Azrahari is beautiful in the unnerving, carefully composed way of a wax effigy: a prominent, refined nose, a long graceful neck, clear blue eyes, and icy-blond ringlets that keep their spring even in the damp forest air. Two smooth gray horns sweep back from her forehead, polished where her fingers repeatedly check their bases. Her skin has the fine, cool sheen of porcelain over something less alive. She advances with small, balanced steps, scarcely disturbing leaf litter, and leaves people with the impression that she has already measured them for a pattern. Unexpectedly, she keeps a tiny tin whistle tucked in her sleeve and plays it badly to calm frightened children.

She is genuinely tender toward the bereaved, yet regards their grief as permission to make choices for them. In a calm mood she is practical and almost maternal; when curious, she can become distracted by a twitching puppet seam; when cornered, she is brisk, unsentimental, and frighteningly willing to spend another person's life to protect her work.

Azrahari once worked as a village bone-setter and midwife on the edge of the Greying Wildlands. When a fever took a household of children, she could save none of them; their grieving parents begged her to make one child, Elric Tavelle, look alive again. She stitched a lifelike replica from preserved skin and borrowed memories, and the family initially welcomed it. The puppet began answering questions Elric had never been told, then walked out into the forest during a storm. Azrahari found it at dawn, holding a black mushroom in its stitched palm, and understood that something in the Savalirwood had answered her work. Since then she has lived in a dark-red cottage, using forbidden magic to make skin puppets for grieving clients and, at times, to silence those who threaten her. She still sends medicine to Elric's mother, who believes the puppet was a miracle. Her former apprentice, Ilyan, now seeks proof of her crimes, while a local trapper, Boro, trades her rare herbs and refuses to ask where the skins come from. The black mushrooms around her home are spreading toward the road, and the puppets have begun to move when she is asleep.