Vendalis
| Also known as | The keeper of the cliffs |
|---|---|
| Species | Troll |
| Home | Alakyer |
| Status | Alive |
| First appearance | Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened |
Vendalis is a purple troll who lives alone high on Alakyer, Eslura's highest peak, and calls herself the keeper of the cliffs.[1] She pulls Barnaby Britto, Alpin Loomin and Piercio out of a high moon season storm, feeds them, and hands them the orphaned dragon egg that becomes Egras.[1][2]
Appearance
Vendalis is dark purple, squat, and small enough that Barnaby takes her for a shape in a doorway before he can make out any features. Barnaby thinks she looks a little like Nordwelg, though less squat, leaner, and with hair much longer than his, long enough to drag along the ground behind her.[1] She wears glasses. One leg is wrapped in bandages and she gets about her house on a cane, and she mentions having taken a tumble on an ice patch outside.[1][2]
Personality
Vendalis takes strangers in first and asks about them afterwards. She has the door open and the three of them inside before she knows who any of them are, gets the fire built up and blankets out, and only then tells them that guests in her home "cannot remain nameless for more than one cup of tea".[1] Pressed for her own name, she gives all three she answers to, her own, the keeper of the cliffs, and "that purple troll up there in the mountain", and says she fares well with any of them.[1]
She is direct about other people's judgement and incurious about their business. Crossing the mountains in high moon season is a fool's errand and she says so, then shrugs off their refusal to explain themselves with the remark that their doings in the mountain are their own.[1]
She works while other people sleep. Overnight she knits a coat fitted almost perfectly to each of the three, with a hood and sewn-on ear covers for Piercio and a flower pattern for Alpin, along with a scarf and hat for Mauz and a pair of spike-soled boots for Barnaby's webbed feet. Asked how she guessed the colours, she says it was a lucky guess.[2]
Background
Her house is a single-storey building on the mountain, meagre and made smaller by what is in it: knick-knacks and well-worn books strewn across the floor, dried plants, pots, pans and utensils hanging from the wooden ceiling, a fire alcove at the back, a table with mismatched chairs, a chest of woven blankets, and a closed door to the sleeping quarters. Portraits cover nearly every free inch of the walls, painted by Vendalis herself to judge by the easel in the corner: landscapes of the mountain range outside, and trolls of a similar purple to her own, which makes Barnaby wonder whether she has family somewhere in a distant quarter of Eslura. The books do not say whether she has.[1]
A gully lives with her and sleeps on top of whatever is in the room under a blanket.[1] Barnaby later puts the way Egras purrs down to Vendalis's cat, and whether that is the same creature is not established.[3]
The dragons of Eslura hatch in the core of Alakyer, the only place hot enough for them to break their shells. Vendalis found a clutch of eggs outside while scavenging in a lull in the storm, their mother dead on her way back into the mountain. Two of the three eggs were lost. The last she carried home and kept as warm as she could on a wooden pedestal beside her table, under a blanket, knowing it would not be warm enough. It had been trying to hatch for moons by the time the three travellers arrived, and she says she would have taken it to the core herself if her leg had been sound.[1]
Story
Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened
Vendalis sees movement through her window during a high moon season storm, opens her door and shouts the three of them inside before they freeze. She sits them at her table with hot tea and blankets, gets their names, and gives her own.[1]
She then remembers the baby, crosses the room and pulls the blanket off a green-speckled egg standing taller than Barnaby. She explains where it came from, what happened to its mother and its siblings, and what it needs. Barnaby volunteers to take it to the core over Alpin's objection, and Vendalis tells them they are doing a noble deed because dragons are not as common as they used to be.[1]
In the morning she wakes them, hands out the coats and boots she has knitted overnight, and wheels out a makeshift wagon with steel wheels and spikes fastened to them, which she had begun building before her fall. She helps Barnaby lift the egg into it, straps it down over a plush lining, and tells him that at the core he must dump the egg into the lava, because the fire will melt the shell and release the dragon. She gives them the landmarks to follow, a bare pine shaped like a Y, a frozen stream whose bridge is riddled with gopher-sized holes, and a painted wooden sign at the mountain's mouth, then wishes them luck and sends them off.[2]
Her directions run out at the entrance. Three paths lead deeper into the mountain and she had not said which one goes to the core, so the party finds it by wheeling the egg to each in turn and watching how hard it shakes.[2] Vendalis does not appear again.
Relationships
Barnaby Britto is the one who accepts the egg. Vendalis fits him with boots for the ice, and he thanks her for the coats as much as the shelter.[1][2]
Alpin Loomin objects to the whole errand and gets a pink knitted coat with flowers on it, on the grounds that he needed a little more colour and warmth. He knows better than to complain about a gift.[2]
Egras is the dragon inside the egg. Vendalis never sees her hatch.[4]
Behind the scenes
Vendalis appears only in Sacred 2: Flames of the Awakened, and her name is listed only in that book's pronunciation guide, as Ven-dah-liz. No surname is recorded.[5]