Characters – Fenris

Before the mandibles and the crimson mist, Batu Arnesen was Senior Blackcoat of Xing Hong. He trained recruits in blade work, ran security details, and mentored a young officer named Haylen Shih. When Fenris forces overran his team near Olympus Mons in 2288, Batu watched his squad get torn apart. Then he did the math.

He offered Skarn his expertise instead of his corpse. The Primarch, impressed by such cold pragmatism, accepted. Now Batu hunts high-value targets across the Seven Realms, his curved blade dripping with Eclipse energy. No ideology drives him. No delusions of Fenris glory. Just the simple logic that living as a monster beats dying as a hero.

To Skarn, Sigrun Fjeld is an obsession spanning eleven years. To Batu, she’s legendary prey worth a hefty reward. But his thoughts drift more often to Haylen, still serving in Xing Hong, still wearing the Blackcoat uniform he once wore. He tells himself he wants to convert her to the Horde. The truth might be softer than a Draug should admit.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 1

Sven Solheim was born into Nordic opulence, a talented psion attending Jotunheim Institute with every advantage wealth could buy. He was handsome. He was brilliant. And when the Third Princess of House Fjeld rejected his advances and fled their date, something inside him broke in a way that would reshape the Seven Realms.

He took the Nucleus Virus willingly, merging with his teacher and lover Ysolde in a ritual that birthed the first Draugs. What emerged stood five meters tall, skull-faced and monstrous, with five tentacles where manhood once was. He named himself Skarn and built the Fenris Horde to claim what he believes was always his.

Eleven years later, Sigrun Fjeld remains free. She haunts his every conquest, the absence at the center of his empire. He commands armies. He breaks worlds. The Imperium’s cybernetic enhancements make him nearly unkillable. Yet he measures victory only in how close it brings him to her.

Queen Maren feeds his obsession with intelligence and promises, keeping her monster on a leash he doesn’t realize he’s wearing. Whether Skarn will ever see the strings remains the Nordic Commonwealth’s darkest question.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 1

At Stanford, Ysolde was the most desired graduate student on campus. Seventeen confirmed lovers in three years. As visiting scholar at Jotunheim Institute, she co-led the Sons of Ymir alongside Sven Solheim, preaching Nordic supremacy to eager young believers. When the Nucleus Virus arrived, she didn’t flee or fight. She drank it willingly, then spread it through an orgy with her followers.

The transformation made her the first Elder Draug and Great Mother of the Fenris Horde. It amplified everything she already was: the hunger, the ambition, the need to possess. Now she collects “worthy” men from across the Seven Realms, keeping them as trophies. Many come willingly, preferring beautiful slavery to impoverished freedom. She knows Skarn only keeps her close because he cannot have Sigrun. She accepts this arrangement. It grants her authority, resources, and access to pleasures that would break lesser beings.

Lately, though, something has shifted. She watches Marcus Thorne with an interest that goes beyond appetite. The Stalwart’s faith and discipline remind her of things she discarded long ago. Skarn has noticed. It makes him nervous when his favorite playmate develops new fixations.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 1

Phobos Station held Mars’s worst. Ragnar was kept in maximum isolation after devouring seventeen inmates over three years. When the Fenris Horde raided the prison in 2291, guards found him gnawing his own fingers to the bone, having survived two weeks without food. Other prisoners begged for mercy or tried to flee. Ragnar asked one question: “Can I eat them?”

Skarn said yes. The transformation didn’t change Ragnar. It completed him. Multiple rows of teeth that regenerate within hours. Acidic saliva that dissolves bone. A secondary stomach that processes things no human body should. Where other Draugs spread the virus through violence or violation, Ragnar spreads it through consumption. He swallows commanders whole mid-battle, healing his wounds by digesting enemies alive. Psions are his favorite. Their Aether “seasons the meat,” he says.

He holds no territory. Builds nothing. Skarn simply points him at whatever needs breaking, and Ragnar breaks it. His only longer conversations happen with Lokki, who studies his unique biology, and strangely, with children. He never touches them. “Not ripe,” he explains, as if that makes any sense at all.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 2

Professor Lokki taught one lesson at Jotunheim Institute: choice is an illusion, and everything reduces to breeding and feeding. His student Sigrun spent three semesters arguing against him. She believed humans could transcend their base instincts. He found her conviction charming. He also found excuses to keep her after class, to let his gaze linger, to frame propositions as “research opportunities.”

The Fenris outbreak gave him the chance to prove his philosophy right. His masterpiece, the Vöxtr breeding machine, now pumps out Radi-Mon spawn by the thousands. Women are harvested, connected, used until their bodies give out. Each one validates his thesis.

