Marrek looks like someone who has spent half his life on a heaving deck: weather-creased skin, a thin white scar zigzagging from his right temple to jaw (’the lightning scar’, he jokes), and a slow, deliberate roll to his shoulders as if always compensating for gusts. He moves with the careful precision of a man used to balancing on wet wood; his hands are broad, callused, and stained faintly black at the nails where sea-ink bled into his skin. Under his left eye is a narrow inky tattoo that glows a faint bioluminescent teal when he speaks of the sea or is emotionally charged. He favors an oilskin coat that smells faintly of tar and lavender and wears an impossibly neat velvet cravat beneath it — a small protest to vanity juxtaposed against the salt and soot. The contradiction is striking: a worn, leathery face set above a carefully manicured fingernail and a trimmed beard. When he laughs he throws his head back like a man who grew up shouting over waves; when he’s suspicious he seems to shrink into himself as though trying to be small as a plank.