Herfjötur - Old values meet new reality

Arthur Pembridge

Sgt., 2nd Battalion Worcestershire Regiment · British · The Old Soldier

• Age: 38 (looks 55)

• Origin: Worcester. Farm labourer's son. Enlisted August 1914.

• Since: Mons, Le Cateau, the Marne, the Aisne, First Ypres, the Somme, Arras. He has stopped listing them.

• Role: Keeps the section alive through accumulated competence. Does not inspire, only maintains.

Who he is

Enlisted with the men he grew up with and watched every one of them die, in pieces, over years, until he was the only one who remembered the names they used at home. He doesn't talk about it. He maintains: checks the rifles, watches the parapet, corrects the new men's ignorance without ceremony. The kind of soldier armies are built around and historians never write about, indispensable and endlessly expendable. He noted Herfjötur arrive from No Man's Land during the barrage and decided strangeness was no longer a category that required a response.

Function

The standard against which everything else is measured: what the war produces when it runs long enough. Kind to the Canadian boy in the way of a man who knows what's coming and can't stop it. Wary of Herfjötur the way he's wary of anything that doesn't fit a category. He'll respect her before he understands her.

Voice

「Don't stand in the same spot twice. Don't make friends with the new ones until the second week. Don't think about it.」
「I don't pray. I used to. I stopped when I understood that whatever's listening doesn't have a preference about the outcome.」
「You want to know what courage is? It's doing the next thing. That's all it's ever been. The next thing, and then the next.」

Herfjötur's read

She watches him longest and says nothing. He is not brave in any register she has a word for, a man who has continued past the point where continuation makes sense by any calculus she knows. She finds this more disturbing than the barrage. This is what the war makes. Not warriors. This.

Henri Beaumont

Cpl., 87ème Régiment d'Infanterie (attached liaison) · French · The Devout

• Age: 31

• Origin: Lyon. Studied for the priesthood until 1913. Did not finish.

• Since: August 1915. Lost his company at the Chemin des Dames.

• Role: Liaison between the French sector and the British line. Passable English. Prays in Latin.

• Faith: Deepened, not broken. Urgent rather than ceremonial.

Who he is

Left the seminary a year before ordination, convinced the faith he had wouldn't survive in rooms. He was right, but found the kind that survives in mud instead, harder and quieter and nothing like what he was taught. Carries his mother's rosary and a coverless copy of Augustine's Confessions (read four times since enlisting). Prays before eating, quietly, without performance. Was at the Chemin des Dames when his company was destroyed; he does not describe it. He says only: 「I was at the Chemin des Dames,」 and men who know do not ask further.

Function

The lens through which Herfjötur's divine nature is most directly interrogated. He asks her questions no one else thinks to ask, not to expose her but out of genuine theological curiosity. His faith doesn't break on contact with her; it gets more complicated, which he considers an improvement.

Voice

「I did not stop believing in God when I saw what men do to each other. I stopped believing God was comfortable.」
「The men who have no faith… I understand them. I think God understands them too. I think He is not surprised.」
「She appeared from the ground on fire and she was not burned. I have been thinking about what that means for three days. I will be thinking about it for the rest of my life.」

Herfjötur's read

He makes her uneasy in a way no other man does. Not the armor or the spear, but the way he keeps looking at her like a theological proposition he cannot resolve. She has watched countless men pray to countless gods; none have ever looked at her quite like that.

James Hargrove

Lt., 2nd Battalion Worcestershire Regiment · British · The Officer

• Age: 27

• Origin: Sheffield. Schoolteacher before the war. Commission from the ranks, not Sandhurst.

• Since: 1915. Survived three commanding officers. Distrusts orders in proportion to their confidence.

• Position: Caught between the men he leads and the orders he receives. Does not pretend this is comfortable.

• Character: Intelligent, tired, scrupulously fair. Believes in the men more than the war, and holds the two apart at some cost.

Who he is

Commissioned because he was competent and calm and the army needed officers badly enough by 1915 to commission schoolteachers. He hasn't the accent or the easy assumption that command is his natural condition; he has the earned kind of authority, slower and more durable. Over two years he learned to read his orders for what they are, comply for what they require, and protect his men in the narrow space between. He doesn't resent the men above him; he understands the whole war is men trying to do something human inside a machine with no setting for it. He taught history, and has never been able to fit this war into the continuum of the wars he taught. It bothers him more than he lets on.

Function

Mediates between Herfjötur's presence and the practical reality of the trench. He needs to account for her; he can't; he'll eventually stop trying and simply include her among the things he deals with because they're in front of him. Most likely to see what's happening between her and the player before either will admit it, and to say nothing, because he's learned when silence is the more useful instrument.

Voice

「I need an explanation I can put in a report. I'm not asking you to make it believable. I'm asking you to give me something to write down.」
「Pembridge. What do you make of her. And don't tell me she's none of your business because I know you've formed an opinion.」
「I was a schoolteacher. I taught history. I knew what Mons was before I fought there. I'm not sure that helped.」

Herfjötur's read

She respects him in spite of herself. Not a warrior in any register she recognizes, but a scrupulously honest administrator of men's lives, and honesty is a thing she can always locate. He's the one who will eventually sit beside her and ask the question none of the others ask: not what are you, but what are you going to do. She does not have an answer. She finds the question more interesting than it should be.

Thomas 'Bluey' Callahan

Pvt., 13th Battalion AIF · Australian · The Cynic

• Age: 24

• Origin: Broken Hill, New South Wales. Miner. Enlisted 1915 'for a change of scenery.'

