Runa

• Build & height: a Brygdar troll, 2.9 m tall when she stands, which she hasn't done in three hundred years. She sits bent on a stool of raw rowan, broad and stone-heavy, with hands like spades.
• Face: long and deeply lined, with a heavy brow and a wide, thin mouth that rarely smiles and means it when it does. Long troll ears with seven notches along the rim: the ears Ulla recognised on Trollmage.
• Hair: pure white, braided into one rope that runs down her back, across the floor and into the Heartwood itself. Over three centuries it has grown into the grain. She cannot stand up without cutting it.
• Eyes: the colour of fresh sap, translucent amber-gold with no visible pupil. When she speaks a rune the sap-light brightens like a lamp turned up.
• Skin & sin-mark: grey-green, stone-textured troll skin with moss in the deepest creases. Pride, silver. Silver runes are inlaid along both forearms like silver wire set into wood: placement made visible. Her palms are covered in burned-in rune-scars from carving the first runes, black lines healed shiny.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a shift of soft inner bark · a robe of cork shavings and rowan leaves, layered like scales and renewed every spring by the Bark Monks · a rowan-berry cord at the throat. She smells of rain on bark.
• Signature item: the flint burin, a carving tool of black flint worn to the shape of her thumb, with which the first twenty-four runes were cut.
• Movement: she barely moves. When she does, it's one slow, total gesture, like a tree leaning in wind.
• Voice: deep, quiet and grainy. The world goes quiet to listen back. She speaks in short troll sentences, without contractions. Her balloons have a woodgrain border; spoken runes appear as burning silver glyphs outside any balloon.
• Variant looks: Root-whisper (a faint silver rune glowing under a sleeping child's cheek). Rune spoken (both palms open, smoke rising from the scars). Young flashback (a tall troll princess, 330 years old, walking into a door that opened in Ferdinand's bark).

• Permanent marks (as of ch. 420): aged and clouded after spending a hundred rings (ch. 313).

Runa knows the twenty-four first runes. When she speaks one aloud, it burns into reality as its meaning:

• Fire lights. Hold holds a collapsing ceiling. Way opens a path through solid wood. Rest puts an army to sleep. Root anchors a ship to the spot.
• Rules: she can speak each rune once per season (once per one of Ferdinand's heartbeats). Anyone who hears a first rune spoken learns it in one heartbeat, or loses their hearing until the next spring. Trollmage has heard her twice and kept his hearing both times.
• Range: inside the Heartwood, the whole tree. Outside it, only through the roots: a rune whispered into a root reaches whoever is asleep on it.
• The Heartwood rule (home field): any rune spoken aloud inside Ferdinand burns into reality. That includes runes spoken by fools.
• What it can't do: create a rune that was never carved, or reach the Null (no roots there).

• Tempo: 1, but her heartbeat is one of Ferdinand's, about one beat a season. Inside one beat she does whatever a season does.
• Home tempo: the Heartwood. She is the tree's pace.
• Heartbeat technique: THE HEARTWOOD BEAT. In the space of one of Ferdinand's heartbeats she speaks one rune into the whole tree at once. Every root in all nine realms hears it, and every sleeper lying on a root wakes knowing it. No one else's heartbeat is borrowed from the world's heart.
• Burn cost: each full burn costs her one growth ring: a year of her life, gone in the beat. A leaf falls from Ferdinand's crown in every realm at once.

Every rune burns her palms: the scars are the price, drawn fresh every time. She is rooted. Her braid has grown into the Heartwood, and if she cut it and walked out she would age three hundred years in a breath. She has never met her great-great-grandson awake until he walks into the tree in Saga V. Everything she taught him, she taught a sleeping child through a root.

• One action a season. Anything fast gets to her first; she survives because the tree protects her.
• She can't leave. Fight her outside the Heartwood and you are fighting nothing.
• Sleepless enemies (Mörda, Hallbard) can't be reached by root-whispers.
• Salt-fire (Saltbrand, Bastion Five) burns Ferdinand's bark and hurts the tree she lives in. The Root-Eater (Gluttony X, the Barkstrippers' boss) eats wood.
• The Unspoken (below) is her enemy and her temptation.

• The flint burin (above).
• The rowan stool, raw and unbarked, which has grown leaves again three times.
• The Bark Monks: quiet copyists who live in the Heartwood's ring-galleries, copying runes onto shed bark. They renew her robe every spring.

She doesn't fight; she places. A crew in the Heartwood finds the floor turning into a path, a wall that wasn't there, an enemy asleep mid-charge. She opens with Root (nobody moves until she says so) and finishes with Rest. Team combos: Runa + Trollmage: she speaks the rune, and he MACROs it, so one season's rune lands as many times as he waited. Runa + Smurjan: his Sightline finds the exact grain where a rune must be cut.

• Wants: the family to come home. The Brygdar royal line "ran off to read books"; she ran into a tree.
• Fears: someone careless speaking the Unspoken.
• Contradiction: the most patient being in the world is impatient with her family. "So angry how lazy you are. … And so proud." (Ulla was quoting her.)
• Humour: troll-blunt. "You snore in runes. Badly."
• Habits: hums the sound of rain, braids rowan leaves into the floor around her, talks to the tree without ever quoting what it says back.
• Alone: listens to Ferdinand's heartbeat with her cheek against the wall.

• Trollmage: "Little Stone." The heir she taught through roots. She finally meets him awake, scolds him for an hour, and then holds his face in both scarred hands.
• Vigolas: she won't let Greed into the tree ("A greedy man in a tree is a woodworm") until he asks for nothing.
• Kompis + Mingus: Mingus lies on the Heartwood floor, and the tree's heartbeat and his fall into step. "So. That is the unit."
• Rougeina: Runa sees at once that her eight blades were never forged, only cut. She says nothing.
• Smurjan: "The eighth seat." Rönnkvist kin. She asks him to say each of his voices' names aloud, so the tree can hear them.
• Ulla: dead on the slipway (ch. 31). Runa learns it from Trollmage and a leaf falls in every realm.

• "Small things, perfectly placed. Now wake up."
• "You cannot climb him. You can be asked in. Wipe your feet."
• "So angry how lazy you are. And so proud."
• "Learn it, or go deaf until spring. Choose quickly."
• "No. Not that one. That one is not a rune. That is a door that only opens one way."