Peskri holds herself in a forward lean, as if listening for a loose floorboard, and waits with her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. Her moss-green skin has a soft, pebbled texture, and her broad ears twitch toward small sounds. A crown of wiry dark hair sticks up in uneven tufts, pinned with tiny brass washers. She moves in quick, economical starts and stops, leaving the impression of a trapdoor that has learned to walk. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tidy little collection of pressed wildflowers between the pages of her spellbook.

Peskri is quick to challenge a faulty plan but painfully slow to ask for help with her own trouble. In a crisis she becomes crisp, inventive, and bossy; when safe, she is curious and unexpectedly sentimental. She wants to believe evidence can persuade anyone, yet resents people who demand proof after ignoring her first warning.

Peskri grew up beneath the old cistern district, where goblin families kept the drainage gates working in exchange for the right to live in its dry chambers. Her aunt, Tziri, taught her to read watermarks and listen for pressure changes; a patient human surveyor named Oth once lent her a primer on arcane notation. During a spring flood, Peskri ignored a warning whistle to save a box of her neighbors' keepsakes. The delay cost her aunt a leg and wrecked the lower homes. Peskri has since learned wizardry to predict and redirect the city's hidden waters, but she still carries the box's surviving pressed flowers. Now the cistern is failing again, the city council dismisses her warnings, and Tziri insists the family should leave before the next flood.