Krydog

• Build & height: 1.95 m, broad and heavy through the shoulders, with a dock-fighter's thick neck and forearms roped with old breaks. His bare chest is a map of every kind of blow: rope-burns, blade-lines, a round brand where a Sentinel's spear-butt landed, a starburst of frost-scar. It's the body in the series that has hit the ground more than any other, and it shows.
• Face: square and sun-browned. The nose has been broken flat more times than he can count, there's a split scar through the upper lip, and his left ear is a lumpy fighter's ear. The grin is wide and constant, with a chipped front tooth (upper left). At rest he's grinning, or about to.
• Hair: shaggy dark-blond, shoulder-length, tied back at the nape with a strip of old bandage. Strands come loose with every fall. A short rough beard that he trims by feel (see Habits: he never looks in mirrors).
• Eyes: slate-grey and red-rimmed from sleeplessness. On the Get-Up Beat a thin silver ring flashes round each iris, twice: ba-dum, ba-DUM.
• Clothing, layer by layer: bare chest, always, even in snow ("I run warm. I've been getting up all day.") · a broad belt of knotted rope with a dented iron buckle · canvas sailor's trousers, patched at both knees · boots resoled a dozen times, the soles a stack of different leathers like the bands on his ship · the long captain's coat: navy once, now almost all sewn-on patches, one for every time he got up. When he can, each patch is cut from whatever knocked him down: a strip of a Sentinel's sash, a square of prize-ring canvas, a scrap of storm-torn sail, a hand of a Wrecker's false-light hood. He sews them himself, badly; Roffe re-sews them at night. Jeppson keeps the count: 1,104 patches at his Saga V debut. · bandages on both fists, plain linen, re-tied before every fight.
• Signature item: the patchwork coat. A new patch appears after every fight he gets up from, so a careful reader can find each fight of the series on his back.
• Movement: a rolling dockside walk that never quite stops. He fights moving forward and never guards his face. When he falls, he falls all the way, flat, like a felled tree. Never let him scramble or push himself up; the Get-Up Beat lifts him like a tide. He leans on nothing and sits only when he's told to, and nobody has seen him lie down on purpose.
• Voice: big, warm and loud enough for two ships, with a barking laugh. His tic is "Again!" after every blow that lands, and he grades his own falls out loud ("That one was a seven."). His balloons have a flat base, as if they're standing up: bold outline, slightly squared, never drooping.

• Permanent marks (as of ch. 420): no shadows under his eyes after the eleven days' sleep (ch. 417); the edges of his memories gone (Arc 7).

Knocked down, he rises healed of the last blow, and a little harder for whatever knocked him down to knock down again.

• The trigger: a knockdown, meaning off his feet (back, side or face on the ground) against his will. One knee isn't down. A fall he chooses isn't a knockdown, and nothing fires. (He can't trip himself to heal; he has tried.)
• The rise: on the beat after he hits the ground he comes up in one motion, and the last blow is healed: the cut closes, the cracked rib knits, the burn cools. Only the last one. Everything earlier stays exactly as bad as it was, so a man who has been ground down by twenty small blows and then knocked flat by a tap rises healed of the tap.
• "Same Way Twice": whatever knocked him down finds him a notch harder to knock down again: that fist, that spell, that wave, that technique. It's a notch per fall, it stacks, and it belongs to that source alone. By the fifth time, the blow that floored him barely rocks him. The stacks last until he sleeps, and he never sleeps, so he carries years of them.
• Range: himself only. He can't lift anyone else with it. (He lifts them with his hands: see Hand Up.)
• What it can't do:
  • Heal what's gone: a severed hand doesn't grow back; the stump closes.
  • Rise from death. A blow that kills him outright doesn't knock him down; it ends him.
  • Fire twice inside one beat.
  • The Null. A greying isn't a blow, and the Null doesn't knock anything down; it subtracts. There's nothing to rise from. In the grey, UPP IGEN simply doesn't fire (Phase One), and he is as uncountable as anyone. It's the one fall in the world he can't get up from, and he knows it better than anyone alive.
  • Mingus. Mingus can't knock him down, because a golden retriever bowling you over in welcome isn't a blow. The Get-Up Beat doesn't fire, and he lies there laughing with eighty pounds of dog on his chest. It's the only thing in the world Krydog stays down for.
• Getting up was never the feeling (ch. 259): when Skymning bottled his will to rise, a shove put him on the grass and he stayed there. UPP IGEN heals the fall; it never supplied the wanting. What got him up with nothing in him was habit: "There's nothing in me to do it with… It's in a jar." / "So?" / "…So." Muscle and bone remembering a motion. "Courage is in a jar. Wanting to is in a jar. Getting up was never a feeling. It's a habit."

