Sven has a graceful, handsome build and the open, attentive face of someone who listens before deciding what a person means. His hazel-brown hair catches a faint sheen like polished leaves after rain, and a developing beard shadows his jaw unevenly. His skin is weathered by damp wind and outdoor work, pinking quickly at the nose and roughening at the knuckles. He moves with careful, economical steps, placing his feet as if testing a plank before trusting it. A small, unexpected detail: he carries a little wooden bird, crudely carved but carefully rubbed smooth, and turns it over in his hands when he is trying to comfort someone else.

Patient and empathetic, but not passive: Sven gives people time to explain themselves until he decides that delay will cause harm. He is gentle when someone is embarrassed, brisk when a task needs doing, and quietly wary around authority. His composure is genuine, yet beneath it he carries the strain of adapting to a body, age, and world he never chose. When finally angry, he becomes startlingly decisive rather than loud.

Sven remembers being a woman in a far-future America, where she worked as an accountant and trusted numbers to make a world legible. Then came a blank interval and waking in the Netherlands in 867, amid a fractured Carolingian order, in the body of a local-looking boy of about seventeen. He has had to learn the speech, customs, and dangers of a life others assume he has always lived. He does not tell people that his memories include another body and another age; he has seen how quickly an explanation can become an accusation. The first person to offer him food was a reed-cutter named Geth, who treated his confusion as shock rather than sin. Later, after Sven found a stand of hazels mysteriously sickened by a stranger's axe, the local healer Ffion recognized the scale-like branching at his shoulders and told him of the Frisian Hazelwyrm. That encounter made the draconic heritage real, but not safe. Sven now helps the Unfilled Circle, a clandestine fellowship of displaced outsiders, quietly find shelter and search for the cause of their arrivals. His present troubles are practical: he needs a trustworthy place to sleep, the fellowship's members disagree about whether to investigate or disappear, and a reeve has begun asking why Sven keeps visiting damaged groves.