Ezra ~Palimpsest~ Kaine

Ezra Kaine looks like someone halfway between a professor and a ghost — the kind of man people remember a moment too late. There’s a deliberate smallness to how he carries himself, as if he’s always trying not to disturb the air around him. His build is lean, the sort that comes from forgotten meals and long walks through the city when sleep won’t come.

His hair curls just enough to look unkempt no matter how often he runs his hands through it, often a shade darker than the light around him, giving his blue eyes a haunted clarity. There’s something oceanic in them — not vast, but deep; the color of tidepools that have seen too much reflection. His features are sharp but weary, softened by exhaustion rather than kindness. When he smiles (rarely), it’s brief — a flicker of warmth that never quite reaches the eyes before being swallowed by thought.

He dresses like an academic who has never stopped expecting winter: wool coats, threadbare cardigans, button-downs gone pale from washing, everything layered and practical. There’s a quiet ritualism in his appearance — his coat always buttoned halfway, his collar slightly askew — as if he’s trying to preserve some pattern no one else can see.

When he speaks, it’s with precision — each word chosen, weighted, and placed like a note in a symphony only he can hear. His silences are heavier than most people’s sentences. He listens like a confession is being offered, even when the conversation is mundane.

Ezra Kaine moves through the world like a man walking through a library after an earthquake — quietly, reverently, cataloguing what can still be saved. Soft-spoken and unassuming, he seems more ghost than professor: clothes perpetually a day out of fashion, voice low and precise, eyes that seem to read the spaces between words. There’s an old-world gentleness to him, a scholar’s restraint masking the pressure of too many unspoken realizations.

He believes that stories, dreams, and destinies are living systems — not scripts, but symphonies that lose meaning when forced into perfection. That belief defines him: the refusal to let meaning ossify, even in the face of horror. He fears what happens when knowledge becomes dogma, when curiosity hardens into control.

Beneath his calm is a constant hum of guilt and wonder. He treats even mundane details like sacred text, every conversation another page in a cosmic book he’s still trying to read correctly this time. To his students and allies, he’s patient, encouraging, a steadying presence amid chaos. To himself, he’s more complicated.

When the others look at the impossible, Ezra doesn’t flinch — he listens. Every paradox, every Abyssal whisper, he approaches with a mix of awe and sorrow. Because deep down, he knows: the story is still writing itself, and he’s just one more margin note trying to make sense of it.

• Intelligence 4
• Academics: Mythic Symbolism, Cosmic Horror 4
• Investigation: Omens 3
• Occult: Divination 4
• Expression: Writing 3
• Professional Training: Omen Scholar 4
• Trained Observer 3
• Area of Expertise: Divination
• Inspiring
• Cohesive Unit
• Mysterium Status 1
• Consilium Status 1
• Shadow Name: Palimpsest 2
• High Speech 5
• Second-Person High Speech
• Cognoscente
• Egregore 4

The Reluctant Expert: Ezra knows things he shouldn’t — occult correspondences, the way a Lie ripples through conversation, or how to read a ward without touching it. He’s the one you call when the usual channels fail.

The Fearless Listener: He’s got a strange gift: when people talk to Ezra, they tell him things. Not just secrets, but confessions, half-remembered dreams, things they didn’t mean to say out loud.