Nagel

• Two forms. At rest he is one rusted iron nail, square-headed and hand-forged, driven into the lintel above the cabin door. Awake he is a man of iron.
• Build & height (awake): 2.1 m, tall and gaunt, as if hammered out of a single long bar. Narrow shoulders, long arms, no wasted metal.
• Face: long and angular, with a seam for a mouth. The top of his head is hammered flat, crowded with the dents of a thousand strikes.
• Hair: none. Flat, dented iron.
• Eyes: two rivet-holes, with a faint warm glow inside: the cabin's firelight, reflected, always.
• Skin & mark: rusted iron, orange-brown flaking over black. He bleeds rust. No sin (Scarwood). He is the one Scarwood not made of wood: iron poisons trees, so wherever he stands, the wood under him blackens in a ring. That ring is his mark.
• Clothing, layer by layer: none. Snow collects on his flat head and shoulders, the snow from outside the cabin, and he never brushes it off.
• Signature item: himself, as a nail above a door.
• Movement: he creaks with every movement, stiff, rusted at the joints. When he pins, he moves all at once: he becomes a nail mid-stride, drives himself through the target, and stands there as a nail.
• Voice: a creak more than a voice. He speaks rarely, and only about things he has pinned. His balloons are angular, rust-stained, with very few words.
• Variant looks: The nail (a close-up of a dented square nail-head with a faint glow behind the rust). Pinning (an iron spike through a shadow, a man frozen mid-step, rust running from the head). Pulled out (ch. 353–354: standing in the snow for the first time, dark holes where he left the wood; an empty square hole in the lintel through the war, ch. 360).

Nagel drives himself through anything and pins it: a shadow to a wall, a person to a moment, a falling realm to its coordinates, a memory to a mind. Nothing he pins can move, flee, fall, or be forgotten.

• One pin at a time: there is one nail. While he holds a pin, he is the pin and can do nothing else.
• Memory-pins: he can pin what is there, or his own memories into someone else's mind, so they can never lose them. He cannot pin back what is already gone from a mind.
• The Door rule (home field): nothing pinned there can be forgotten, and the cabin cannot be opened by anyone uninvited while he is in the lintel.
• What it can't do: pin the Null (nothing to drive into), pin Mingus (he wouldn't, ever), or move while pinning.

• Tempo: 1. An iron nail doesn't hurry. But he remembers every beat: the cabin resets every heartbeat, and he is the one thing that doesn't.
• Home tempo: the Door.
• Heartbeat technique: THE PINNED BEAT. He pins one heartbeat of one person so that it repeats: the same beat, again and again, the way the cabin's moment repeats. A dying ally's last good beat comes again and again, and they don't die until he lets go. No one else can make a single beat come back.
• Burn cost: every repeat rusts him from the inside. He holds everything he pins with his own pain.

Iron poisons trees. Nagel poisons Ferdinand just by existing, and the tree grew him anyway. Everything he holds pinned, he holds with his own pain, and he is rusting from the inside out. And he has never come inside the cabin, and never will. He has watched a billion beats of fire, warmth and a sleeping dog through the window, from the cold.

• One nail, one pin. Make him choose.
• He can't move while pinning. Kill what he isn't holding.
• Water and time: he rusts. A century of rain would eat him.
• The Scarwood: they call him "the poison." Flisa pulls iron nails out of roots for a living.
• Anything invited: he can't stop a guest. A trickster who gets an invitation gets in.

• Himself.
• The cabin: one room of pine logs, a fire always lit, snow always falling outside, a golden dog asleep at the hearth. It resets every heartbeat. The only true sanctuary.
• Mingus, his ally. Every beat, Mingus sniffs at the door where Nagel is. A billion sniffs. They are old friends.

He holds. He opens by pinning the most dangerous enemy's shadow, and he finishes by pinning them to a moment and waiting. He has never hurried and has never lost the door. Team combos: Nagel + Isa: she holds the world still, he pins the one thing that would move when she lets go. Nagel + Kompis: the Pinned Beat keeps Kompis's heart steady through Subtick's worst burn. Nagel + Vigolas: see below.

• Wants: nothing. "I'm not tired of it." (He means it.) Maybe, once, to feel the fire from the inside.
• Fears: the fire going out; the day the cabin's beat stops resetting.
• Contradiction: a poison guarding the most loved place in the universe, and the cabin's only witness, who has never been inside it.
• Humour: barely there. Creaky literalism. "The dog sniffed. … Again. … Again."
• Habits: counts beats; remembers every one of them.
• Alone: he is never alone. He is at the door.

• Kompis: Nagel has watched him by that fire a billion times, and Kompis has never noticed him. In Saga VI Kompis looks up at the lintel and says thank you, and Nagel creaks for a whole page (ch. 358). Kompis shakes his iron hand at the door: a dark ring burned on his palm ("Now you've got a mark. From the door." / "Good.", ch. 360).
• Mingus: a billion sniffs at the door. His only friend.
• Mörda: "The guest is allowed. She knocked."
• Flisa: "The poison." He doesn't argue.
• Ferdinand: he poisons the tree that grew him, and he knows it.

• "I've seen this fire a billion times. I'm not tired of it."
• "Pinned. … It stays."
• "The guest is allowed. She knocked."
• "The dog sniffed. … Again."
• "I can't give it back. … I can give you mine."