Motivation: To outdo all rivals for feats of daring.
Caste: Night
Anima Banner: A ghost-white lion with eyes of warm gold.
Nalla grew up in a potter’s household in Whitewall. Idealistic and aggressive, he fit poorly into his home city’s constricted, humorless mold. After spending a year among the icewalkers, young Nalla joined Whitewall’s guardians. He then spent a decade hunting monsters that ventured too close to the city which taught him fully to despise the brutality and bloodlust of Northern raiders. He Exalted while hunting a Winter Folk noble that had infiltrated Whitewall to stalk and kill its people in the night.
The Syndics sought to retain Nalla’s services after his Exaltation (indeed, they still come to him in dreams to remind him of his origins). However the Bull of the North offered chances for adventure the defense of his home couldn’t match.
Nalla’s new life is bloody and harsh. While he admires the courage and self-reliance of the icewalkers, he never liked their casual cruelty to other folk. Nalla joined Yurgen Kaneko in part because he saw the Bull as championing the admirable aspects of icewalker culture, while curbing and civilizing the icewalkers in other ways.
Now he is one of those raiders, Nalla finds himself divided. Never has the order, peace and prosperity of Whitewall looked better, but he now knows the desperate uncertainty that drives bandits and barbarians—the fear of starvation and cold. The Karnese have become people to him, not merely pawns in a game—and so have their foes. As a result, he wrestles with his own tactics. Where killing barbarians once seemed little more to him than the putting down of mad dogs, it begins to feel like murder.
Nalla looks every inch the Northern warrior-hero. He stands taller than the typical Northerner, with broad shoulders and muscular limbs, and he moves with an easy grace. Wavy blond hair frames a broad, tanned face with bright blue eyes and an expressive mouth that conveys his many moods: from infectious grins and warm smiles to black scowls or the teeth-bared grimace of a berserker’s fury.