As an Elder Draug, Lokki still lectures. To captured scientists. To fresh converts. To anyone strapped down long enough to listen. His favorite topic remains unchanged: Miss Fjeld, who fled Europa screaming about dignity and choice, now survives on Mars by selling her body and killing for coin. “Just another beast,” he tells his audiences, “pretending to be human.”

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 2

Before she became what she is now, Brynhild Fjeld was the heir apparent to the Nordic Commonwealth. The eldest of Maren’s four daughters. Sigrun’s big sister—the one who pushed her on swings while Sigrun pushed her wheelchair through Europa Station’s corridors.

Paraplegia took her legs young. Infertility took her future. The blue pendant meant for the eldest heir stayed around her neck, but Maren’s eyes drifted toward Dagny, toward Sigrun—daughters whose bodies worked as bloodlines demanded. Bryn watched her birthright slip away one medical report at a time.

In 2285, after Sigrun fled and Dagny rebelled, Bryn volunteered for Draug conversion. A dutiful daughter proving her worth the only way left. Maren demanded the process remain dignified. Skarn agreed. Under Lokki’s surgery, a symbiote was grafted directly into her most intimate place—filling her womb, her canal, feeding continuously on what her body produces. In exchange: no more sleep, no more weakness, her flesh rejuvenated to eternal twenty-five. The creature coils around her hips and carries her through air and void, freeing her from the chair that once confined her. She drifts now, gowns trailing, beautiful and hollow.

She and the symbiote share one mind. It protects her fiercely. Those who displease her find its jaws at their throat. Yet beneath the arrogance, beneath the imperial bearing, something remains trapped—a woman who never knew love, whose body was taken before she could offer it to anyone. The symbiote feeds on her isolation. What might cure her, no one in the Fenris Horde suspects.

Of all the enemies she has faced, only one Covenant Stalwart has ever held her gaze without flinching. She tells herself she wants to kill him. She is lying to herself.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 2

Sixty years as a Leased Lily in the lawless stations of Uranus. Every admiral, CEO, and minister who visited her bed left behind secrets they thought would stay buried. By the time Maren arrived on Europa with forged genealogy and purchased testimony, no one dared question her claim to House Solheim’s vacant throne.

She has birthed daughters through various consorts, including her own brothers. House Fjeld’s tradition demands genetic purity, and Maren has never let squeamishness interfere with dynasty-building. Four daughters used to serve her purposes: the first obeyed, the second rebeled before the Breeding Machine could ruin her. The third, Sigrun, fled at eighteen rather than become another broodmare for Maren’s ambitions. The fourth vanished before Maren could reach her.

The Fenris Horde was her masterstroke. In 2283, she fed the Nucleus Virus to Sven Solheim, knowing his obsession with Sigrun would make him the perfect weapon: terrifying enough to cow the Commonwealth into submission, controllable through promises of eventual delivery. Three major powers refuse to intervene because their leaders still fear what Maren knows about them. She keeps Skarn leashed with intelligence and patience while her beauty, preserved through black-market treatments funded by national treasuries, reminds everyone that time itself bends to her will.

What she actually wants remains unclear. Perhaps all of Nordic space. Perhaps something larger. Perhaps power is simply its own purpose, and control its own reward.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 3

The Covenant’s most promising xenobiologist, until her research crossed lines the church couldn’t forgive. When Zori’s algorithms flagged her work as “spiritually hazardous,” Kathrin faced a choice: recant and return to acceptable medicine, or continue alone. She chose knowledge. She always chooses knowledge.

In 2287, she traveled to Europa under false credentials. She didn’t stumble into Fenris territory by accident. She sought them out, offering her expertise in exchange for the ultimate experiment: herself as subject, the Nucleus Virus as catalyst. The transformation was the final thesis written in her own flesh.

Now she oversees Vöxtr optimization for Skarn, studies why certain captives produce stronger offspring, and has developed a unique diagnostic technique. A drop of blood reveals disease. Breast milk shows stress markers. Semen tells her everything: fertility, psionic potential, psychological vulnerabilities. She bathes in it, drinks it, catalogs humanity’s genetic potential one sample at a time. Between sessions, she still maintains her leather-bound journal of rare herbs and biological specimens. Old habits from her Covenant days. The scientist never quite dies, even in monsters.

She’ll offer you tea while discussing breeding optimization. Her aristocratic Welsh accent makes atrocities sound like university lectures.

First appearance: Nucleus Volume 4