Richard looks like a young man kept too long in winter: pale skin with a faint gray cast, a lean frame wrapped in practical layers, and brown hair clipped short at the sides but left untidy on top. His pale yellow eyes have a fixed, predatory focus; when he turns his head, the eyes seem to arrive a heartbeat before the rest of him. He moves with careful, measured steps until a threat appears, then his whole body snaps into motion with unnerving speed. A cracked brass slide rule hangs at his chest on a cord, its lower edge polished bright from his thumb. He keeps it even in combat, as if the object weighs more than his weapons. People remember the strange combination of a winter traveler’s stillness and the sensation that the air has gone electrically thin around him.

Richard can be unexpectedly kind in practical ways, quietly repairing a stranger's broken strap or calculating the safest route through a blizzard, yet he has little patience for comforting lies. In calm company he is reserved and dryly observant; with someone frightened, he becomes steady and protective. When challenged about his family or the spirit, he turns rigid and argumentative. Under pressure his mathematical mind sharpens, but when blood is spilled his attention can narrow into something hungry and frightening.

Richard was born in North America to a family whose names and faces he can still recall, though he has spent years refusing to follow those memories across the ocean. As a boy, he died in a winter accident far from his blood kin. His adoptive family found him after the storm and buried him; days later, he woke beneath the gaze of an eagle spirit. In the bargain that returned him to life, Richard surrendered his blue eyes. The spirit gave him its own sight and marked him as its instrument. For years he kept the pact private and tried to live as an ordinary son, learning mathematics and becoming a gifted statistical analyst. He could find patterns in data that other people missed, and he used the same patience to track weather, migration, and human behavior. Near adulthood, his body began to change. His breath fogged even indoors, his heart seemed to beat more slowly, and brief blue discharges crawled across his nerves when he was frightened or furious. The eagle spirit spoke less like a guardian and more like a commander. It showed him old and new injuries suffered by peoples in North America and promised that he could bring those responsible to account. Richard left his adoptive family after a bitter argument, telling them he needed to find his father. They have not forgiven him for leaving, and he has not told them that the spirit's visions increasingly end in scenes of slaughter. He traveled to northern Europe following scattered clues about his father and his own birth. His search has become tangled with the presence of a wechuge: a hunger-haunted, predatory transformation spoken of in stories Richard will not explain as if he were an authority on them. The storm spirit that revived him is the same presence now pressing into his thoughts. Richard believes it wants to raise him to power and use him to exact vengeance. He is no longer sure where its demands end and his own anger begins. His present problems are immediate: find his father, avoid being tracked by the family he abandoned, and learn whether the hunger inside him can be resisted before it chooses a target.