• Home tempo: Gate City's surf, the black-sand beach where the reborn walk out of the sea. He grew up there, letting the waves knock him down ten thousand times. Every wave is a fall and every fall is a rise, and there he's fastest.
• Burn cost (and the HADOM OVERFLOW rule): one borrowed beat is all his heart can hold. Knock him down twice inside one of Mingus's heartbeats and it has to borrow a third, which it can't count. The beat overflows: silver light pours out of his chest, and the heart can't close. This is how Krydog can die. Every enemy who has studied him knows it: you don't need to keep him down, you need to put him down twice in one beat. His crew is built round stopping the second blow.
• On the page (ch. 272), nearly: Gnag, strong as the world tree, swats him off a chalk stair through a root-arch; he rises (ba-dum, ba-DUM, the silver double-ring), and Gnag's other hand is already coming down inside the same heartbeat. Kompis, eyes gold: "NOT TWICE! NOT IN ONE BEAT!" Vigolas lands over him and takes the second blow across his own back. Krydog's heart stays on its one borrowed beat, not overflowed: "You took my second one." / "You'd have burst. Then who'd I draw with?"

Every rise costs him a night's sleep. That night he lies awake while his heart drums the borrowed beat back. The nights never come back, and the exhaustion piles up: he hasn't slept a full night in years. The shadows under his eyes are the receipt. The day he finally falls asleep, he'll sleep for days (Jeppson has done the sums: the nights he owes, "Four thousand one hundred and six. And an afternoon." (ch. 267), and how many days the sleep that pays them will last, "Eleven, give or take an afternoon."), and his enemies know it. Worse, every Same Way Twice stack is wiped when he sleeps, so everything that ever floored him can do it again at full strength. That's why he's afraid to close his eyes. On the page, every rise is followed, sooner or later, by a night panel: Krydog in his hammock, eyes open, heart going twice.

• Two falls in one beat: the overflow. It takes a fighter fast enough to land twice inside one of Mingus's heartbeats, or two enemies timed perfectly. Rougeina could do it; she has never tried.
• Blows that don't knock you down: poison, a slow bleed, cold, hunger, chains that hold him standing, a grab and a squeeze. Isa's Hold is the cleanest counter in the series: inside it he can't fall, so he can't rise. You can't get up if they never let you fall.
• Sleep: anything that makes him sleep (Sloth VI's violet WINTERLONG snow, a lullaby, a drug in the water), or anything that makes skipped time catch up (the kind of power Tövind had), drops years of owed sleep on him at once. The Thaw Cult ("Everything is owed its time") would love him.
• A killing blow (the Headsman's sunrise stroke, a fall from a height that kills) has nothing to rise from.
• The Null: the one fall he can't get up from.
• His own Pride: he won't kneel even when kneeling would save him, won't retreat, and won't let anyone else stay down if he can help it.
• Being emptied, not hit (ch. 257): Skymning, the Bottler, uncorked one vial at him mid-charge, "The will to rise.", and a silver-gold ribbon poured out of his chest, "the most I've ever bottled from one man" (sold as Lot 1,005, "a lifetime of getting up"). A Dimmer shoved him, and he went down and stayed down: "I don't want to." Daniel: "There's no verdict to appeal. He wasn't judged. He was emptied." It came home when the Seven Towers cracked every jar on Lumen (ch. 261: "NOW I want to!"), but he had already got up without it.

• His fists, bandaged. He carries no weapon and has never wanted one. "I'm the weapon that comes back."
• The patchwork coat: 1,104 patches at debut, and a running count in Jeppson's Book of Works.
• The crew: Flexsnus (quartermaster) · Roffe (bosun and cook) · Jeppson (shipwright) · Perne (lookout) · Emma (first mate and healer) · Tihi (cabin girl) · Daniel (navigator and judge). See 12.
• No dog. He has wanted one all his life and never takes one.

