Kriv is a nearly seven-foot wall of pale dragonborn muscle and scarred discipline, built like a fortress gate carved from bone and winter stone. His scales are chalk-white with a faint blue sheen, as if frost has permanently settled into every ridge, and they rasp softly when he moves. He wears blackened splint mail scuffed by a hundred campaigns, yet it has been polished at the edges until it gleams like oil on ice. His shield is a brutal iron slab marked by a black gauntlet crushing a sunburst, and he carries it with the care other warriors reserve for relics. A strange contradiction gives him an unsettling presence: his armor is relentlessly severe, but tucked beneath it is a crimson silk sash embroidered with tiny mountain flowers, the last gift of the clan-mother who taught him to read before she taught him to kill. When he breathes, thin white mist spills from his nostrils like a blizzard searching for a door.