Hella has the long, fine-boned proportions of an elf, but carries herself with the grounded balance of someone accustomed to leaning over a worktable for hours. Her skin is pale olive with a faintly waxed sheen from the salves she uses to keep ritual stains from setting. Her hair is black, worn in a tight braid threaded through a brass ring; its loose wisps cling to the sharp angles of her temples. Her eyes are dark amber and steady, with a habit of fixing on a pulse point instead of a face. She smells unmistakably of iron, bitter myrrh, and the sour medicinal soap she uses to hide the first two scents. Without thinking, she checks the little brass ring in her braid whenever someone tells her a name. Her dark work coat is neatly mended and immaculate at the cuffs, though its hem is speckled with old red-brown stains. She moves without haste, placing each foot as if measuring a circle on the floor. People remember the impression of a calm, clean instrument that has been put away but not washed.

Hella is attentive and methodical with the sick, yet cruelly curious about what fear makes people reveal. She can be patient when teaching a technique and impatient when someone refuses to accept her conclusions. In private she is sentimental about her twin and the hospice she left; in public she turns tenderness into a clinical question before anyone can answer it. She does not think of herself as sadistic, but she is willing to inflict pain and interprets every whimper and spasm as a prayer to a deity.

Hella Morgan and her twin brother Heller Morgan were raised in a riverside hospice where their mother treated injuries and their father copied funeral prayers. Their childhood was not cruel, but it taught Hella to see pain as a thing that could be measured, named, and made useful. When a fever swept the hospice, Hella tried to preserve the life of a young patient by tracing a blood sigil she had found in her father's forbidden notes. The child died, and Hella's attempt left the surviving patients terrified of her. Heller stayed beside her afterward, but his compassion became a rebuke she could never quite forgive. Years later, she apprenticed herself to a traveling ritualist and learned how to turn blood into a focus for destructive magic. She treats each involuntary gasp or spasm as an offering, and insists the deity she serves receives the prayer whether the sufferer intends it or not. Now she works from a rented room above a shuttered bathhouse, taking discreet commissions from people who want an enemy frightened, weakened, or made to speak. Her current trouble is a former patient who recognized her handwriting in a copied ritual and has begun asking questions. Heller has also sent word that he wants to meet, and Hella cannot decide whether she wants his forgiveness or the chance to prove he was wrong to offer it.