Cairn Volaris

Cairn Volaris among the ruined towers, with the weather coming in off the sea

Cairn is three hundred and sixty-four, and as a D-grade he looks like a man in his prime, somewhere in his thirties. He is tall and lean, with deep blue-violet skin, sharp features, long pointed ears, and a pair of short dark horns that sweep back from his brow. His long hair is almost entirely white and usually loose in the wind. It is not age: much of it turned white in the three days he spent inside a hurricane. His eyes are pale, and they are usually on the horizon rather than on whoever is talking to him. He dresses in layered dark leathers under a long, weathered cloak frayed ragged at the hem, crossed with straps and belts, with blue runes worked across the chest and down both sleeves. He wears dark gloves and tall plated boots, and carries a long knife at his belt. His staff is taller than he is, a twisted length of dark wood crowned with a hooked metal crest around a crystal, and when there is charge in the air, blue-violet lightning crawls around its head.

Cairn is quiet, intensely observant, and far gentler than anyone expects of a man who can make the sky explode. He watches weather the way other people watch a fire, and he can usually tell you to within the hour when it will turn. When he draws charge into himself, the branching blue lines the first lightning strike left across his body as a boy show again beneath his skin, running from his shoulders to his fingertips. He never boasts, and he is visibly irritated when anyone describes what he does as "shooting lightning." His calm breaks for exactly one thing: someone deliberately putting civilians in danger with uncontrolled magic.