Iltan looks less like a mountain than like the old quarry crane that has somehow learned to walk: immense through the shoulders, compact through the hips, and carefully balanced on feet that turn outward a little. His skin is the weathered brown of worked leather, crosshatched with pale dust caught in the creases of his knuckles. His iron-gray hair is clipped short at the sides and tied in a stubby tail, while his beard is braided with plain wooden spacers. He waits with most of his weight on his right heel, as if testing a floor before trusting it. When he moves, there is no lumbering: his steps are quiet, economical, and startlingly quick. The unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulously mended patch of bright yellow embroidery on the inside of his work coat, sewn by his granddaughter and kept facing his skin.

Iltan is patient with frightened people and impatient with confident people who have not checked their work. He can be tender and funny with children, then blunt enough to wound an adult who treats danger as someone else's problem. He enjoys company but dislikes being celebrated; in a crisis he becomes decisive, while in private he second-guesses every choice that cannot be undone.

Iltan was born to a family of quarry workers in the high valley of Sootfall, where the air carried a mineral tang and every house had a wall built from someone else's mistake. He learned leverage by helping his mother shift stone blocks, and learned restraint from his father, who would rather lose a day's pay than let a tired worker be crushed. At twenty-six, a hoist cable snapped during a spring thaw. Iltan held the falling counterweight long enough for eleven workers to escape, but his younger brother, Boro, was trapped beneath a smaller collapse and died before Iltan could reach him. The event made him famous as a man with the strength of a hundred, and left him privately convinced that strength is worthless unless someone else gets out alive. He spent decades as a caravan guard, bridge-builder, and occasional village champion, sending most of his pay home to his daughter, Dema. Now he has returned to Sootfall, where the new owner of the quarry, a practical and not wholly cruel engineer named Ruzan, plans to reopen a dangerous lower shaft. Iltan is trying to stop the work without destroying the livelihoods of the families who depend on it. His granddaughter, Lali, thinks his caution is cowardice; he keeps showing up at her school anyway, carrying slate and sweet buns.