he is boyishly handsome, with curly hair and a ready smile, but these features are ruined by his eyes. one is grey glass (black in the film adaptation) and the other is off-white, with a tiny, pinhole-sized pupil. he is a genius, but also evil to an astonishing degree. his mind has been compared at times to both a corkscrew and a shattered mirror (i.e. something brilliant, sharp, and dazzling, but also fundamentally and irrevocably twisted/broken and very dangerous to handle). his main problem seems to be that he 'sees things differently from other people, in that he sees other people as things'. this gets him into a spot of trouble early on, as his assassinations often include the brutal murders of not just the target, but also their family, their servants, and very often their pets, all of which are direct violations of guild protocol. senior assassins regarded him as a young man to watch, preferably from a distance.