Riven moves like someone born to shift with tides: a slow, coiling grace that can snap into violence. He wears a battered tricorn hat pinned at a rakish angle and a long coat of oil-dark leather stitched with salt-white thread. His left forearm is wrapped in a band of blackened chain etched with a single wave motif — the physical locus of his Hexblade bond — and when he speaks his left hand idly traces the chain as if feeling the grain of wood. His smile is calm and small, the kind that promises a bargain. Unexpectedly, his right cheek is tattooed with an intricate map of the Lysmere shoals: tiny islands, currents and little Xs that mark shipwrecks — a sailor’s cartography burned into skin. When angry, his movements speed and his voice hardens; when charmed, he hums an old harbor shanty without realizing it.