Niðrerir

His name is pronounced roughly NIH-thre-rir — the ð (eth) is a soft, voiced "th" as in "this," and the stress falls on the first syllable, as in Old Norse. In IPA: /ˈnɪðrɛrɪr/.

Niðrerir is the player character in Land of Song: a Celeste warlock, a former soldier of the Great War, a member of the exiled Honor Escort of the Schism at Saudient, and, in the present, a wandering mercenary. Much of what is recorded of his past comes from his own first-person account, some of it bitter, and is set down here as his telling rather than as settled fact.

Origins and the war

Niðrerir was born in the Lor'Sha'Une and spent his youth among its branches. He was about a century old — young for a near-immortal Celeste — on the eve of the Great War, when he overheard the Accordance decree that the Celeste would fight under the Aesir's banner. He took up arms and fought for the lifetime of twenty-seven human kings, killing enemies he had once known as kin, including other elves and his own Vaenir makers.

When the war ended he wept in the River Ghofrim, then shattered his spear, sword, and armor with a hammer and swore never to take up arms again. He returned to the Lor'Sha'Une and slept for roughly a century.

The Honor Escort and exile

Niðrerir was one of the four of Freyaðri's Honor Escort — a post he says he took seeking no glory, only to keep quiet vows. When Freyaðri was decrowned for loving an elf, the escort held to their oath and flew by night to join her in exile among the gray peaks of Saudient, with two members of the Accordance. The price was the loss of the way home to the forest.

The pact and the name

Wandering after the exile, beset by demons and by both Vaenir- and Aesir-born who sought to kill him, Niðrerir was encircled by a ring of forty nymphs chanting the curse Trúníðingar. Out of that moment he forged a pact: that none would fell him, no enemy hold him, and no bitterness keep him from returning home one day. As he swore it, a blade appeared in his hands where there had been none.

He will not remember his old name; Niðrerir is the name he took at the pact, which he calls "my sin and my word." He shed enough nymph blood to escape at dusk and took up work as a mercenary.

The blade and its cost

Niðrerir's pact is that of a warlock's conjured blade — called to his side hundreds of times since. The blade draws on his love for the forest and a remembered time of peace, and every use diminishes it: each conjuration spends another memory of wind in the branches and sun through the canopy. In fighting to earn his way home, he loses the very thing the pact is meant to return him to. The war and the pact are, in his words, two weights on a broken soul.