Content warning
This article documents a state-level figure’s role in atrocity committed during a psychotic break, the Imperial cabinet’s coverup of that role at the cost of his goddaughter’s grief and mental health, his decades-long knowledge of her self-injury, and the slow private reckoning he carried for the rest of his life. References The Night of the Veil and What Kara Carried, both of which carry their own content warnings.
A note on fiction
Like every page on this wiki, the article is fiction set within the lore of Landfall. The character is played by a real person; the player is not the character. Acts attributed to Nordvik, including the events of the post-Veil week, are not statements about the views, values, or real-life behavior of the player behind the role.
Overview
Nordvik Alvaldi was a statesman of Saludo, a descendant of Robert Alvaldi, co-sovereign of The Second Lilaris Empire alongside Empress Kara A. Ehrveil, elder brother to the itinerant knight Amlooi Alvaldi, and one of the principal political architects of the late imperial period. The official record of his reign emphasizes his commitment to ecological balance, the preservation of Saludo’s animist traditions, and his meticulous attention to the Empire’s legal framework. The private record, which has emerged only since his correspondence was released, is considerably more complicated.
He carried, across his adult life, three forms of weight the official record did not engage. The first was his decades-long knowledge of Kara’s chronic self-injury, which began in her adolescence under his co-rule and which he kept on her behalf at the cost of being the only person in her life who knew and could not act. The second was his role in the destruction that followed The Night of the Veil, during which he set explosive charges at specific Larrist sites in a state of psychotic dissociation he later recalled only in fragments. The third was the Imperial cabinet’s coverup of that role, accepted by him in silence, and the foreshortening of Kara’s mourning that was the price of it.
Background
Saludo
Nordvik inherited Saludo from his predecessors and ruled it for years before the broader Imperial project. His governance there is the part of the public record that holds up cleanly: ecological reforms, the codification of animist traditions, the careful management of his duchy’s diplomatic relations with New Ides under Isaac Acentino and with the broader Ehrengard Empire. He was, in this period, widely respected. He has been described in later academic accounts as the most administratively gifted regional sovereign of his generation, though one of these accounts had access to the private record yet.
Brother to Amlooi
Nordvik’s relationship to his brother Amlooi Alvaldi is the part of his family record that the wiki’s later accounts have read as more complex than either of them admitted in public. Amlooi’s diary describes their bloodline as having “disowned” him “the moment he could walk,” and identifies the dark-eyed, white-haired figure who named him Loki with the broader pattern of family rejection that defined his childhood. Nordvik’s surviving correspondence on the subject is sparse. He does not, in any letter recovered, describe Amlooi as a brother. He does, in two private letters to Kara across the years, refer to him as “the man who shares my blood and not my name.”
Whether the estrangement was Nordvik’s choice or his family’s, and whether he later regretted it, is the question Amlooi’s death at Seraphine’s hands late in the epoch made impossible to answer. By the time the brothers might have reconciled, the elder was dead.
Co-Rule with Kara
When Kara inherited the throne as a sixteen-year-old in the aftermath of Avery’s assassination, Nordvik became her co-sovereign rather than her regent. The arrangement worked because the two trusted each other. Nordvik handled the day-to-day public business while Kara grew into the role, and the two of them eventually merged the surviving remnants of the Ehrengard Empire with the failing state of Saludo into the joint polity that became The Second Lilaris Empire. He was the older voice in her life. He was also, on the available evidence, the closest thing she had to a parent in her adult years, given the death of Avery and the trajectory of Isaac.
What He Carried
Knowledge of Kara’s Practice
Nordvik knew earliest, from Kara’s adolescence under his co-rule, about the practice she would carry across the whole of her reign. He had been the one to find her the first time. He had arranged the standing relationship with the household physician that produced the only contemporaneous medical record of the practice and that allowed it to be treated when treatment was needed. He kept the secret on the grounds that Kara had asked him to keep it and the alternative was a public discovery that would have ended her reign before it began.
He kept it for the rest of his life. He spoke to her about it on the order of a few times a year and not more, because she preferred it that way and because he had agreed. He found her, in one of the years between the worst of it and the better stretches, in a state that required calling the physician at three in the morning. The household physician’s correspondence with the Provincial archive records the call. Nordvik wrote nothing about that night himself. His silences, in the recovered material, were often where the heaviest things sat.
