Hrothgar moves like a stone that has been worn soft by water: deliberate, heavy-footed, and with a quiet resilience. His beard is a braided waterfall of dark peat-stained hair threaded with metal rings and tiny, polished bog-pearls—each ring annealed in ceremonies for a fallen smith or a born child of the wetlands. Peat stains rim his robes in irregular, dark crescents as if the garment remembers standing by bog-pools centuries-old. An iron anvil, scarred and stamped with the sigil of Durinn, is chained to his hip by a short, soot-blackened shackle; he uses it as both altar and weapon. He wears a twisted iron circlet engraved with the crude likeness of Gizaragzda, the Lady. His hands are callused and tattooed with saltwater knot-lines; he unconsciously rubs those knuckles when thinking. Unexpectedly, his heavy, soot-dark robes are lined with a patchwork of bright, embroidered reef-patterns in greens and corals—an old, defiant homage to the island coasts his people once tended. In sunlight he squints, and his movements reveal a lifetime of work at low angles: he crouches and stands with surprising speed despite bowed knees.