Nindra
| Species | Eslurian |
|---|---|
| Title | Primarch of the Academy |
| Home | The Sacred City |
| Status | Alive |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
Nindra is a girl of the Sacred City and Primarch of its academy, chosen for the role by a vote of her own class.[1] She is the first person to teach Beatrice Tidal anything useful about controlling her powers, and she does it with a wad of foul-smelling fluff and an instruction to breathe.[1]
Appearance
Nindra is about Bea's age, with silver-beaded dreads that hang down to her knees and green eyes with specks of blue mixed into them.[1]
Personality
Nindra is blunt and unembarrassed about it. Her opening assessment of the new Sacred Head of Eslura, delivered minutes after meeting her, was that she needed help, big-time help.[1] When Bea's hands started throwing sparks into the grass, she stamped the fire out with her foot and said the point was proven.[1]
She is also the only person in the city who treats Bea as a person with a problem rather than as a title. She explained herself plainly: "I had someone help me when I was down on myself, and I want to help you", and added that none of them would survive the coming war with a Head who could not keep her head on her shoulders.[1] She talks about her own position without self-pity and without pretending it is easy: "The whole academy looks up to me in a role I don't want or didn't ask for."[1]
Her steadying is physical and wordless as often as not: a hand cupped on a shoulder, a nod, and the single instruction to breathe.[2]
Background
Nindra grew up in the Sacred City with a father who woke her with Sniffysno when she was late for the academy, which is how she came to be carrying a wad of it.[1]
She was chosen Primarch by her classmates. The role normally belongs in the gift of the Sacred Head, and with the seat empty the class held a vote: "Normally the Sacred Head chooses them, but since we didn't have you at the time, we did a vote."[1] She describes it as the most important role at the academy and says they do not just choose anyone, and in the same breath that she never wanted it and that the workload has buried the things that used to make her happy.[1]
The Academy
By Nindra's account the Sacred City once had the best academy in the entire world, that one was destroyed in the War of Shadows, and the academy standing now is a replacement: "It's not the best, but we are working on building it even better than before!"[1] Its library is a small room in a half-destroyed building, though most of the books were saved from ruin, and Nindra goes and sits in it when she is overwhelmed.[1]
Being Primarch carries the key to the forbidden books section, which is where she read what she knows about the Eyearke Stone: that the legends hold it to be the only true connection to Eslura and her powers.[1]
Book 2 is not consistent about the state of the city around this academy. In Chapter 9 Bea thinks of herself and Alistair Archibald as wandering around "an abandoned city", and Chapter 5 shows the place as a field of rubble with a dozen or more tents pitched in a courtyard.[3][4] In Chapter 17 Nindra describes a working academy with classes, a class vote, a library and a Primarch.[1] Neither passage acknowledges the other, and where the academy stands in relation to the ruins is not said.
Story
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Nindra watched Bea destroy the city's last surviving mural with a burst of water, and followed her back to the ruined castle because of it.[1] When the castle came apart around Bea and she went through a window into the gardens, Nindra was the one who found her lying on the mossy marble and woke her by holding a wad of Sniffysno under her nose, which she cheerfully described as "Probably about the nastiest thing you'll ever smell in your entire life."[1]
She sat with Bea in the garden while Bea's temper turned to sparks, put the fire out, and told her that her emotions were all over the place and that it made her powers hard to control.[1] Then she gave her what she had: take a moment and a couple of deep breaths, and find a place to go to in your head when there is nowhere to go. She used her own library as the example.[1]
Finally she asked Bea to try something with the stone around her neck: "Hold it, breathe, and think of your happy place."[1] Bea did, and the memory of her mother gave way to a vision of herself standing over kneeling friends in the ruins of the Sacred City with Obellius Kalaar at her shoulder. She came out of it soaked with sweat, with a small gold crack splintered across the Eyearke Stone in her hand.[1][2]
Nindra could not wake her while it lasted, and said so when she came round: "I tried shaking you. You were out cold." She asked what Bea had seen, took the refusal without pushing, and asked only whether it had shown her anything useful.[2] Told that Bea wanted to go back to the mural and did not know the way, she answered, "Good thing you've got me", and led her into the square.[2]
There the townsfolk turned on Bea, and a man named Bray asked why anyone should trust her not to make it worse. Nindra put a hand on her shoulder and whispered to ignore him and breathe. Bea rebuilt the mural out of grass and vine, a five-fold symbol grown through the hole with gold petals opening across it, and Alistair Archibald judged the new one better than the original.[2]
Nindra was still at her shoulder afterwards, when Lumikki Otsby arrived and told Bea she believed she had met her mother in a cell at Veskadoth. Bea's hands shook and her thoughts scattered, and a hand on her shoulder and a nod from Nindra were what slowed her heartbeat enough to ask where.[2]
Relationships
Beatrice Tidal is the Sacred Head Nindra follows across a ruined city to help, and by the end of the second novel is a friend. Bea's own thought is that the last thing she needed was a stranger lecturing her about her feelings, and Nindra's method works anyway.[1][2]
Her father is mentioned once, as the person who used to wake her for the academy with Sniffysno. Nothing else about her family is recorded.[1]
Behind the scenes
Nindra appears in Book 2's pronunciation guide, which gives Nin-druh, and not in Book 1's.[5]
Sniffysno is named only through Nindra, and whether it is a plant, a preparation or something else is not established.[1]