In her human guise, Iagaara looks like a tall, broad-shouldered woman whose skin has the matte, finely pitted texture of cooled lava. Her movements are measured and economical, with her weight always settled over the balls of her feet as if the floor might give way. She wears a squat brass distillation flask on a cord at her hip; its lower corner is worn nearly smooth from tapping against stone. The unexpected detail is a row of tiny, neatly painted ceramic flowers on the inside of her work goggles, visible when she lifts them.

Iagaara is intensely practical and genuinely compassionate, but she distrusts compassion that has no plan behind it. In a workshop she is patient, exacting, and almost playful; when someone is in immediate danger, she becomes brisk and decisive. In private, she can brood over a small mistake for days, yet dismiss a personal insult with a shrug.

Iagaara was hatched in a chain of caverns beneath a volcanic shelf, where her kin measured wealth in safe routes through unstable stone. She became fascinated by the chemistry of the vents and learned to distill their fumes into medicine, fuel, and weapons. Her first major failure came during the collapse of a refuge tunnel: she could have saved a cache of rare reagents or helped evacuate the trapped miners, and she chose the reagents, convinced she could return in time. She returned too late. Since then, she has made a life among surface-dwellers, posing as an alchemist and supplying medicines to those who cannot pay. She is still trying to perfect a compound that can stabilize a failing cavern without poisoning its inhabitants. Her former apprentice, Szelka, now works for a mining concern that wants to blast open the same underworld passages Iagaara considers sacred. She has not told Szelka that the collapse was partly her fault.