Nessu (prime)
Appearance
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He is tiny. He appears to have one foot in the grave.
He has bloodshot milky blue eyes and pasty white skin.
He has a bald head, a pock-marked face, a broken nose and sunken cheeks, and a dirt-caked rotted willow pegleg for a leg.
He is wearing a rune belt, a circular black coral medallion set with a driftwood rune, a mottled chestnut bazan duster with ink-whorled cuffs, a glaesine crystal dragonfly, some brown robes, a silver-capped bull minotaur horn, a pair of antique platinum-framed spectacles with badly cracked lenses.
Origin
The old halfling sat in a low chair by the hearth, hands folded, staring at the place where the fire should have been.
There had been a fire once. He was almost sure of it. Warmth belonged here. Light did. But the memory refused to come when summoned, like a word on the tip of the tongue that dissolves the moment you reach for it.
His cottage was quiet. Quiet in the way only forgotten places are. No ticking clock, no pattering feet, no voices pressing into the walls. Just the creak of old wood and the soft hush of dust. The old halfling frowned down at his small hands. They were gnarled, lined, and faintly scarred, though he could not say how the scars came to be. He knew they mattered. Everything about them felt important.
“Who am I?” he asked. No one answered.
The question echoed uselessly, as it did daily, and died. Silence, then, something changed. There was a sound in his lonely little home that hadn’t been there in the past. Screaming.
It burned through the fog in his head like fire though old cobwebs. High-pitched. Terrified. Real. Was anything real anymore?
The scream sounded again. It was Real.
The old halfling stood before he realized he’d decided to. His legs complained, his back bent, but his feet carried him outside and down the winding path toward the sound. Each step felt strange, as though walking a path he’d traveled a thousand times but could no longer remember why. A clearing.
A small halfling child lay on the ground. The fog gone, he recognized her. She brought him meals from the town every day. He remembered. He had promised her great-grandmother that he would care for her family on the day she knew she wouldn’t be able to do so any longer. At some point in time, he had stopped caring for them. Instead, they cared for him.
The girl scrambled backward, palms raw with dirt. Looming over her was a troll, thick-limbed, warty, its breath steaming with hunger. How had it gotten here? These lands were safe. It raised a club the size of the child’s whole body.
Something snapped inside him.
Not bone. Not thought.
Memory.
The world sharpened. Colors deepened. The air hummed, alive with unseen currents. The old halfling’s breath steadied, and with it came knowledge that had not been there a heartbeat before. Not new knowledge. Old. Learned. Remembered.
Power answered him like an old friend.
He lifted one hand, fingers curling instinctively, and the sky obeyed.
Fire and earth erupted from underneath the troll, throwing it backwards, breaking bones and burning through its flesh. New screams sounded. Not from the girl this time. The trolls flesh burned in a way that refused healing and he watched it with a grim, satisfied feeling, as it slowly died, drowning in its own blood.
Silence followed.
The child stared, wide-eyed and unhurt, terrified. She saw something in the old halfling she had never seen before, though she had known him her entire life.
The old halfling lowered his hand slowly, heart pounding, not with fear, but with recognition. He knew that spell. Knew its weight, its cost, its shape. For one bright, aching moment, the fog lifted entirely.
He was Nessu, Paradis, Wanderer, Protector. A name spoken once with reverence, even fear. He had walked battlefields crackling with lightning, bent rivers to his will, vanished from sight like mist at dawn.
He remembered it all.
“Oh,” he breathed, wonder and grief tangled together.
He knelt and placed a gentle hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Go,” he said softly. “Run home.”
The child ran.
Nessu watched her disappear between the trees, smiling faintly. The smile lingered as he rose and snapped his fingers, the gesture as natural as breathing.
His body shimmered and was gone.
Invisible, he turned away from the clearing and began the long walk back toward nowhere in particular. As he walked, the brilliance in his mind dimmed. Names slipped first. Then faces. Then, the reason his chest hurt so badly.
By the time he reached the edge of the woods, the storm inside him had quieted. Invisible, his eyes once again glazed over.
When the villagers came later, armed and shouting his name, they found a scorched clearing and a story too strange to believe. No halfling. No footprints. No sign of the old man who lived alone by the hearth.
Only the lingering scent of fire, and the burned corpse of a creature from nightmares.
Worn by time, Nessu wandered on, powerful, forgotten, alone.