Forward, always. He opens by walking straight at the enemy, fists up, grinning, and lets them knock him down: he's measuring them, and every fall makes their best blow worse against him. The middle of a Krydog fight is the enemy floored-and-floored-again while he gets up, stack by stack, until their best blow is a slap. He finishes with the Rising Fist, thrown out of a rise with the borrowed beat behind it. He never finishes anyone who's down: "Up you get. Again?" Crew combos (the Up-Again crew):

• Krydog + Perne, "Second Blow": Perne's long look sees the enemy's follow-up before it starts and calls it, so he's never floored twice in one beat.
• Krydog + Tihi, "The Hiccup": Tihi giggles and the enemy's second blow, timed on the next beat, lands on a beat that doesn't count. (Running gag: the one time she giggled while he was rising. "NOT WHILE I'M FALLING, TIHI.")
• Krydog + Emma, "One Boot on the Line": 5. Her circle makes the overflow impossible; he fights from its edge.
• Krydog + Roffe, "Ladle Launch": Roffe catches the rising captain on the bowl of the oar-sized ladle and flings him back into the fight. Krydog lands hard, and sometimes that counts as another knockdown, so he rises again, healed. Roffe calls it "seasoning".
• Krydog + Jeppson, "Upstairs": as he rises, Jeppson snaps a chalk line and a chalk stair rises under him, so he finishes the Get-Up on the high ground.
• Krydog + Flexsnus, the Gag: Flexsnus once bent his fall "a little softer", the fall didn't count as a knockdown, and nothing fired. "DON'T SOFTEN MY FALLS."
• Krydog + Daniel: when a referee, a law or an Arena-keeper calls him out, Daniel says "Objection", and the count stops long enough for him to get up.

Marka combos:

• Krydog + Vigolas, "The Long Walk": Greed-sight (or KEYSTONE) shows the one gold point; Krydog walks through every blow toward it, unfloorable by anything that's already floored him, and hits it.
• Krydog + Trollmage, "Buy Time": the crew always has to buy the troll time, and Krydog is the best time-buyer in the Current. He stands in front of the sleeping troll and gets up for as long as it takes. (Trollmage: "Mm. Five more minutes." Krydog: "Take ten. I'm having a lovely time.")
• Krydog + Rougeina, "Swap-Shield": she Swaps him into the path of a blow meant for someone else; he takes it, falls, rises. "You like this." "Again!"
• Krydog + Kompis, Shared Beat: Kompis lends him a kept line through a two-blow combination, so the second blow finds empty air.

• Wants: a world where anybody can get back up: ranks, sure, but a second chance for everyone, every time. Secretly: a dog. More secretly: one whole night's sleep.
• Fears: staying down. The long sleep (who guards his crew while he's out?). The grey, the one fall nobody gets up from.
• Contradiction: he believes in a second chance for everyone, and he has never forgiven himself the first one he wasted. He's for ranks, and he has spent his whole life refusing to kneel to them.
• Humour: loud, physical and self-mocking. He laughs when he's hit, grades his own falls, and challenges people to arm-wrestle as a greeting.
• Habits: re-ties his bandages before every fight; sews his own patches crookedly; shakes hands with everyone he fights, after; never looks in a mirror (he shaves by feel, which explains the jaw scars); talks to whoever has the night watch, because he's always awake; pats the figurehead's fist goodnight.
• Alone: he lies awake on deck, staring up at the starlight Current, and when he remembers the jetty his heart beats twice for no reason at all.

