Richard looks like a young man dressed for a winter crossing, not a legend: brown hair flattened beneath a wool cap, a long charcoal coat, and the pale yellow, forward-fixed eyes of a hunting bird. His gaze snaps to movement before the rest of his face turns. His skin has the waxen, cold cast of someone who has spent too long outdoors, and his breath fogs even in rooms warm enough to make other people sweat. His hands are ink-stained at the fingertips from statistical work, but the pads are rough from range practice and the creases hold a faint smell of gun oil. He moves economically, with abrupt little head turns and a stillness that makes people feel they have been measured. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny fold of bright, childish origami birds in his coat pocket, refolding them whenever he is frightened.

Richard is disciplined enough to calculate a risk and impulsive enough to accept it when family is involved. He can be dryly funny in ordinary company, but goes coldly literal when frightened. With children and people who are lost, he is unexpectedly gentle; with anyone who tries to claim authority over his body or his choices, he becomes hard and confrontational. He wants independence, yet keeps measuring himself against the eldest-son role his family never formally assigned him.

Richard Jones was born in Delaware to a Swedish father and an American mother. His earliest clear memory is of his father and uncles leaving him by a shoreline. The image has never settled into a complete story: sometimes he remembers being carried, sometimes standing, and sometimes the tide speaking in a voice that might be his own. He remembers his father clearly, but his mother only as fragments. After his death as a boy, an eagle spirit returned him to life under a pact: Richard gave the spirit his blue human eyes, and it gave him the eyes through which it sees the world. The spirit is a messenger of the heavens and a force of freedom, independence, power, and far sight, but it is not a gentle guardian. Richard was adopted by the Jones family and grew up as the eldest sibling, often treated as a likely heir despite nobody making that promise aloud. He became close to Aaron, whose worry follows him even now. Alexander, another younger brother who has also brushed against death, has never discussed their shared experience with Richard; he searches for him whenever his work allows, convinced he would make the better leader. Richard trained with firearms and built a quiet career as a mathematical statistics expert advising businesses. He relearned Swedish to approach the family he remembers across the sea. As he neared adulthood, ordinary ambitions became harder to hear beneath a call to hunt. A warlike spirit of wind and lightning has crawled into him, while the eagle spirit can take control of his body without warning. He cannot reliably separate its memories and actions from his own. Now he is heading toward Northern Europe to find his blood father and demand a conversation, knowing that the meeting may end in murder. He suspects a Wechuge, a corrupted being from old stories, is tied to the shoreline and to his death. A nearby Geiger counter crackles when he approaches, though he has no explanation for why.