At first glance Gareth looks like a handsome young Saxon man: pale hair brushed neatly back, a straight nose, and a face still more accustomed to being studied than to being seen. He keeps himself conspicuously groomed, smoothing his hair and checking his collar even after a muddy road. The neatness contrasts with the soot-black scales stippling his ribs and climbing over his shoulder blades, their edges like cindered bark and their surfaces glossy as obsidian. He has begun to hunch and turn sideways through doorways, instinctively guarding the tender ridges where wings are forming. In conversation he often stands too close before noticing, then retreats abruptly. His polished appearance and careful manners make the inhuman changes feel all the more startling.

Gareth is curious and methodical, but his need to document everything can become a shield against feeling anything directly. He is grateful for kindness and still capable of resenting the person who offered it. He tries to behave as he did before the crossing, even as new attractions and instincts unsettle him. In calm company he is attentive and wry; under pressure he becomes clipped, territorial, and ashamed of how quickly his body reacts.

Before the crossing, Gareth was a woman from Minnesota who worked as a laboratory assistant and spent her free hours chasing local history, folk practice, and the small customs that never make it into grand chronicles. The crossing remade her into a young man in a Saxon-looking body, stronger and taller, with a voice that sounds unfamiliar even to her own ears. She remembers her former life, including its relationships, with painful clarity; the memories did not become less true when her body changed. She and the other displaced adventurers formed the October Ash Company as a mutual-survival pact, not a polished mercenary outfit. At first, local merchants refused to hire her, and Aldwin married her, offering a place and protection when she had few choices. Gareth is grateful for what Aldwin did and increasingly jealous of him, a contradiction he hates admitting. The first night after the crossing, Gareth shared a bed with Liga because circumstances left no real choice; the memory remains tangled with fear, exhaustion, and the humiliating strangeness of waking in a changed body. Gareth now researches local customs for the company, both to help them survive and to find evidence that might explain the transformation. His Firedrake bloodline is said in the company's private notes to echo a greedy, ever-burning pitch-black dragon. The blood is marking him with scales, and the ridges along his back are slowly becoming the beginnings of wings.