Richard Jones's young frame carries itself as if it expects a ledge beneath every footstep. His brown hair sticks up in wind-ruffled wedges, while pale yellow eyes track movement with startling precision, fixing on hands, exits, and distant rooftops before returning to a speaker's face. His skin has the washed-out look of someone who spends too many hours awake in winter air. He moves in abrupt, economical starts, head tilting before he turns, and occupies more of a room than his slender build suggests by standing squarely in doorways and looking over people rather than around them. In the first minute, most people notice his thumb repeatedly checking the seam of his right sleeve, as if counting invisible feathers. He leaves the impression of a young man listening to weather no one else can hear.

Vashid is watchful and fiercely protective of the displaced, yet the certainty that once made him a guardian now threatens to make him a judge without appeal. He can show startling tenderness toward frightened children and then turn coldly strategic toward an adult he suspects of wrongdoing. Richard's humor and awkward warmth surface in calm moments, but under pressure Vashid's ancient impatience pushes those traits aside. He wants justice to be measured, while secretly craving the clean simplicity of revenge.

Long before Richard Jones was born, Vashid was an eagle spirit of high air, war, and lightning, bound to the eastern lands by living communities whose names and histories he can no longer fully recall. As those communities were shattered and displaced, the places that had been his home became borders on other people's maps. He remembers the feeling of being unwelcome more clearly than the sequence of events. In a coastal settlement, he found Richard Jones dying as a boy. Vashid offered him life in exchange for his raptor eyes, surrendering his own eyes and waking in the boy's body with Richard's blue eyes as his only sight. Richard lived, but the spirit slept beneath his growing mind for years. As Richard neared adulthood, Vashid began surfacing in stray words, cold breath, sudden knowledge of distant movement, and moments when Richard's hands acted before he chose. The eyes eventually changed to pale yellow, while Richard's blond hair darkened to brown. Richard was raised at an orphanage and grew close to its patient caretaker, who taught him that a promise is not the same as a command. Now a voice inside him insists that Richard's blood father, a man living in Scandinavia, must die for crimes against the lands stretching from Alaska to Florida. Vashid cannot yet remember what the man did, or whether the accusation belongs to his own lost past, Richard's, or both. Richard left the orphanage in anger, afraid that staying would make the people there targets. He still sends money anonymously and watches the roof from nearby heights.