Varis is a young dragonborn woman with bronze scales dulled by years of dust, smoke, and mineral-rich water. Fine clay powder gathers beneath her black claws and settles in the shallow ridges around her knuckles, no matter how often she washes. Her scales are smallest and most delicate along her cheeks, where they overlap like hammered metal leaves, while the heavier plates of her neck click softly when she turns her head. A thin scar splits the left side of her lower jaw, giving her resting expression the look of a patient frown. She moves with careful, economical precision, stepping around people as if they were fragile objects in a crowded storeroom. The unexpected contradiction is that her hands, though stained and callused from archival labor, are astonishingly gentle. She can lift a crumbling tablet without shedding a grain of it, yet she has been known to slam a council ledger hard enough to crack its binding.