Niva

• Build & height: 1.49 m, compact and bow-legged from a life of walking, with a herder's stamina. She leans slightly forward, always walking into a wind.
• Face: broad and weathered brown, cheeks wind-cracked red, deep lines at the eyes from squinting into white. A small old scar splits her upper lip.
• Hair: black shot with grey, two short braids tied with sinew, mostly under her hood.
• Eyes: silver coins, no iris or pupil, like her cousin Ögar's. In the Null they are the only thing on the page that reflects.
• Skin & sin-mark: Greed, emerald. A ring of emerald script around her right wrist (the stake hand) with seven notches; six are filled in. Greed is "decide what you value": each stake made her decide which memory was worth less than ground.
• Clothing, layer by layer: wool underlayers · a bone-white parka of reindeer hide stitched with sinew, closed with bone toggles, the hood lined with white fox · fur-lined trousers · soft boots with turned-up toes · a belt with a bone-handled knife, a coil of sinew rope and a rolled hide map.
• Signature item: the seventh stake: forearm-length, pale wood, carved all over with tiny reindeer, carried across her back like a short spear. It is the last one.
• Movement: a steady, tireless herder's walk. She never runs. In the Null ground appears under each footstep and vanishes behind her.
• Voice: sparse. Three words where anyone else uses thirty. Her balloons are small, square and plain, with no punctuation flourishes.
• Variant looks: In the Null (colour leaves everything but her eyes and the emerald ring, and she is drawn in thin pencil-like line). Planting (both hands on the stake, the parka blown back, ground bursting outward from the point in rings like a tree's). Herder flashback (young, laughing, with a tent and a herd, and no idea what's coming).

Ground exists only where Niva's stake is planted.

• She drives a stake into the Null and a field of real ground (earth, grass, a little sky) appears around it, about a hundred paces wide. It lasts as long as the stake stands.
• The hard limit: seven stakes in seven thousand years, each costing a memory. Ferdinand drops one great branch every thousand years, and she carves each into a stake. There is no making them faster.
• Six are planted. Together they make Kanten, six islands of ground at the inner edge of the Null. The seventh is on her back.
• Edge-walking: within sight of a planted stake she can walk the Null itself. Ground appears under each step and vanishes behind her. Anyone holding her sinew rope can follow her footsteps.
• What it can't do: make ground outside the Null (there's no need), move a planted stake without losing its field, or walk the Null with no stake in sight.

• Tempo: unmeasurable inside the Null, which has no heartbeats. Outside it she moves at about 9, a steady walk.
• Home tempo: Kanten, the only six places in the Null where a heart can beat.
• Burn cost: inside the Null her heart doesn't beat at all. Every hour there costs a day of her life, unless she is touching a planted stake. (That is how she has lived seven thousand years: she only ages outside.)

Each stake costs a memory she chooses. She carves what she paid on the stake itself, so she knows what she lost even though she can't remember it:

• Where home was (the first stake was her tent-pole).
• My mother's voice.
• The colour of summer.
• The name of my first reindeer.
• Why I laugh at snow.
• My own face, young.

• No stake in sight means she has no power in the Null and is mortal outside it.
• The Root-Eater (Gluttony X, the Barkstrippers' boss) eats wood, and her stakes are wood.
• The Null's creatures: grey hounds that gnaw at Kanten's edges (the same kind Bakasura grew Null-sick eating in Saga I).
• Solvig's window: the Order can see into the Null, and Solvig has been watching her for years.
• The memory cost: she gets lost easily now. She can't find home, and she can't always remember why she's walking.

• The seventh stake (above). The six planted ones each have a field around them: a strip of tundra, a birch grove, a field of cloudberry, a frozen pond, a stone circle, and her old tent ring.
• The sinew rope and the bone-handled knife.
• The hide map.
• The reindeer spirits: white, silent and antlered like winter trees. Their lead bull is Gamle.

She doesn't fight the Null; she outlasts it. In a fight she ties the crew to her line, walks them along the only safe path and lets the reindeer charge. Against people she is a plain, hard knife-fighter who wastes nothing. Team combos: Niva + Smurjan: the Sightline finds the one thread of the Null that is still "almost counted", and she plants beside it. Niva + Vigolas: he COMPACTs a Null-creature into a cube and she drops the cube off the edge of the world.

• Wants: home. She doesn't remember where it is.
• Fears: forgetting why she walks.
• Contradiction: a woman who has paid six memories for ground hoards nothing else at all: no keepsakes, no letters.
• Humour: dry, three words long. "Bad place. Walk faster."
• Habits: knots her sinew rope when she's nervous; reads the carvings on her stake every morning to see what she lost.
• Alone: sits in the tent ring on the sixth field and talks to Gamle.

• Vigolas: "It smells you." She knows the Null leans toward him, and she ties her rope round his waist first.
• Kompis + Mingus: she ties a strip of her parka to Mingus's collar as a gift. "For winter."
• Rougeina: two women who make things disappear. Rougeina asks her what forgetting feels like. "Quiet."
• Trollmage: his book twitches near Ysel. Niva knows why, and won't say.
• Smurjan / Bakasura: Bakasura tried to eat her three times, long ago, and took the parka instead each time. "…Woolly."
• Drämmen: "Map-woman." The one she left off. She visits him every century.
• Ögar: cousin. They argue about whether the Null can be looked at.
• Öde: they compare what they've forgotten, in lists.

• "Stay here. The void does not."
• "Bad place. Walk faster."
• "I paid for this grass. Don't step on it."
• "One left. Not today."
• "Quiet." (on forgetting)