The Olphin Survivors
| Type | Hidden community |
|---|---|
| Leader | Ofie, the camp's elder, and afterwards Barnaby Britto |
| Headquarters | A camp inside the walls of Morgaedion |
| Notable members | Olphins |
| Status | Left the prison to march on the Nelazgians |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
The Olphin Survivors are the Olphins who hid inside the walls of Morgaedion when the Nelazgians raided the prison island and forced the rest of their people into the Nelazgian army.[1] The books give the group no name of its own: The Olphin Survivors is this wiki's title for them, not one used in Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened. They were still in the walls when Barnaby Britto walked into the prison, and they came out of them behind him.[1][2]
The camp
The camp lies behind a section of prison wall that swings open as a secret door. The passage through it is narrow, barely large enough for Barnaby to squeeze through, and far too small for the dragon Egras, who put her head halfway in, worked out that the rest of her would not follow, and sat down outside to wait.[1]
Inside, the air is thick with rot, cold and wet stone, and the light of about a dozen lanterns strewn about the encampment. Barricades of broken furniture and torn cloth stand between the sleeping places, and the whole space has a single exit.[1]
Who cut the passage, when the Olphins first got into it, and how long they had been living there are not recorded.
Condition
They looked to Barnaby more like husks than Olphins: clothes little more than scraps clinging to bone-thin bodies, filthy hair hanging in tangled knots, faces hollowed by many moons without food, and every one of them missing some variation of limbs or fins.[1] Mavis says the missing fins were Obellius Kalaar's way of punishing them, that none of them ever worked out what they might have done to avoid his blade, and that she counts herself one of the lucky ones because it was only her fin.[1]
None of them has a toad. An Olphin toad bonds with one Olphin one time and never again, and Mavis says the toads left when Obellius put the Olphins under, because they no longer recognised the people they had bonded to.[1]
Their memory of what put them in the prison is exact. Ofie says she would not forget the name of any of the four Rulers who pushed to have her people locked away in these halls "for crimes we hadn't committed", and glares at Alpin Loomin as though he had a hand in it.[1]
Members
The books never count the camp. It is described as a cluster of gaunt figures, and a dozen more Olphins walk out of it behind Mavis at the end.[1][2] Three are named. Several others speak without being named: a middle-aged woman who blames Mavis for the intrusion, and a navy-finned man who asks whether Barnaby is a Nelazgian pawn sent to weasel them out of hiding. A young boy stands behind Mavis clutching a toad plushie almost black with dirt.[1]
Mavis is a young Olphin girl about Barnaby's age, brown-skinned, with one brown pectoral fin and a healed-over stump where the other was. She is the one who keeps watch on the corridor through a gap in the stonework, against the camp's wishes, and the one who brings Barnaby's party in.[1]
Ofie is the camp's elder, wobbling on a cane with a lantern in her hand and speaking for the rest. She has no article. Her first instinct is that Mavis has brought the enemy into their home, and her last act in the prison is to hand Barnaby a spear.[1][2]
Monagan is the only one of them who leaves the walls. He has no article either. His wife, unnamed, is heavily pregnant and is the one who works out where he has gone.[1]
Life inside the walls
The camp sends out one forager and no more. The rule was settled between them when the Nelazgians first took up base on the island, on the reasoning that they could not risk heading out in droves, and it had not been revisited since.[1] Monagan is that forager, and a night's sleep is normally the longest he is gone.[1]
They had seen nobody at all since the first raid, and their view of the outside was Mavis's hole in the wall. Ofie's position was that if Monagan did not come back there was nothing to be done, because leaving with no direction would only strand them wherever he was or walk them until their feet gave in.[1] Piercio asked whether that meant starving rather than looking, and got the answer that they had no other choice.[1]
Barnaby's arrival
Piercio heard a stone roll behind a wall in a prison corridor and would not let it go. Barnaby found a gap in the stonework at eye level, put his face to it, and met another eye looking back. The voice behind it wanted to know only whether they were Nelazgians. When Barnaby listed everyone with him, the wall shook and slid open, and Mavis walked out of the shadows with "Hello, my name is Mavis".[3]
Barnaby's party had come to Morgaedion looking for Lumikki Otsby, and the camp could not help. Mavis had seen the Sacred Ruler once through her hole, straight after the raid, and remembered her robe and nothing else. Monagan had seen more, and Monagan was two sleeps overdue.[1]
Monagan and Relagatra
Monagan's wife named what had happened before anyone else would. Relagatra, the giant spider of the prison, had been fed by the Sacred Guard as a matter of duty, the Guard were all dead, and she could be heard crawling the corridors at night.[1] Barnaby volunteered to go after him, refused both Alpin's and Piercio's company, took Ofie's spear and went with Egras instead.[1]
He found Monagan cocooned near the ceiling of a cavern and cut him out from the dragon's back while Relagatra was busy with the spear he had put in her. Monagan sobbed into his wife's arms on the way back into camp and said "it should have just eaten me".[4][2] Ofie called one spear a fair trade for his safe return.[2]
Leaving
Monagan repaid the rescue by leading the party down to the ground block and showing them the hole a Nelazgian had pushed Lumikki into, a jagged shaft in the floor with the tip of a wooden ladder poking out of it. A gully found Barnaby on the same walkway with a letter from Pemadee saying that Ovallia had been invaded.[2]
Alpin's objection to going down after them was arithmetic: a baby dragon, a mouse, a gopher and an Olphin were not an army. Mavis answered it by walking out of the shadows with a dozen more Olphins behind her, Ofie among them, carrying pieces of broken pipe, shards of glass and jagged spears. She told Barnaby that they had done their thinking, that hiding from their problems had never worked out anyway, and that "It's about time we left this place".[2]
Ofie offered him a second spear with the words "And every band needs a strong leader", and Barnaby, who had never thought of himself as the leading or the fighting type, took it and started down the ladder with the camp behind him.[2] That is the last the books show of them.