed their work from a pleasant family custom into a vow: they began traveling from shore to shore, gathering names from descendants before memory thinned further. They are now famous, though reluctant to be treated as a performer rather than a witness. Sava's former ferry mate, Nuru, still sends news of threatened settlements, while a young descendant named Jali keeps asking Sava to teach them the whole craft. Sava currently has a growing dispute with local officials who want their songs to omit a drowned hamlet that would complicate a lucrative shoreline claim.