Saltbrand

• Build & height: 1.90 m, broad and heavy, barrel-chested, slow. A man-shaped block of salt.
• Face: bald and crusted, heavy-browed, mouth a crack. Eyes red-rimmed and bone-dry, with grains of salt caught in the corners (ch. 31). Where tears should be, salt flakes instead (ch. 31, 35). Once, in the rain, they fill and run over (ch. 73).
• Hair: none. A cap of salt-crust.
• Eyes: pale and reddened, never wet.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a salt-stiff linen shirt grown into the crust · long gloves · an oiled sealskin hood · a heavy belt with a water-tight pouch (nothing wet ever touches him on purpose) · boots with iron soles. He never steps off iron (ch. 31).
• Signature item: the branding iron, a long iron rod whose head is shaped like a closed gate, the Bastion's crest. Its tip is always white-hot.
• Movement: slow, planted, never hurried. He doesn't chase; he sets things alight and lets the fire travel. He steps from iron to iron (gangplank, deck-plate, salt-sled) and never onto wood or soil.
• Voice: slow and dry, "as if words cost him water" (ch. 31). Short sentences. Balloons are cracked, chalk-white, with grainy edges, like salt pans. His scream is "dry, cracked".
• Variant looks: Living torch (ch. 72–73: hood back, arms spread on his iron sled, salt-fire running up his whole body from boots to crown). Melting (ch. 31, 32, 73: arm or legs running "like wet sugar", the crust slumping). One-armed (ch. 73 onward: his burning arm gone to the shoulder in Bakasura's jaws; the page doesn't say which side, so keep it consistent once drawn). Crying (ch. 73: dissolved to the waist in the mud, rain in his eyes).

White flames that burn what fire can't, and what dies in them stays dead. (ch. 31's caption)

• It burns salt, bark and stone. Ferdinand's bark, which held against Trisdel fire, catches: the tree's soft gold glow "goes out, like an eye closing", and the wood turns white and crumbles into salt (ch. 31). Troll stone goes white and cracks.
• What dies in it stays dead. No respawn (the Trinity), no regrowth (Röta can't rot salt: "Salt is the one thing I can't make anything of"), no Call (nothing is left to call). Kali's left forearm crumbled to salt below the elbow and never grew back. Grandmother Ulla died a white salt statue. Old Torbjörn, who took the fire inside Bakasura, is lost forever.
• It feeds on seawater. Buckets of fjord water make it worse (ch. 31).
• It leaves water sweet. Once it has burned through, the water left behind has no salt in it: "…Sweet." (Ulla, ch. 31)
• Sweet water drowns it, and dissolves him. Fresh water, drinking water, rain. That's why the Order had the Twin Clerks uncount the rain over the Compost Fields before he burned them (ch. 69).
• It can be drawn as lines: salt poured from sacks in ruler-straight lines and lit, "a ledger ruled over the living earth" (ch. 69 splash); a ring closed around two hundred and twelve people (ch. 34); a river of fire chasing a stern (ch. 32).

• Tempo: 90.
• Home tempo: an iron deck on a salt sea, where the water under him feeds the fire and nothing sweet is near.
• Burn cost (HADOM OVERFLOW): salt-fire drinks water, and he is the nearest water. Every burn dries him: the cracks widen and the crust whitens. Past his ceiling the beat overflows from the inside: white light pours out of the cracks, the crust can't hold, and he shatters into salt. Short of that, every burn leaves him a little drier, and a little less able to weep.

He is made of what he burns. Sweet water — a launch wave, a drinking cask, a bucket from a spring, rain — melts him like wet sugar. He can't sleep ("Sleep, you sweat. Salt doesn't like sweat.", ch. 35). He can't stand on living ground, only on iron. He can't cry: grief comes out of him as salt flakes from the corners of dry eyes. The first time he ever wept was the night he lost ("…I can… cry.", ch. 73).

• Sweet water, discovered by Grandmother Ulla with one taste (ch. 31) and used by everyone after: the Marka's launch into the sweetened fjord (ch. 31), Rougeina tipping the Tally's drinking casks over him ("He sleeps next to it.", ch. 32), Drekk's spring-water buckets ("That's for the grandmother!", ch. 35), Trollmage's MACRO : CLOUDBURST = 3 DAYS (ch. 73), new rain that no decree had named.
• Precision: Smurjan's palm into the deepest crack sheared off a whole shoulder (ch. 31).
• Hunger he can't control: he offered himself to Bakasura to reach the Trinity through its hunger, and Old Torbjörn held the throat shut.
• How he was beaten: ch. 31 (melted and driven off by the launch wave), ch. 32 (fire broken by the cask), ch. 35 (the Tally turned to stone under him; escaped in the jolly-boat with Hrafnkell), ch. 73 (spat out one-armed, then dissolved to the waist by the cloudburst; spared by Trollmage for Ulla's sake and crawled away).

• The branding iron with the closed-gate head.
• Iron underfoot: iron-soled boots, the Tally's iron deck-plate and iron gangplank, the Bastion's iron-hulled sled-ship and iron salt-sleds in Trinity.
• The salt sacks and the Cleaners who pour his lines (Saga II, Arc 5, with the Twin Clerks).
• Hrafnkell, his partner in Arc 1, whom he hooked out of the starlight by the collar.

He burns the ground, not the man. He sets lines, rings and rivers of fire and lets them close; he stays on his iron and keeps the branding iron raised. Against someone "too exact to burn" he changes target: the place they come back through ("So I'll burn the ground he comes back through."), and finally their hunger. Bastion combo: Saltbrand + Hrafnkell (the ring around the innocents, AUDIT on the defenders, ch. 34). Order combo: Saltbrand + the Twin Clerks (uncount the rain, then rule the earth with fire, ch. 69).

• Wants: to finish the job he was built for, one more death, the last one ("How many times have you died, big man?" / "Enough." / "One more, then. The last one.").
• Fears: water that isn't salt; and, under it, being someone who killed a grandmother.
• Contradictions: a man who keeps the dead dead and cannot let his own guilt go; a fire that only a gentle rain can put out.
• Humour: none, unless dryness counts ("Good bark. Pity.").
• Habits: stays awake all night on his plate staring at the water; never drinks where anyone can see.
• Alone: listens to the sea and doesn't sleep.

• Smurjan: his assigned quarry, "big man", too exact to burn. "Next time, big man."
• Kali: her left forearm is his. It is the first thing in her life that didn't grow back.
• Bakasura: "…Salt." The hunger he tried to use as a door.
• Grandmother Ulla: held his fire on her back for a whole ship and died a salt statue. "You killed a grandmother." / "She stood in it." / "She stood in it for her kids." / "…I know." (Vigolas, ch. 35)
• Old Torbjörn: the ferryman who took his fire inside the maw so the others wouldn't. Lost forever.
• Trollmage: spared him: "My grandmother held your fire on her back for a whole ship. She'd let you go. So I'm letting you go. Be grateful. I'm too lazy to hate you properly."
• Hrafnkell: partner. Aldhrun: maker. Röta: the one thing she can't make anything of is him.

• "Good bark. Pity." (ch. 31)
• "The Architect built five of us. One for each of you. I'm yours." (ch. 31)
• "Salt keeps things. Fish. Meat. Grudges. And the dead. It keeps them dead." (ch. 31)
• "What dies in there stays dead." (ch. 34)
• "She stood in it." … "…I know." (ch. 35)
• "Built for you, Trinity. Couldn't touch you. You're too exact. So I'll let your hunger touch me. Eat, then." (ch. 73)
• "…I can… cry." (ch. 73)