A compact, weather-browned woman whose skin has a fine, dry sheen like sun-warmed clay. Her close-cropped dark hair is threaded with a few white strands, and the skin across her nose and cheeks is stippled with tiny pale freckles. Her eyes are amber-brown, brightening to candle-gold when her celestial power stirs. She walks with a measured, forward-leaning stride, like someone accustomed to carrying water uphill; when she stops, she plants her trident as if it were a walking staff. The unexpected detail: she keeps a tiny tin of sugared fennel seeds and offers them to nervous children, prisoners, and stern officials alike.

Miri is tender with people in trouble and relentless with systems that keep them there. She can be patient enough to let a frightened person find their own words, yet blunt enough to make a powerful official squirm in public. In private, she is funny and affectionate; under pressure, she turns meticulous and stubborn. She wants to believe nearly anyone can change, but once she decides a person is deliberately and irredeemably cruel, her mercy becomes a shield for their victims rather than a reprieve for the offender.

Miri was raised above a dye-worker's shop in the crowded ward of Siltmarket, where her mother, Nessa, taught her that a bowl of soup offered without questions could do more good than a sermon. Miri joined the Church of the Open Hand as a young adult, drawn by its promise that mercy was a duty, not a reward. During the winter famine, she organized the distribution of temple grain and found that senior clerics had quietly diverted much of it to secure political favors. She reported the theft, then watched the investigation bury the evidence and blame a junior quartermaster. Her mentor, Huw, urged her to leave the church; instead, Miri took her oath of redemption and stayed, believing that abandoning an institution to its worst leaders would surrender everyone it might still help. Now she tends a neighborhood relief kitchen while publishing carefully argued pamphlets under her own name and cultivating allies among reform-minded clergy. Her sister, Tess, thinks Miri is risking the family for a hopeless cause. Her old mentor Huw supplies her with inside information but fears she will be made an example. A powerful cleric, Canon Varo, publicly praises her charity while quietly trying to bring her under his control. Miri's current problem is that the church plans to close the kitchen and auction its building to pay a debt she knows was manufactured.