Ursk
Holder of the largest dream-range in the Nightwood, which means that a substantial number of people in three realms have met him and do not know it. He enforces the bugbear prohibition on planting false memories, personally and without appeal, and he is the only reason the practice is rare.
In Person
Very large, very still, and mostly asleep. He wakes for guests, which is considered a significant courtesy and takes some minutes, and in the waking he is gentle, slow-spoken, and disconcertingly current on the affairs of people he has never physically met.
Everyone who spends a night in the Deep reports the same three things: that they dreamed clearly, that they were asked something, and that they answered honestly. Nobody agrees afterwards on what the question was.
History
Bugbears do not keep genealogies and Ursk does not discuss his. What is known is that his range has been growing for a very long time — measurably, in the accounts of neighboring holders — and that the growth has not been by conquest. Ranges have simply come to him, one holder at a time, as their own ranges failed or their holders declined to keep them.
The prohibition on planting false memory is older than he is. He did not invent it; he made it enforceable, by being the one range that overlaps everyone else's, and the enforcement has never once been appealed because there is nowhere to appeal to.
Method
Presence, and the fact that everyone within reach sleeps. He does not command, tax, or muster. He knows what his people are afraid of, in detail, nightly, and he intervenes rarely and with enormous precision — a nightmare eased, a warning delivered, an intention noticed early.
This is either the gentlest government ever devised or the most complete surveillance in either realm, and the Nightwood has had two centuries to decide and has not.
Household
The Reach. Not an institution: the ranges that have merged with his, and the holders who now defer. Perhaps eight hundred bugbears live loosely around the Deep.
The Waking Party. His loyal opposition, who hold that dream-range politics cannot answer an army and want ground held, borders drawn, and Hollowgate fortified. The elders call this a category error. The Waking Party call that an answer from someone who is asleep.
The Unmet. Whatever else lives in the deep wood, with which the bugbears have arrangements: routes not taken, seasons not entered, gatherings sited a certain distance from certain places. Ursk deals with them. He will not describe them, and the refusal is the most courteous thing in the province.
Relations
Quietly good with the Spriggans across the unmarked border, and specifically with Grismer, who buys dreamer's-cup in quantity and whose Hollowgate trade the bugbears rely on.
Formally uninvolved with the Great Hunt, which rides the Nightwood's edges and whose outriders have standing orders never to sleep within the treeline — a precaution Ursk is aware of and has described as prudent and mildly insulting.
Reputation
In the Wilds: not feared, exactly. Consulted. A holder in three provinces will say they have never met him and then describe his voice.
In the Kingdom: a monster of the nursery, and the Nightwood is marked empty on the maps, which is the kind of error that comes from never sending anyone back a second time.
Hooks
- The spore-bloom comes and everyone in the province dreams the same scene — the Kingdom's border, from the Kingdom's side. Ursk wants to know who is dreaming it and cannot ask without asking sixty thousand people at once.
- Ursk has not woken for a guest in four months and the Reach is fraying at its edges.
- A Kingdom survey expedition entered the wood eleven days ago under a Chancery writ. The bugbears did not stop them. Ursk would now like them collected, and is being noticeably careful about which route he suggests.
- Somebody is planting false memories. It is being done well, it is being done at range, and the only person who could be doing it at that range is Ursk.
"I have never been to the Nightwood. I could pick his voice out of a crowd."