Logi Emberhand

Logi Emberhand grew up on the fire-marked fringe of the northern mountains, in the high-flame country folk call Hálogaland, north of the fjord. His people had the height and stone-strength of goliaths, but Logi’s vein-marks glowed like banked coals, and rooms always felt warmer when he was in them. He was too slight for the shieldwall and too restless for a hidden mountain hall, so a master crafter took him on: oils, lamps, colored glass, and the careful use of heat.

The workshop taught him how to read a market the way skalds read a saga. It could not answer the heat in his blood. He left with alchemist’s tools, a spear he had learned to keep in both hands, and a habit of asking stallholders what a thing really was.

For a few years he walked the southern emporia — Hedeby, Ribe, Birka, the Kaupang quays — appraising curios, testing fakes with reagents, and buying trader-scrolls in scripts most Norse crafters will not touch. He was hunting relics: old fire-work, giant-work, anything that might explain why his hands ran hot. That is how he began to learn the fire-tongue of Múspellsheimr. He did not yet have anyone to speak it with.

In Hedeby he paid too little for a warm dark orb a stallholder swore was spoiled glass. That night, in a rented loft above the stalls, he heated it to see the fault-lines. The glass did not crack. A voice like a forge-bellows filled the room.

I will make the fire in you answer. You will take me where the amber-sleepers are waking, and where war has spilled old treasures into new markets.

Logi said yes. He wanted magic more than he wanted to ask what the fire was for.

The orb taught him the rest of the fire-tongue. He threaded it on a leather cord so it would rest against his chest, walnut-small, always warm, always in reach. He could keep one hand on the spear and close the other over the glass when the voice wanted out.

Rumors from the north made the orb hotter. A wizard had slept in amber for three hundred years and woken. A public tower was going up in Niðaróss. The same docks were filling with war-loot and stranger talk still: sky-stone, island ruins, relics that had no honest Norse names. To a relic-appraiser, the fjord had become the boomtown. To the thing in the glass, it was the place the amber-sleepers were waking.

Logi turned his face toward Niðaróss with crafter’s tools, a two-handed spear, a too-warm necklace, and the slightly guilty look of someone who finally has the magic he went looking for.

• Known as: Goliath Warlock (eldjötunn); Fire Giant ancestry; Crafter (Norse).
• Known for: Relic-appraiser who found a spoiled-glass orb in Hedeby and followed its heat to postwar Niðaróss.

• Newly arrived in Niðaróss after wandering the southern trading towns.
• Pact focus is the emberglass necklace-orb; Logi believes the voice inside is an eldjötunn of Múspellsheimr.
• Drawn north by rumors that Fróð Erikson woke from amber and that a public wizard's tower is being planned, and by the postwar market in war-loot and strange relics.

• The eldjötunn in the emberglass orb: unnamed patron; asked to be taken where amber-sleepers are waking and where war-loot is changing hands.
• Master crafter in Hálogaland: unnamed workshop teacher; Logi left to hunt relics.
• Possible later ties in Niðaróss: Fróð Erikson and Isar Geirson (amber, the planned public wizard's tower); mountain goliaths under Tor and Crag Torson (kin by species, not by clan).

• Emberglass orb, worn on a leather cord as a spellcasting focus.
• Spear, wielded in two hands.
• Daggers.
• Alchemist's Supplies.
• Books, ink, parchment, lamp, oil, tinderbox.
• Fire's Burn (Fire Giant ancestry).
• Armor of Shadows.
• Eldritch Blast, True Strike, Hex, Hellish Rebuke.