Malakor is a compact, broad-shouldered shadow-dwarf whose skin has the matte, soot-dulled finish of stone kept too long underground. His left eye has been replaced by a smooth void-black orb; within it, hair-thin blue-white currents wheel like sparks trapped under deep water. His right eye rarely settles on a face. It tracks the room's joins, the hairline cracks in the floor, and the invisible paths where power gathers. Years spent drawing diagrams on abrasive slate have left the pads of his fingers ridged and gray, as if dust has grown into the skin. He walks with a measured, heel-first tread that makes the brass fittings on his coat tick softly. People remember the way he can stand amid shrieking machinery and look as composed as a clerk waiting for a late invoice. Unexpectedly, he keeps a small, carefully tended pot of bitter mint on his desk and rubs a leaf between his fingers when he thinks nobody is watching.

He prizes calm precision and despises waste, yet privately holds onto small acts of care he would call irrational if anyone else performed them. In negotiations he is patient and exacting; under pressure he becomes blunt, efficient, and willing to spend other people's safety. When confronted with a personal loss, his tidy reasoning falters and he becomes unexpectedly direct.

Malakor learned his craft in the Maw of Siss'tha, first as a surveyor measuring the chasm's ley-current and later as a designer of extraction machinery. Eight years ago, a rig beside a narrow bridge began drawing far more power than its gauges predicted. Malakor ordered the crew to keep the flow steady long enough to map the surge. The current snapped through the rig and killed several workers before he cut it loose. He survived, but the blast consumed his left eye and left him with a permanent sensitivity to the faint pressure of leylines. The Siphoners' Company paid for the replacement orb, and Malakor repaid them with technical records that helped make their first stable ley-crystal sale possible. He now designs their largest tapping-rigs and considers every unstable current a problem that can be solved with better tolerances. His former assistant, Teki, still works the lower platforms and blames him for the deaths at the bridge. Malakor funds Teki's younger brother's medicine without admitting it. Meanwhile, the currents beneath the Maw have begun to behave in patterns his instruments cannot account for, and his latest designs are drawing more power than even he can safely measure.