Erwin
| Home | A cave hole in the drovig tunnels beneath the Kella Desert |
|---|---|
| Weapons | A knife kept under his cloak |
| Status | Burned and fallen from a walkway in Elmryn's Castle; not seen again |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
Erwin is a small, snouted creature who lives in the drovig tunnels under the Kella Desert, guides Reagan Hideaway's party into a cavern and brings the ceiling down on them.[1] He turns up twice more: once in a tavern to enjoy having failed to kill them, and once in Elmryn's Castle to try to take the deterrent Olphin Stone off Reagan at knifepoint, which is the last thing he does.[2][3]
Appearance
Erwin stands no taller than Reagan's kneecaps and gets about hunched over a wooden cane. His snout is over-elongated, his chin russet-coloured, and his ears are saucer-shaped and twitch when he wants them noticed. He wears tiny round spectacles and a tattered cloak that barely conceals a multitude of pouches and trinkets, so that a step forward brings a soft clink of tin and charms from underneath it. Reagan, who has seen elephant shrews at a zoo, thinks of one on sight.[1][2]
He is heavier than he looks. Pinning Reagan down years later, he weighs about what she imagines a wrecking ball weighs, which she notes as her own mistake in having underestimated him for being short.[3] The books never name his species.
Personality
Erwin repeats himself. He closes most of his sentences by saying the last two or three words again, so that "I am called Erwin. Called, yes." is a fair sample of how he talks.[1]
He is smug and he is calm, and the calm does not break. He smirks so quickly on first meeting Reagan that she almost misses it and writes it off as a quirk. Choked against a support beam by Aero Ellisvat, he takes offence at being told he only tried to kill them, says he was sure he had succeeded, and adds that they were "harder to kill than I expected". When the fight around him turns into a brawl he watches it unfold with "that same infuriating calmness".[1][2]
He works for a price and says so out loud, then folds the moment a blade is pointed at his glasses.[1]
Background
Erwin says the drovig tunnels are his home, and shows an indent in the wall with a bed, a few pots and pans and the remains of a fire in it. He calls it quiet, so long as the worm keeps to its nest, and Tabitha Glowdish admits it beats the trash piles she grew up sleeping in.[1]
He knows the tunnels well enough to be useful. Before the rest of the drovigs left he kept red stones from the Heart of the Kella deposit around his cave hole to keep the worms away, having once watched one eat a stone and be violently sick, and he knows where the stones come from.[1]
How long he had been down there, why the other drovigs left, and whose side he is on are not established.
Story
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Tab cornered him in the tunnels with a knife at his chin while the party was hunting the drovig that had swallowed the deterrent stone. He led them to the nest, where they found the worm asleep with at least a dozen babies against her, and offered the red stones as a way to make her sick without killing her. Asked where the stones were, he named a price, and Tab offered instead not to slice the spectacles off his nose.[1]
He took them down a decline and through a narrow opening into a cavern whose every inch was covered in blood-red stones, then backed out of it in small steps, still smirking. "Don't suppose you'll need to know. Don't suppose," he told Tab when she asked where he was going, and then "Tell the gods I said hi. Said hi." He rapped his fist once against the entrance and the ceiling came down, sealing all three of them inside. His cackle was cut off by the collapse.[1]
They got out. He surfaced next on a bar stool at the Avonbourn with his legs crossed in a pretzel, listening to the bartender warn that the Nelazgians have got ears all over these lands now. "Ears is right. Right," he said, and twitched his saucer-shaped ears at the party with a wide smile before telling them he was most shocked to hear voices he thought he had buried. Aero had him by the throat a moment later; a gorilla of the Rewakan, one of the gangs of Varaar, pulled Aero off, and Erwin sat out the rest of the fight massaging his neck.[2]
The last time is in Zybersia. Reagan, alone on the walkway outside the Chamber of the Book of Fire in Elmryn's Castle and half-blinded, was flattened by something that straddled her chest, and recognised the creature from the Avonbourn and before that from the tunnels. "Give me that stone or I'll pop those pretty little eyes out of your skull," he told her, then threatened to make her watch him kill her friend outside, and reached for a knife under his cloak.[3] Fire came out of Reagan's open hand for the first time in her life and threw him backwards, searing away his cloak. He stumbled blindly, swatting at the air, sidestepped off the walkway and fell into the dark below it with the flames trailing after him.[3]
Nobody confirms his death. Aero's only later reference to him is a warning to Reagan not to stumble off the walkway the way Erwin did.[4]
How he got in
Reagan works over the question rather than answering it. She had felt nobody following her through the abandoned city, and heard and saw nobody, so either he had been waiting in the room for her to arrive or he had got into the castle from somewhere else.[4] Looking down off the platform she found a rope hanging into a hole about the size of a semi-truck, and a chalk map on the walls whose lines all ran back to the Sacred City with Zybersia marked entry point. The lines were tunnels, and the Nelazgians were digging under Eslura.[4]
The books do not state that Erwin came up that shaft, or that he is a Nelazgian at all. What they put next to each other is his answer to a remark about Nelazgian ears, his knowledge of a tunnel network, and his appearance in a locked room above one.[2][4]