Description

Zahir Sandglass is a soft-spoken Khaladi relic-dealer in his late fifties, with kind crinkled eyes and a neatly trimmed silver-shot beard. He wears layered desert robes in dusty terracotta and bronze, embroidered along the hem with old script few in the city can still read. Around his neck hangs a long string of small glass vials, each holding a few grains of pale, luminous sand that glitter like trapped starlight. A small brass astrolabe is tucked into his belt.

Personality

Warm, patient, and carefully measuring. Zahir greets every customer like a returning friend and listens to far more than he speaks. He has a teacher's instinct for which questions a buyer is afraid to ask, and a scholar's discipline about which answers he is willing to give. He sells with a smile and almost always with a warning.

Background

Zahir runs Starglass Curios in the Khasim's Crown shopping district, a narrow shop crowded with ruin-maps, brass astrolabes, sun-compasses, and curious fragments pried from the half-buried imperial halls of black stone that lie under the deeper dunes. He keeps a side trade in old Khaladi-script translations and is one of the few private citizens the Lyceum's archivists will quietly consult when a dig turns up something they don't recognize. The luminous sand in his vials comes from a stretch of the deep desert no one else has been able to reach since he stopped going himself a decade ago.