Koa Attila

Nineteen, and a mercenary since well before that. He was born on the Saltmarch, the unclaimed ground where Taziondale, Eldamar and the Vala all stop short of one another, and raised among the Free Folk who range it, which is a way of saying no country has ever had a claim on him. His family came out of Taziondale. He keeps Ridh as home.

He fights with a greatsword and shield, and carries enough ink to be recognized across a room. He also carries what fighters call the spark of Vroga: the sign that the Breaker of Chains looked at a man once, in a battle, and marked him. He asks Vroga for a fair fight and Snaga to bless the blade; the other five of his ideopan he keeps to himself.

It was Koa who spotted the glint inside the flame and shattered the fire crystal beneath the Mól keep, scattering the bound elemental (S3E30). It was also Koa who stood in the ruins at the Crack and prayed at length to the Martyr: for the souls held in the ooze, for Gwen, and for a town he had no obligation to. He admitted he felt like nothing more than a man who had been called chosen (S4E44). He is engaged to Gwen. He gave her nothing; she gave him two hundred gold for the work, which was a staggering sum out of means as modest as hers.

For the soirée at the end of it all he went in as Garrett Breen, a horse-breeder from near Veren in eastern Idir. The cover was tested at the door: no Breen, his hostess observed, had banked in Haudh-Gwenn in sixty years (S6E67–E70).

Campaign Updates

The Grayeras took two prices for standing down Beltran’s army: two hundred gold out of their own coffers, and a trial for the vigilante who killed their son. Vigilantism is a high crime in Haudh-Gwenn, ranked with treason, and high crimes are judged by the council itself, so the bench that will try him seats the dead man’s parents. He agreed to stand it and to hold nothing back, over Mikhail’s objection.

He speaks Bhaasha fluently and cannot say how. He answered a captured witch in it without deciding to, having already pulled a killing swing off her because what she was screaming was I give, I give. No tutor taught him, his parents did not speak it, and he was never raised among the Hafuwë.

He charged an enemy camp north of the city with his greatsword lit and a lion’s roar thrown half a mile ahead of him, both of them Mikhail’s work, and the camp believed it had heard Leon Yaegar. Edrick repeated the story until the names stuck, the Roaring Lion and Leon’s cub, and neither Koa nor Mikhail corrected anyone, because the Old Lion had made no such charge and could keep his legend. He turned nineteen on the road a few days later and nobody marked it.

Then Ridh burned. He rode in while it was still burning, into gnolls who had fired the outlying farms to herd the village inward and spiked the stone inn’s door shut. He charged them alone, was bitten off his horse and set alight, and got the door open to far fewer people than he had hoped for.

He carries a sliver of Nancáro now, poured into all three of the company at once to put Aldo’s soul back in his body. Vëné corrected the god’s phrasing for them: not for as long as they live, but for as long as they exist. What it does has not been settled.