• Vigolas: rival captains, then sworn brothers. Two dreams with a real argument underneath: nobody ranked against anybody can get up. They fight three times in Saga V and draw every time. First meeting: "You gave up kneeling? I never started." At the Convergence the dreams merge: nobody ranked, and everybody can get up. Vigolas is the only man Krydog would let stand guard while he sleeps. Duel II (ch. 259) was Vigolas getting him up: "You slapped me with a fish." / "Twice." / "I'm going to knock you down for that." / "You can try." Then down, up, down, up, until both sat down at once: "Draw?" / "Draw." In the Splinterlands Vigolas took his second blow (ch. 272), and Krydog called it what it was: "You took my second one. And his bite. Greedy." (ch. 273). Between fights they share Roffe's stew on an upturned boat: "Your bloke and my bloke. Kids together." / "It's a small world." (ch. 263)
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus bowls him over on Fyren's rocks, and Krydog stays down for the first time in his life, laughing. Tihi: "Steal him!" Krydog: "That one's taken. That one's everybody's." He never takes a dog. Kompis reads the thread on him that ends in grey, and says nothing for a whole saga. Then, once, he puts a hand on Krydog's shoulder. On Lumen the line went the other way: flat on his back without his will, Krydog told a Kompis without his courage, "You don't need courage to stand in front of someone, lad. You just have to stand there." (ch. 258), and Kompis did, and handed it back ("You just have to stand there." / "You just have to stand there.", ch. 259). Mingus stood over him whining on the grass, and his hand came up to rest on the dog's head (ch. 257); after the draw the dog lay across both captains' laps (ch. 259).
• Iskall: "You got up without the wanting. I've never seen anyone do that." / "Neither had I, little miss." (ch. 259). Her Look bloomed his joy as he rose: "Him. He's still standing." She gave his ship a lit wick (ch. 263).
• Skymning, the Bottler: bottled his will to rise (ch. 257). "Not going to stop him?" he asked as the emptied man rowed off (ch. 262).
• Isa: his bandaged hand on her shoulder inside her Hold while she held the sea for 2 min 4 s (ch. 265): "New record?" / "Don't ever make me do that again."
• Marka (Saga VI, after the Ascension): the loudest laughing woman in the Current meets the loudest laughing man. They arm-wrestle on the Marka's deck for a whole night, and nobody wins.
• Trollmage: the troll he buys time for. They're the two people on either ship who are never in a hurry, for opposite reasons.
• Rougeina: she thinks he's insane, and Swaps him in front of blades anyway.
• Drekk: Drekk calls him "that patchwork lunatic" and steers to give the Upp Igen a fair race every time.
• Hallbard: the two people in the Current who never sleep. On the lighthouse stair: "How do you do it, old man?" "Badly, son." Krydog offers to get him up again if he'll only sit; Hallbard won't ("Not tonight").
• Flexsnus: his quartermaster and oldest bookmaker. Krydog trusts him with everything except his falls.
• Roffe: the man who re-sews his patches at night and makes him eat first.
• Jeppson: counts the patches, carved the figurehead from his fist, and has the sum of the long sleep worked out to the afternoon (4,106 nights owed, and an afternoon, ch. 267; crossed out ch. 412, when nobody had the number any more; Jeppson collects on his old answer, eleven days, ch. 417). In the Splinterlands Krydog threw him across the gap to the sinking Marka ("Ready?" / "No." / "Good!"), roared "GOOD ENOUGH, IF IT HOLDS!" at him, the loudest he has ever been at his own crew (ch. 265), and sat up all eleven nights of Shard by Shard with two mugs ("You don't sleep. I don't sleep. Might as well.", ch. 266). In the Rivet Beat, forehead to forehead, the calmest he has ever been: "Entry one. The birdhouse. Start there… Then it's one book, isn't it?" "You knew where I keep it." / "I've watched you sleep on it for six years, Jepp. Somebody's got to." (ch. 268)
• Perne: his early warning against the second blow.
• Emma: the one person who can make him stand still, by drawing a circle round him. "You idiot." / "That's Captain Idiot." (ch. 259)
• Tihi: he'd die for her, and she knows it, and giggles at the worst moments anyway. When he stayed down she tugged his sleeve: "Captain, get up. You always get up." (ch. 257) · "That's the whole thing. That's what the ship's called." (ch. 258). "Tihi wins. Tihi always wins." (ch. 263)
• Daniel: the man whose "Objection" founded the crew. Krydog calls him "the reason".

• "A chair? I'd rather stand!" (ch. 199)
• "You gave up kneeling? I never started." (to Vigolas, Saga V Arc 1)
• "Go on, knock me down. You won't do it the same way twice."
• "That one's taken. That one's everybody's." (Mingus)
• "…I don't want to." (ch. 257, bottled)
• "You don't need courage to stand in front of someone, lad. You just have to stand there." (ch. 258)
• "Courage is in a jar. Wanting to is in a jar. Getting up was never a feeling. It's a habit." (ch. 259)
• "GOOD ENOUGH, IF IT HOLDS!" (ch. 265)
• "Entry one. The birdhouse. Start there… Then it's one book, isn't it?" (ch. 268)
• "Getting up isn't an order. It's an offer." (Saga VI)