At six feet five inches, Aurix has the long-limbed, upright bearing of someone accustomed to standing above a crowd. His golden-tan skin has a faint, fine-grained sheen, like sunlight caught on polished sandstone. Thick golden hair falls in uneven waves to his collar; he keeps pushing it back, leaving a bright streak of grease from the oil he uses to tame it. His amber eyes have narrow, dark pupils that contract sharply in bright light. He moves with careful, measured steps, then turns with startling speed, as if his body has to remember that human joints do not sweep a room like a dragon's. He smells unmistakably of warm cloves and sun-baked stone, and seems genuinely unaware of it. The unexpected detail: he carries a little bundle of paper scraps and sketches birds whenever he has to wait.

Aurix is sincerely gentle with people in distress but can become rigid when he thinks a preventable danger is being ignored. He is curious about ordinary routines and delighted by small kindnesses, yet uncomfortable with praise and suspicious of anyone who treats him as a savior. In a calm room he is patient and attentive; under pressure he grows commanding, moves first, and asks permission afterward. He tries to be humble, but the confidence of a creature accustomed to immense power keeps showing through.

Aurix hatched in a limestone cavern above the warm coast, where his mother taught him that a dragon's strength mattered most when used to protect the small and easily overlooked. At twenty-seven, he slipped away from her watch to investigate a human settlement whose well had turned bitter. He found that a magistrate had diverted the spring to a private quarry. Aurix confronted him in dragon form, but his intervention frightened the miners into a stampede that killed two people. Their deaths ended his certainty that a righteous cause excused a frightening entrance. He spent the next decades learning human customs and taking work as a caravan guard, then adopted his present identity to live among people rather than over them. Now he serves as a paladin and occasional escort in the market town of Kettle-Spring, a name left over from an old survey map. He is close to Mara's? No: to Nela, a practical ferrier who knows his identity and insists he ask before solving anyone else's problems; to Davor, a young courier he quietly tutors; and to Jarek, a former quarry foreman who blames Aurix for the old disaster. A smuggling crew has begun poisoning wells along the coast, and Aurix suspects the same method is being used again. His current challenge is to stop it without deciding on other people's behalf what they need.