Daxo stands eight feet tall and is built like something bred for war — broad through the shoulders and haunch, thick-limbed, heavy with the dense mass of a draft animal rather than the lean frame of a scavenger. He has the head of a hyena: a long, dark-lipped muzzle, a heavy jaw built for terrible work he declines to do, and expressive ears that move when the rest of him won't. His eyes are amber — hard and watchful, never gentle, set under a low brow that makes them harder still.

His coat is austere: dun and ash, dark-banded down the limbs, nothing bright in it — the serious coloring of his line rather than the dappled chaos of common gnolls. A heavy black mane runs down his neck and spine. It rises when the thing he keeps leashed begins to surface, and it is the one tell his discipline cannot fully govern.

He carries old, honest scars — a clean notch through one ear, a pale seam across one forearm where the fur won't grow back. His teeth are intact, which for a fighting gnoll his age is its own quiet statement: he does not lead with his mouth.

He wears plain, dark, battle-worn armor with no vanity in it, bears an unheraldic shield, and fights with a glaive held two-handed across his body — a holding-ground weapon for a man who decides where he will stand and makes you move him.

At rest, he is unnervingly still. People find the stillness worse than the size; a big thing gone quiet reads as a held breath. He is intimidating at first glance and has already lost the room's trust before he speaks — and somewhere on him, carried like the discipline it is, there is a worn book of verse he would deny owning.