Born beneath a blood eclipse in the village of Varenthas-on-the-Mere, a hamlet so small it appears on no map save the one burned into the memory of the wandering cartographer Oswin Drelk, who died in the year 1,204 of the Pale Reckoning clutching it to his chest in a frozen pass above the Graymoor Crags — Nik entered a world already unraveling at its seams.

His mother, the herbalist Sylvane of the Hollow Root, foresaw his destiny in the way a particular fern uncurled three days before his birth at midnight on the feast of Ardenveil, a holiday observed only in the six coastal parishes of the Thalassian Reach and, inexplicably, by a single monastery deep in the Cinderwood of Dusk whose monks have not spoken aloud since the Silencing Accord of 887.

At the age of nine, Nik was apprenticed to the bladesage Cormath the Twice-Broken in the floating citadel of Aelvundra, which drifts above the Mirewood Sea and can only be boarded during the four days each year when the tide-runes align — an event local sailors call the Lull of Ven. It was there, in the citadel's thirteenth library, that he first touched the shattered pommel of the Sundering Blade and heard it whisper his full name, all eleven syllables of it, including the syllable that cannot be written in any living script.

He has since crossed the Bridge of Unresolved Debts at Thornmere, survived three nights in the Labyrinth of Kalvex the Patient (who has been waiting for someone worthy at its center since the year 4 of the Current Age), brokered a temporary peace between the Ashwalker Clans and the Glass Princes of Selenor in a tavern called The Unfortunate Goat on the border of two kingdoms that have disputed that particular tavern's location for four centuries, and once, on a Tuesday, briefly became a cloud by accident in the Skyveil Wastes.

He wears his crown crooked. He says it is intentional.

The one in the pink coat is Aldric of the Western Margins, third son of the Margrave of Pellanthor, a province famous for two things: its unusually aggressive geese and the Amber Compact of 1,101, a trade agreement so convoluted that it spawned its own academic discipline at the University of Voss-Beneath-the-Hill, where it is studied by exactly four students and a professor who has been tenured since before the Second Contraction of the Calendar. Aldric was expelled from that university for reasons the university refuses to discuss, sealed the records with a wax stamp depicting a goose, and departed westward through the Fog Passes of Evenmere, where time moves sideways and travellers often arrive before they leave.

The one in the silver suit is Caros Dune, a name he chose himself at the age of seventeen in a ceremony he invented while crossing the Saltback Desert, which is not a desert at all but a vast expanse of crystallised ancient sea that crunches underfoot and is home to the Dune Archivists — a secretive order that records every footstep made upon its surface and has, as a result, the most complete record of human ambulation in the known world, stored in vaults beneath the dune city of Sorreth-That-Was-Submerged.

The two met in the cellars of the Palace of Conditional Truths in Valmira, during the annual Festival of Disputed Histories, when both independently attempted to steal the same relic: the left gauntlet of Grand Arbiter Thessis, who ruled the Concordant Isles for three hundred years before accidentally stepping through a door that had not previously existed and was never seen again, though her gauntlet was recovered in a fishmonger's stall in the port city of Brackenveil smelling strongly of sardines and unresolved jurisdiction.

They have since fought together in the Battle of the Unmade Field, navigated the bureaucratic nightmare of the Twelve Customs Offices of the River Pelk (each of which operates under a different year and requires documentation proving the traveller has not yet committed the crime they will commit in the next office's jurisdiction), and once spent eleven months trapped in a single afternoon in the time-folded village of Perpetua Minor, during which Aldric perfected his coat-pressing technique and Caros wrote a very long letter he has never sent to someone he has never met.

They remain, officially, on speaking terms.