With a furrowed brow framed by tumbling, leached-oaken hair, Janolin stands slight of build and pallid of skin. Her cheeks, callow, ever-so-slightly gaunt, are pecked by a dimpled, weather-beaten gooseflesh. Her mouth holds a flat line. Her hands pack themselves in the bundle of her arms. And her nose sticks out in a hawkish downturn. Indeed, had one not known otherwise, it would be easy to mistake this young woman to be twenty years her senior, so harshly have her own two begotten decades taken their toll.

Save, of course, for her eyes. Twin icey pools, like ponds flash-frozen just before the onset of winter, their irises stand sentinel and vivid among her otherwise cadaverous complexion. There is a certain dark life in those wells of black. It is an intelligence the color of which no tongue might express and marred only by swirls and ripples of vile things swimming beneath the surface.