Verex

Kijinxi is a nation of tribes far to the east, past the Barren Lands, and one of its tribes is Clan Denshō, which is called the Ashen. Its ruler holds a title that comes into Peren as warlord. In that country the clan name is spoken first and the man second, so he is Denshō Verex.

What is told of him is one story, and the story is about fire. He fought a war-leader out of the Barren Lands who was not a man in any ordinary sense but spirits bound into a body, and what he used was a ring of fire. The ring pinned the thing in place. It fought the magic holding it and it fought the body it had been put into, and neither struggle got it loose, and Verex burned it and consumed it and took some of its magic into himself in the doing.

Yara told the party that at the Valley of Doom (S2E19), and she told it because they had just watched a ring of sacred fire burn across the valley floor with a figure standing at the center of it. She was careful about what she was claiming. It is the only ring-of-fire ritual she knows of and it belongs specifically to that legend; past that, she said, it is not her culture and she does not know, and somebody might well be able to copy the thing. The figure in the valley’s fire was Orsugo.

She told it a second time much later and much further west (S4E48), against a different question. The Barren Lands are troubled by shadows that take the dead and walk them, and Yara’s account of where they came from was a chieftain who had found a way to put something into bodies and make them shuffle and feed. It was the great Verex who fought him in a circle of fire, and in her telling of it he carried the will of Vroga Waruk and had grown by then to a giant’s size.

He has never come west. In Idir he exists as the name of a power somewhere off to the east, in Kijinxi and the Ashlands, and as nothing more solid than that.