Andrew Graves is a tall, lanky young man with pale skin, green eyes, and unruly jet-black hair, two long jagged strands falling over his forehead. He is compact and tense, braided of bone and law: four arms, an upper pair quick and deft at braidwork, sinews callused and ink-stained; a lower pair folded and dim, kept close to his midriff for steadying seams. He has four eyes: the upper pair hard and quick to read lattices, the lower pair pale and hooded, nearly blind to light but keen on subtle motion. A thin, wirelike neck carries a clause-sharp jaw. A mouth set low on his stomach, a secret aperture that hums when the Codex speaks, adds a disturbing, functional intimacy to his form.
A mantle fused along his shoulders and spine is hot and ridged, veined with faintly luminescent anchor-threads; three ridged scars score his forearm from his first salvage. His hands habitually bear ink stains and small burn marks; a waxed page is always folded into a cuff, a braided cord loops at his belt, and a small awl is kept for private repairs. Ink-tendons of the Codex nestle under his ribs, pulsing with conditional whispers and leaving a faint ledger-smell on his breath. He dresses plainly in wool wraps and dampening sigils and practical leathers scored with tally marks.
He moves with contained and deliberate, trained to be a living fuse: precise in gesture, economical in speech, and startlingly patient with delicate lattices. Stoic and endurance-bred, he tolerates pain and loss with a flat reserve that masks quick, calculating attention; he reads people like marginalia, noting debts, favors, and vulnerabilities. Dutiful to the municipal bargains that shaped him, he carries a quiet, utilitarian bitterness beneath a professional pride in his craft. His tenderness is narrow but real, expressed in small rituals (three stitched tallies on a cuff, a softened braid left for Julia) rather than words. Pragmatic and protective, he constantly manages his surplus, dampening, siphoning, and inventorying, to keep others from harm and to preserve the slimmest scrap of agency the Codex and Shackles have left him.