Cebri is broad through the shoulders and stooped slightly from years of bending over rows, with a sun-beaten face textured like dry, cracked earth. His forearms are ropey and browned, his palms thick with calluses, and his movements are economical: he rarely wastes a step, even when startled. He smells strongly of crushed mint, damp soil, and the sharp, animal warmth of the goats he tends, and seems entirely unaware of it. Unexpectedly for a farmer, he keeps a tiny, painstakingly folded paper map tucked inside his shirt, updating it with neat little marks whenever a boundary stone shifts.

Cebri is quiet and superstitious, yet he is no fool: he trusts repeated observations more than omens, though he still mutters a charm before sowing. He is generous with labor but guarded with trust. On a good morning he jokes dryly with his neighbors; when tired or cornered, he becomes stubborn and answers questions with a list of chores that need doing.

Cebri grew up on a small holding outside Brackenford, learning to read weather from the smell of wind and the angle of swallows. At seventeen, a late frost killed the village's seed crop. His father, Oren, insisted the old boundary cairn had been moved and that the neighboring estate owed them land; the dispute ended with Oren jailed and the family forced to sell their best field. Cebri learned then that keeping a careful record could matter as much as keeping a strong back. He now farms the same soil with his wife, Sachi, and their teenage son, Toma, while quietly mapping the old field boundaries. His neighbor, Hesh, is an old friend who has begun selling scraps of their shared pasture to a road contractor. Cebri is tired, proud, and increasingly worried that this year's strange, black-rooted blight is spreading from a collapsed well beneath the eastern field.