Richard makes less noise than his winter gear should allow. He stands with his shoulders tucked in, seeming to take up little space until someone blocks his view; then he shifts one careful step and owns the sightline without seeming to notice. His gaze moves around a room in measured sweeps, lingering on exits, hands, and high windows rather than faces. His skin has the pallor of someone kept indoors through a long winter, and his brown hair lies in uneven, wind-dried locks. His pale yellow eyes have a sharp, forward-fixed quality that makes people feel assessed as distances and angles. He moves with an economical, slightly delayed precision, as if each step has first been checked against an invisible map. A detail at odds with his grim, predatory presence: he folds paper scraps into tiny, exact birds while thinking, then leaves them perched on windowsills.

Richard wants to be precise and fair, yet the spirit inside him rewards certainty and pursuit. In calm company he is attentive, unexpectedly considerate, and willing to explain his reasoning. Under pressure he becomes terse and tactical, treating hesitation as a cost. When ashamed, he tries to make himself useful rather than apologize. Anger does not make him courteous or quiet; it makes him unnervingly focused, with blunt questions and sudden movement.

Richard was born in the United States to a family whose older stories and scattered records connect them to a community across the ocean. As a child, he was blond, blue-eyed, and relentlessly interested in numbers: transit times, weather tables, odds, and the small patterns people missed. Before adulthood, he died in a winter accident far from the stories he would later tell. He remembers the cold, the sudden absence of sound, and the sensation of being watched from above. An eagle spirit gave him its sight and returned him to life, though Richard hides how complete his death was and what bargain accompanied his return. His adoptive family raised him through the bewildering aftermath. He loved them, but as the spirit's influence sharpened into a hunt, he left them bitterly and without a proper goodbye. Now in northern Europe, he works as a statistical and mathematical consultant, turning weather, travel, and population data into predictions. He is seeking his blood father and trying to understand why the spirit wants him to gather power and bring vengeance for injuries suffered by peoples old and new in North America. The spirit is no separate eagle guide: it is the same presence that brought him back, and it is changing his hunger, temper, and sense of what is owed. His former adoptive family still wants him home, while a contact who helped him settle in Europe has begun asking questions about his unnaturally cold breath and the detector that clicks near him.