Moaro Niyaanou

• Lexicon: among orcs, stories are braided rather than written. Each tale is a braided cord on which engraved beads are strung according to a precise code. A clan's Braids form its library, and the Great Braid gathers the memory of all. A Teller is one who knows how to read them.

Moaro Niyaanou, the Teller's Son

His mother was a Teller, and every evening she read him the clan's Braids, bead after bead. She died too soon to teach him. Moaro should have followed her path, but every knot brought her passing back to him, and he never found the courage to learn. Tradition demanded that her Braids return to the Great Braid. He kept them. The clan loved him, and banished him. On the road, he made his body a weapon in a human temple, without ever looking for a god there. Every day he still tells his mother's Braids, and recovers only fragments.

Describe him

He is massive, even for an orc, and his hands would put a blacksmith to shame. Yet he moves with a grace no one expects from such a frame, and every gesture is slow and measured, as if he were afraid of breaking something. Freezing wind and midday sun alike seem to slide right off him. When you speak to him, he never interrupts. He even waits a little after you've finished, in case the silence still has something to say.

Play him

Speak softly, and leave silences. Listen more than you answer. Let his gaze linger on a bird, the sound of water, a distant conversation. Morning and evening, have him run his Braids through his fingers, slowly, focused, like someone searching for a forgotten word, and at the last bead, always have him smile. If a player shows him a stray bead, have him hold it for a long time without a word, then ask where it was found. Remember that in these beads, he is searching less for the stories than for the voice that used to tell them.

What he says (rarely)

"Listen. No, not to me. To everything else."
"My mother read this one in a single night. I'm on the third bead."
(rolling a bead between his fingers, smiling) "This one, I think it's a wedding. Or a war."