A towering Jotun-Kin whose emaciated frame makes his cold-iron armor seem built for someone broader. Tattered black silks rasp against plates furred with fine frost, and his dark-glass visor reflects a room in warped, wavering fragments. His skin has the puckered, waterlogged texture of someone long exposed to brine and freezing spray, stretched tight across prominent joints. He smells strongly of sour brine, wet stone, and the sharp medicinal sting of preserved flesh; he knows, and considers it a useful warning. When he turns, the reservoir on his back sloshes with a thick, muffled glug.

He is methodical enough to calculate a retreat while ordering an attack, yet his composure turns brittle when someone invokes the frozen settlement he abandoned. He can show practical mercy to a useful rival, then authorize the public execution of a less useful prisoner without hesitation. He prizes discipline, but distrusts anyone who obeys too eagerly.

Before undeath, Vaelen was a Jotun-Kin route magistrate who calculated how much heat each barge, hold, and family could claim from the old siphon works. During a winter evacuation, he ordered a sealed passage opened to divert heat toward a military storehouse. The current turned; a settlement froze while the stores survived. He later claimed the order had been necessary, though he still remembers the sound of small bells freezing mid-chime. Years afterward, the Glacial Absolute offered him an answer to mortality and a means to control the siphons. He accepted a pact with an intelligence he calls the Deep Listener, then rebuilt his body around a reservoir of cryo-fluid. Now he commands Void-Ice Legion field operations, directs attacks on Concordat outposts, and sabotages thermal vents. He maintains an uneasy working arrangement with Sheshe, a siphon engineer who knows the machinery better than he does, and quietly hunts for the missing route-markers that could identify the original diversion site.