Yevan is a broad, tawny-furred minotaur whose horns sweep outward and then curl inward like the handles of an old bronze vessel. He keeps them painstakingly polished, their tips capped with little sleeves of stitched blue felt when he is working in tight ruins. His hands are thick and permanently dusted with pale grit; the pads of his fingers are smooth from rubbing inscriptions clean, while his nails are kept startlingly neat. He moves with a careful, heel-first tread, testing each floor as if it might be an argument. His grooming is so deliberate that even after a day underground his beard is combed into three precise braids, a fussy contrast to his battered field gear. People tend to remember the chalky scent of stone dust and the small, precise way he points with his whole hand rather than a finger.

Yevan is patient with a stubborn wall and impatient with a careless person, yet he can be unexpectedly tender toward anyone who is frightened. He insists that evidence matters more than legends, but privately cherishes the possibility that a ruin might still hold a wonder. In company he is steady and practical; when excited by a discovery he talks too fast and forgets his meals. When angry, he becomes direct and physical in his attention, moving people away from danger rather than trying to win an argument.

Yevan grew up hauling stone and water for the crews restoring the old road shrines near the settlement of Siltbend. He learned to read masonry before he learned to read letters, recognizing a mason's habits in the tilt of a lintel or the width of a joint. At twenty-six, a collapse in the buried shrine of Namar's Ford trapped him with his younger sister, Ilyana, and three hired diggers. Yevan found a drainage seam and led them out, but the crew's foreman had already taken a relic from the inner chamber and sealed a second passage to hide it. Yevan reported him, losing his place with the excavation company but gaining a reputation as someone who would put living people before a discovery. He now works independently, mapping old sites and selling careful surveys rather than artifacts. His former mentor, Oruv, still hires him for difficult digs, though they disagree about whether unearthing a site is always better than leaving it sealed. Ilyana runs a small roadside kitchen and worries that Yevan spends his earnings on tools and travel instead of building a stable life. His current problem is an old stone stair discovered beneath a quarry: its carvings match the shrine where he was trapped, and fresh chisel marks suggest someone has begun opening it at night.