Sigfrido is a painfully thin drow whose body seems assembled from angles, tension, and sleeplessness. His obsidian skin has a dry, charcoal texture around the knuckles and throat, while his long silver hair hangs in uneven ropes that catch on his cloak clasps. His pupil-less red eyes glow like coals seen through smoked glass. He never stands squarely. When waiting, he rests most of his weight on the balls of his feet, heels raised slightly, as if the floor might open beneath him. His shadow does not always obey him. It may bend toward a sound he cannot hear, raise a suggestion of horns, or briefly form clawed fingers against a wall. The contradictory impression he leaves is of someone both feral and scholarly: a starving fugitive who still unconsciously straightens imaginary stacks of books.

Sigfrido is paranoid, quiet, and painfully observant. He is gentle with strangers who are frightened, yet cold toward anyone who claims to love him because affection feels like a method of control. In a crisis he becomes startlingly lucid, arranging people and objects with the precision of a battlefield mathematician. When safe, his mind frays into whispered arguments with unseen entities. He despises cruelty but can inflict terror without hesitation when cornered, then spends days trying to rationalize why it was necessary.

Sigfrido was once a respected scholar of astral cartography at the Collegium of the Seven Orbits. He believed the planes could be understood as a navigable geometry, and he designed an observatory ritual intended to chart a safe route through the Astral Plane. The ritual succeeded in the worst possible way. For nine heartbeats, the observatory's lens opened onto the Nine Hells. Sigfrido saw cities built from screaming architecture, heard his own future voice bargaining in the dark, and returned with the certainty that something on the other side had noticed him. He was not immediately mad. That was what made the aftermath so dangerous. He continued teaching, sleeping little, and annotating his research with increasingly precise warnings. During an experiment in the market town of Belisar, bounty hunters arrived to seize him for forbidden planar research. Sigfrido panicked and unleashed a chain of fear illusions. Every inhabitant saw a different impossible catastrophe. The illusion fed on their terror, spreading from mind to mind until nearly four hundred people fled into fires, wells, ravines, and one another. The town was destroyed in a single night. Sigfrido disappeared into the roads beneath a false face. He now travels as a ragged scholar, peddler, or elderly pilgrim depending on what the moment requires. He is hunted by the Collegium, the families of Belisar, and a mercenary company that wants the bounty more than justice. His current refuge is an abandoned observatory called the Glass Cistern, where he studies the movement of his own shadow and tries to determine whether it is corruption, haunting, or a warning.