Kvar

• Build & height: 1.79 m, average in every way, a little soft round the middle. The kind of man you'd forget in a crowd, which is the point.
• Face: ordinary and tired, a forty-five-year-old face that has been forty-five for a very long time. Salt-and-pepper stubble, a burn scar along the left jaw, a mouth that seems about to say "well."
• Hair: short, grey-brown, with ash in it that never washes out.
• Eyes: brown, heavy-lidded, kind. They are the only thing that ages when he's tired: in some panels they look a thousand years old.
• Skin & sin-mark: Gluttony, amber. Amber script between his shoulder blades, where you'd carry a load: the names of the dead he has buried, crawling. It has spread down his back and around his ribs over the centuries. Gluttony is integration: he takes endings into himself.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a wool shirt the colour of old ash · a patched leather coat, burned in a hundred places, every patch from a different war's cloth · trousers of soldier's canvas · boots re-soled so often there's nothing original left · and the scarf (below).
• Signature item: the scarf of a hundred armies: dozens of regimental scarves knotted end to end and wound three times round his neck, in the colours of armies that no longer exist.
• Movement: a slow, steady walk; he never hurries. In battle he stands still while everything misses him: arrows bend, blades slide off, explosions open around him like a door.
• Voice: plain, quiet and tired: the voice of a man who has said the same goodbyes a hundred times. His balloons are plain, slightly smudged grey, as if dusted with ash.
• Variant looks: On Askslätten (shirtsleeves, digging, the ghost-soldiers sitting around him). Carrying (bent under a weight nobody can see, amber names glowing through his coat). First war flashback (a twelve-year-old cook's boy on a smoking field, the only one standing).

Kvar is always the one left standing at the end of any fight he is in.

• Blades, arrows, sins, lightning and collapsing walls route around him. He has never been struck by anything that was meant to end him.
• The price is built into the rule: what misses him goes somewhere. The arrow that bends around Kvar finds the man behind him. Standing behind Kvar in a battle is the most dangerous place in the world.
• The hard limit: he cannot decide a fight. If he raises a hand to win (to land the deciding blow, to kill), the rule lets go of him for that moment. So he doesn't. He stands, and afterwards he buries.
• Askslätten: wherever a war ends with no one left to remember it, the Ash Plain surfaces out of the Current under the battlefield's ash, and he's on it.
• What it can't do: protect anyone; win; stop the Null from talking to him.

• Tempo: 1. The scale refuses to count it: the old record keepers swear his one beat is longer than everyone else's thousand.
• Home tempo: Askslätten, where every war's last moment ends up.
• Heartbeat technique: THE BEAT AFTER. In any fight, the last heartbeat on the field is his. However fast the others are, his single beat lands after their final one. No one outlasts him by even a beat.
• Burn cost: each time he uses the Beat After on purpose (to wait out a thing for someone else's sake), he takes that fight's dead onto his back as new amber names, and he gets heavier. He walks slower every century.

He survives everything, so he buries everyone. He has never died with anyone he loved. The rule makes him dangerous to stand near, so he stays at the edge of every battle and arrives after it: "You haven't been looking." And he is tired, so tired that the Null, the one thing that could finish him, sounds kind.

• He can't win. Any fight that needs him to decide it, he loses by default.
• Allies behind him die. The crew has to learn to stand beside him.
• The Last War: an endless war that drifts through the Current, made of the ghosts of every war that ended. It wants one thing: a war with no one left standing, which means Kvar dead.
• The Latecomer (Envy X) wears the sins of the dead for a night each and has watched more of his wars end than anyone. She knows his limits.
• The Null's voice: "You are so tired of remaining." His only true weakness is that he agrees.

• No weapon. A short spade on his back, worn bright at the edge.
• The scarf of a hundred armies.
• A cold clay pipe he never lights (fire reminds him of things).
• A tin cup, dented, from his first war.
• The ghost-soldiers who never left: grey, quiet soldiers in a hundred uniforms who stayed on Askslätten after their wars. They play cards with him and never win, because he always outlasts the game.

He doesn't fight. He stands, and the fight goes around him. He opens by walking into the middle of the field with his hands in his pockets, which draws fire away from anyone not behind him. He finishes by burying it. Team combos: Kvar + Rougeina: he Carries her weight, and her tempo comes back for the fight. Kvar + Isa: the two stillest people in the series. Strays curve around him; Isa holds the ones that would curve into someone else. Kvar + Mingus: Mingus is the one creature who can sit beside him in a battle: the strays never find the dog.

• Wants: to be allowed to stop.
• Fears: being the last one standing when the crew falls.
• Contradiction: the man who can't die is the most tired person alive; the man who stands at the edge of every fight cares about everyone in it.
• Humour: plain gallows humour. "I'd offer to help, but then you'd be dead."
• Habits: nods at empty chairs; counts the dead aloud; keeps one extra cup by the fire.
• Alone: digs, slowly, on Askslätten, while the ghost-soldiers watch.

• Vigolas: ch. 36. Vigolas tries to recruit him on the spot. "Can't. Things miss me, captain. They have to go somewhere."
• Rougeina: the two people who stand among the dead. Kvar Carries her weight (Saga III): she keeps the names, he takes the slowing heart.
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus walks over the ash, sits down beside him and leans. Kvar doesn't move for an hour.
• Trollmage: "How do you sleep?" "Standing up." Trollmage is horrified.
• Smurjan: Kvar was at the end of three wars in Trinity. He knows the seventeen voices by their old names.
• Öde: the one who always survives and the one who remembers. He teaches her the Roll-Call; she teaches him that remembering isn't the same as carrying.

• "I'm always here. You haven't been looking."
• "After the first Sign, it gets hungry."
• "Things miss me. They have to go somewhere."
• "If I go, who's left?"
• "Stand beside me. Never behind."