Azrahari has the deceptively ordinary silhouette of a cottage-dwelling woman, but everything about her seems arranged a fraction too carefully. Her face is long and softly creased, with a mouth that stays gently pursed as if holding a thread between her teeth. Her skin has the waxy, faintly pebbled texture of old candle drippings, and dark fungal dust gathers in the creases of her knuckles. She moves with a measured, rocking step, as though testing each floorboard before trusting it. Within a minute of meeting her, most people notice her constant habit of tapping the flat of her amulet against her breastbone, counting under her breath each time. The sound of birds and small animals around her cottage is warm and busy, yet their calls repeat with a subtle, unnerving regularity.

Azrahari can be genuinely patient with the frightened and sharply practical with the proud. She is tender toward people who mourn, yet treats their memories as materials she has a right to handle. When relaxed, she can be almost neighborly and has a dry appreciation for ordinary chores. When anxious, she becomes controlling and speaks as if every problem can be repaired with the right tool.

Azrahari was born among the scattered woodcutters and herb-gatherers of the Greying Wildlands. As a young woman, she learned to identify the Savalirwood's poisonous growths and to set broken bones with splints and careful stitching. Her turning point came during a winter fever that took her younger brother, Oru, while she was away seeking a cure. His grieving parents begged her to make something that would let them see their son again. Azrahari used stolen skin, a charm taken from a buried shrine, and a spell she did not understand to craft a lifelike puppet of the boy. It sat at their table and turned its head when they spoke. For a few days the family was comforted. Then it began answering questions with phrases Oru had never used, and the parents fled. Azrahari kept the puppet and decided that grief was a wound people would pay anything to have covered. Years of secret work and increasingly dangerous bargains changed her from healer to witch and Hollower. She now lives in a dark-red cottage deep in the Savalirwood, where black and red mushrooms pock the earth and the wildlife seems almost unnaturally unafraid. She sometimes kills travelers, then makes puppets from their skin; some are still, while others twitch or mimic familiar gestures. Her most famous work is a replica of Elric Tavelle, made for his bereaved parents. Azrahari told them it was only a doll, but she knows it occasionally whispers things Elric could not have known. She still exchanges remedies with a woodcutter named Eeva, who believes Azrahari is merely reclusive, and avoids Elric's parents, who have begun asking why their son remembers a locked room none of them told him about. Azrahari is currently searching for a way to quiet the voices inside her puppets without destroying them.