His cheekbones are sharply carved, pale marble rising in slender relief beneath haunting, sunken eyes whose iris?an opaline grey?emit a light both chill and mournful, as though despair itself dwells in their reflective depths. Long, silken hair, the color of moonlight on water, cascades past his shoulders, thin strands trembling at the slightest breath of air, framing a forehead high and unyielding. His lips are narrow, blood-kissed yet cold, set in a perpetual, sorrowful arch. The ears, tapered to fine, quivering points, betray his otherness?delicate vantages of flesh against flesh, the skin so translucent that veins weave through it like ghostly threads of sorrow. His neck, long and serpentine, seems strained in its elegance; his hands, thin and knuckled, like spindled wood, bear fingernails sharp-tipped, pale, almost crystalline. Every contour and hollow of his form, from the hollow above his collarbone to the thinness of his limbs, suggests one molded not in the forge of this world but in its shadowed periphery?beauty edged with the glint of mortality.