Nicky was born in the high northern wood, Veena-born, under the moon of Llymlaen the Navigator, who watches the seas. A strange mark for a child of the mountains: the sea-goddess's moon on a boy who would never settle near water.
The Veena keep to their groves and their old ways, and their sons keep to the shadows. A male Viera is raised apart, sworn to warden one patch of forest, alone, more or less forever. So when Nicky left, no one was surprised. What he did with it surprised everyone. He took the warden's lonely road and walked it the wrong way: past the borders he was sworn to guard, out into the realm, turning a life sentenced to solitude into one spent gathering people.
Where the wood asked him to stay, Oschon the Wanderer asked him to walk, and the Wanderer won. His first steps out of the wood carried him, of all places, to the harbor of Limsa Lominsa, the sea-city of the very goddess whose moon he was born under, and he wore the Maelstrom's colors for a season. But water was never going to keep him. He took up the lance and turned his eyes to the mountains, and there he learned the things a lancer is not supposed to learn: how to take a height instead of fleeing it, how to fall on purpose and land like he meant it. He has never called himself a dragoon. That title belongs to an order that never sent for him. He simply learned the leap, and kept it. Somewhere on the Coerthan roads, after the long cold of the Dragonsong War had broken, a meerkat began following him and simply never stopped.
These days he carries three things: a lance he rarely needs, a deck he reads by candlelight, and a standing invitation. He wears his colors where everyone can see them, and he has never once apologized for it.