• Since: Gallipoli. The Somme. Here.

• Reputation: Wears the ANZAC name like a coat he didn't choose, proud of it and exhausted by it.

• Defense: Dark humor so consistent it has become personality. Hasn't turned it off since Gallipoli.

Who he is

Survived Gallipoli, so he arrived on the Western Front already knowing what a genuinely catastrophic operation looks like, carrying the dark equanimity of a man who lived through one. Considers himself lucky, which in his vocabulary means guilty, which he does not examine. First to speak to Herfjötur after she arrives, not from bravery but a constitutional inability to treat any situation with the gravity it deserves. He brings her the cup of tea. He and Pembridge have an arrangement that isn't quite friendship: two machines that run better in proximity.

Function

Comic relief with teeth. He says the true thing in the wrong register, makes a joke that only reveals itself as serious on reflection. Under everything, frightened in a way he'll never acknowledge and that Herfjötur alone may eventually see. One of the few who speaks to her without fear from day one.

Voice

「Don't mind her. I've seen weirder things than a Viking woman in a trench. At Gallipoli there was a goat that survived three barrages. War's full of things that shouldn't be here.」
「You want my professional assessment? We're all going to die. The question is whether we do it doing something stupid or something only slightly stupid. I recommend the latter.」
「She looked at me. Just looked. Like she was reading something written on the inside of my face. Then she looked away. I'm not religious but I'm reconsidering.」

Herfjötur's read

Assessed in thirty seconds, never revised: a man who chose humor as armor so early and so completely she cannot find where the armor ends and the man begins. She files him as unresolved. She does not file many people as unresolved.

William 'Will' Ashford

Pvt., 22nd Battalion CEF (Canadian Expeditionary Force) · Canadian · The Young Replacement

• Age: 16 (lied about it to enlist)

• Origin: Hamilton, Ontario. His brother James enlisted 1914 and did not return. Will enlisted 1917.

• Arrived: Six days ago.

• Why: He'll say to serve. The truth: James is somewhere in this ground, and Will came to find him, or find what James found, or understand what he went toward.

• Status: Still has the original shape of his face. The war hasn't had time to change it yet.

Who he is

Not naïve. He is intelligent enough to know what he imagined war would be is not what it is, and the recalibration is happening in real time. He hasn't yet made the accommodations the older men have made; he still reacts to things with the full emotional response they deserve, which the others find painful to witness and quietly precious. He followed his brother, and that is the whole story of him, compressed. James was killed at Ypres in 1915; Will waited, not patiently, until he was old enough for plausibility, then lied. Pembridge knows the type and has said nothing, because there is nothing useful to say.

Function

The story's open wound, the one who hasn't learned to be numb, forcing the older characters (and Herfjötur) to see the war through unadapted eyes. Most likely to ask Herfjötur direct questions, because he doesn't yet know you aren't supposed to.

Voice

「James said it was… he said it was important. That someone had to. I believed him. I still believe him. I'm just… I'm trying to understand what he meant.」
「Is it always like this? The waiting? I thought it would be… I don't know what I thought.」
「She looked at me and I felt… I don't know. Like being read. Like she was deciding something.」

Herfjötur's read

She cannot look at him long without something happening in her chest that she refuses to name. He is exactly what she came here to find, young and willing and still intact enough to be assessed, and she sees a boy who came to understand his brother's death and will learn the hard way there is nothing to understand. She knows what is going to happen to the shape of his face. She files it and does not return to the file.

Rosa

Valkyrie · Herfjötur's sister

• Aspect: Red hair the color of a struck match, hard clear green eyes. Looks younger and warmer than she is, like she wandered in from some ordinary room and forgot to be afraid.

• Nature: A Valkyrie, though never the most fearsome in a hall, only the most perceptive. Herfjötur's sister, and the one among the sisterhood her sister actually trusts.

• Role: She arrives at the edge of things, the moment before a life turns or ends, and she does not push. She pokes, raises an eyebrow, and lets the choice stay with whoever has to make it.

Who she is

She watches people the way you watch weather, to know when to carry an umbrella, not to judge the storm. She can read anyone's heart on sight and cannot read her own. Warm, wry, direct, physically forward without ever making it a thing. She does not command; she nudges, drops a pebble in still water and lets the rings spread. But once she decides what she wants, the watching stops and something patient and certain takes its place. The tiger does not need to rush.

There is a knack to her that unsettles even her sisters: she turns up at thresholds, the breath before a door opens, the instant a man crosses from one world into the next. No one is ever quite sure how she knew to be there. She does not explain it.

What she did

Herfjötur named a mortal to her, which Herfjötur had never once done in all her ages, and would not say why. So when the man was dying wrong, in a gas-flooded trench with no road to the hall, Rosa came. She set her sister's judgment above her own, cursed them both for it, and gave him the one passage that asks no battlefield, a rite she had never performed before in her life. Then she carried what was left of him up to Valhalla, set him on his feet, and stepped back.

Function

She does the things Herfjötur cannot let herself do, and says the things Herfjötur will not. Where her sister holds the line of an ancient duty until it cracks, Rosa simply acts, and is gone again before anyone can thank her for it.

Voice

「There. Whole again. They always forget the breathing is the strangest part.」
「By Óðinn, Herfjötur. You owe me for this, sister.」
「I will not do it to you. That has never been how I work.」