Nancáro

Nancáro is Vëné’s brother. He fought beside her in the rising that pulled the Mól Empire down, he was cursed in the same working that made a goddess of her, and the overarching curse that sat over Idir for the seven hundred years after was his own. It was also his cell. He is aligned to death and to negative energy, the seat the pantheon leaves vacant, and nobody prays to him.

For seven hundred years the only part of him anyone met was a shadow. That shadow walked the insides of the seven keeps under the name the Elder, guided whoever came to break them, and could not remember its own name when it was told it. Everything Idir knows about the curses came out of it.

The Prison and the Breaking

Three of the seven keeps fell inside four minutes at dawn, and the curse that covered the whole region fell with them. His prison went with it. He came up out of the ground in the Twisted Grove courtyard as though he were climbing stairs, younger than the party had ever seen him and moving with an unearthly glide, and he did not know them: We’ve never properly met before. At least, I’ve never properly met you before. The elevation put an immense wave of energy out across Idir, and behind it a dark wave that some people could see and some could not.

With the prison gone he could let one part of himself go, and he handed the choice to the three men standing in front of him: his spite, or his domineering need for control. They chose the spite. It released from every place and every person it had seeded through the land, it relaxed the Peren’s inherited spitefulness almost universally, and it freed everyone he had personally caged and held down with it. The curses were the exception. They were built out of that spite and the keeps still holding theirs have to be broken by hand, one at a time.

Campaign Updates

Putting Aldo’s soul back into his body took more than one mortal frame could carry, so he divided a piece of himself between Koa, Mikhail and Aldo at once and bound the three of them together. He said forever, and his sister spelled out what forever meant in his mouth: not for as long as they live, but for as long as they exist.

He kept the promise he had made Koa about Gwen, and paid it within the hour. The thing the Mól buried beneath Haudh-Gwenn is what makes the Slumbering Queen; Gwen had settled her house over the top of it, in what he called one of my prisons; it is starving now and no longer held down, and the choice of what to do about that went to Koa. On one thing he and his sister do not agree, and he let it be seen only once: she told the three of them that a death among them would be felt and not shared, and he thought the matter unsettled.

He left saying he had matters to attend to, that he imagined they would not encounter each other often and perhaps never again, and that they had a new beginning to do what they liked with. He answers to Nancáro still, and will until he takes another name. He can be called from where the wound is inside the land.