Slagg

• Build & height: 2.00 m, big and slow (ch. 112), heavy through the chest and forearms, a smith's body gone to bulk. He walks at the same steady pace from the first panel of a fight to the last.
• Face: square, broad, perfectly calm. Broken nose from ch. 113 on (Vigolas's Emerald Knuckle), and "his expression doesn't change." After ch. 117: ruined, human, wet with tears for a whole chapter.
• Hair: dark, cropped short, singed at the edges by forge-work.
• Eyes: flat, like painted glass, with nothing behind them (ch. 112). They un-flatten in one panel (ch. 117) when the oil lifts.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a sleeveless leather vest · a leather coat to the ankles · gauntlets so thick with black oil it drips off his elbows, the oil pooling in his palm like a well · heavy boots crusted with slag.
• Signature item: the oil-black gauntlets. One of them is knocked off by Tyst's silent shot (ch. 116); after ch. 118 he works with bare hands.
• Movement: unhurried, unflinching, inevitable. He takes every blow (fist, Triple Pulse, a blade, a smith's punch that throws him twenty metres) and walks back. Then everything at once.
• Voice: flat, polite, a foreman reading a work order ("Master Malm. The Council sends its regards."). Balloons are plain rectangles with no emphasis anywhere until ch. 117–118, when they burst into ragged screams and wet, broken letters.
• Variant looks: The Man Who Feels Nothing (ch. 113 splash: bloodied from a dozen wounds, walking forward at the same pace, the crew broken around him). Unquenched (ch. 117: on his knees on the oil-slick platform over the lava, hands over his face, screaming). Apprentice (ch. 118: kneeling bare-handed at a cauldron, a quenched sword held to his chest, humming badly).

He plunges a soul-weapon into the black oil that coats his gauntlets, and the soul inside goes silent. The weapon becomes a tool: it obeys whoever holds it, has no will, and never speaks. (Saga III beats; ch. 112)

• A quenched soul isn't dead. It's asleep under oil. Kompis can see her thread, "faint… covered, like a candle under a blanket".
• Tools aim perfectly. With a quenched gun he lands every shot exactly where he means it (ch. 113): Drekk's axe-haft, Kali's sickle, Bakasura's tongue ("…ow…").
• The rule that undoes it (ch. 117): a quenched soul wakes when someone it loves calls it loud enough. Pups come for the old one who growls. Kompis's call wasn't enough; Ivar's was ("CUB! WAKE UP! THE BOY NEEDS YOU!").
• The second touch lifts it: oil that touches a quenched soul a second time, after a pup has bitten through it, lifts (ch. 117). That's what happened to him.
• SFX: the plunge GLLKK; oil dripping drp… drp; a quenched gun's shot, flat and dead: tak.

• Tempo: 280.
• Home tempo: Smedjan's lava-fields, by a smoking cauldron, where the oil stays warm and liquid.
• Heartbeat technique: THE DIP. Inside one heartbeat he catches, wrenches and plunges: the weapon leaves its owner's hand and goes under the oil "in one impossible motion" (ch. 112). No one else disarms a soul between two beats of its owner's heart. (Distinct from Malm's The Quench, which binds a willing soul on the beat it says yes. Slagg's dip is the theft of that beat.)

Long ago he quenched his own soul first, so he would never flinch. (Saga III beats) He feels nothing: no pain, no joy, no fear. "You'll want to stop me. I understand. I don't feel it, but I understand." (ch. 113) "I haven't made a point, master. Points are for people who care." His threads are gone; there is nothing to read in him. And when the oil lifts, the price comes due all at once: every weapon he ever quenched, every soul he silenced, every scream he didn't hear, in a single second (ch. 117).

• Love, loud enough. Ivar's roar reached Lilla Ulv under the oil; she burst out in black and gold and bit his gauntlet ("…Ow.", his first pain in decades).
• His own oil. The Four-Gun Volley tipped his cauldron and the oil splashed back over him (ch. 117).
• Silence. Tyst's soundless shot knocked his gauntlet off ("…Silent. Clever. I didn't hear it.", ch. 116).
• Fireworks: Fru Gnista's burst blinds every Melter in a vault and burns oil in mid-air (ch. 115, 117).
• How he was beaten (ch. 117): the Four-Gun Volley (Ivar splits the oil-wave, Lilla Ulv ricochets through, Fru Gnista burns it, Tyst snaps the cauldron's chain), and his own oil unquenched him. He fell to his knees screaming.

• The oil-gauntlets and the cauldrons of black oil; the crucible on the lava-lake platform.
• The Melters (MELTER · K-II MARKED · Smedjan blockade): black-oil gauntlets, cauldrons, black-hulled ships. An Order-backed cartel. Their fleet foundered in Smedjan's harbour (ch. 118), and Slagg himself tore the gauntlets off his own men.
• Quenched Lilla Ulv, for three chapters.

Inevitability. He walks in, takes your soul-weapon, and shoots you with it; then he takes whatever you hit him with and keeps walking. Nothing you do registers, so nothing you do changes his pace. He leaves the dramatic work (melting, flooding) for dawn and in front of everyone. Melter combo: Slagg + the Melters: cauldrons and gauntlets on every grapple, every soul on the ship "tools by tomorrow".

• Wants (before): nothing. Order, maybe: "No will, no yipping. A good tool." (After): to bring back every soul he put under.
• Fears (before): nothing he can feel. (After): that one of them won't wake.
• Contradictions: a smith's apprentice who became the destroyer of smiths' work; a man who chose numbness "so he would never flinch", and whose redemption is a lifetime of flinching.
• Humour: none, until a bitten hand and a flat "…Ow."
• Habits (after): hums to the weapons, badly, a song he doesn't know the words to; never whistles at Glöd's anvil ("That's his.").
• Alone (after): at Glöd's anvil, one quenched weapon at a time, listening for it to stir.

• Malm: his old master, who hit him once and then said "Good." when he wept. "It means they're not gone. A soul you can hear is a soul that can come back." Took him back in Glöd's place.
• Glöd: the fifteen-year-old who held the door against his flood and died whistling. Slagg works at his anvil now, and doesn't whistle there.
• Lilla Ulv: quenched by him, fired by him, woke and bit him.
• Ivar: the old soul whose roar beat the oil.
• Kompis: "She shot me. She shot me." / "No. I shot you. She's a tool now. Tools don't shoot anyone."
• Fru Gnista & Tyst: the waiting souls he came for, who chose Kompis instead.
• The Melters: his men; he tore off their gauntlets ("Can't you HEAR them?!"), and a few began to hear.

• "Master Malm. The Council sends its regards. Every soul-weapon on Smedjan is to be melted down to tools." (ch. 112)
• "She'll fire for anyone now. No will, no yipping. A good tool." (ch. 112)
• "Pain is a soul thing. I put mine under oil a long time ago. It's very restful." (ch. 113)
• "I haven't made a point, master. Points are for people who care." (ch. 113)
• "…Ow." (ch. 117)
• "…I can hear them. Every one. …A little girl's knife that sang when she cut bread. I can hear them all crying." (ch. 118)
• "…Yes, master." (ch. 118)