The Week of the Veil
In the week following The Night of the Veil, Nordvik held governance during Kara’s mourning period and was, simultaneously, undergoing what his household physician later described as the worst psychotic break of his adult life. The content of the break was Seraphine du Roscarte. Through the week he was heard repeatedly speaking of “the quartz lady,” her whispers, and the ideas she was, in his words, giving him.
He was not in his right mind. He was also, in those hours, present at several of the southern detonations that destroyed Larrist sites in the week after the assassinations. He set the charges himself at specific sites: Isaac’s wine cellar at Nouveaux Ides, the mansion his own brother had been given by the Larrist regime, the chapel where Amlooi had received the numbered bread “22.” The fuller account of what he did, what the Bureau reconstructed afterward, and what he himself remembered (and did not remember) is in The Night of the Veil.
The detail that returned to him for the rest of his life, by his own later account given under household care, was a single image: a doorway whose frame was on fire and a small shoe on the ground at the threshold. He did not know whose shoe it was. He did not investigate. He did not ask.
The Coverup
Nordvik did not initiate the coverup of his role in the destruction, but he did accept it. The Imperial cabinet, in the days after the explosions ended, suppressed the connection between Nordvik and the sites he had personally triggered, on the grounds that public knowledge would have ended his standing and destabilized the Empire’s already-fragile management of the Idesian transition. The Bureau of Religious Oversight was instructed to keep its findings sealed until the regent’s recovery had stabilized. The Bureau complied.
The cabinet shortened Kara’s mourning period to weeks, against the standard imperial protocol of several months, on the public rationale of the Idesian Accord’s urgency. The internal rationale, recorded in private correspondence later released, was that the longer Kara’s mourning ran, the closer the public came to noticing Nordvik’s absences during the week of the explosions. Ending the mourning early meant Kara back in public, Nordvik in formal retirement to private chambers, and the chronological proximity of the regent’s presence to the southern detonations dissolved by ordinary news cycles.
Kara returned to public life on schedule. The relapse the foreshortened mourning drove in her is documented separately. Nordvik was not the architect of this arrangement. He was, however, its beneficiary. He did not refuse it. He did not insist on the disclosure that would have ended his standing and given Kara the time. The acceptance of the coverup, weighed against the years he had spent keeping Kara’s own private record on her behalf, is the part of his moral biography that the surviving correspondence fails to resolve.
The Pattern Recognized
In the later years Nordvik returned, in private writing, to what he came to call “the same shape.” The pattern of protective concealment he had volunteered for around Kara’s adolescence and the pattern of protective concealment the cabinet built around his post-Veil week were, in his reading, the same act in two configurations. Both protected a position. Both required the silence of the protected party. Both placed the cost of the silence on someone else who was not consulted.
Late in his life he wrote a letter to Kara that he addressed but never sent. It was recovered from his papers and contains the clearest articulation of the carrying he ever produced:
I have been kept from the consequences of what I did during the worst week of my life by the same instinct you asked me to use, when you were sixteen, to keep you from the consequences of your own. I do not know whether one excuses the other or whether they cancel out and leave both of us further in debt. I think it is the second. But... I am not certain it is the second. The uncertainty is part of what I have kept. What I am certain of is that you are both my chosen family and my obligation, and I would not trade either fact for all of the beauty our divine Ivory Reaches bestows upon us daily, nor the coin Roscarte produces the empire. I am forever grateful for both the grace our arrangement has afforded us, and the relationship underwriting it that I have leaned on every day of my life since meeting you.
Other Public Roles
Governance During the Mourning
Beyond the coverup, Nordvik’s formal governance during Kara’s mourning was unremarkable in its public-facing decisions. He signed the Idesian Accord. He continued the day-to-day administration. He attended the formal occasions Kara could not attend. The public read his stewardship of that period as steady and capable. The public was not informed of the state of mind he was steady and capable from.
The Constitution
Late in Kara’s reign, Nordvik and Kara jointly drafted The Constitution of the United Provinces of Lilaris at Dominion Hall. The conversion of the Empire into a democratic republic was their joint work. The Twin Thrones became ceremonial offices held by the Scions of House Ehrveil and House Alvaldi. Nordvik continued in his ceremonial Throne after ratification until The Blaze forced both Thrones into hiding.
What he did not know, at the time of the drafting, was that Kara had embedded X-Seven into the Constitution itself. Whether Nordvik would have signed the document had he known is one of the open questions of the Republic’s founding. He never publicly addressed the unit during his lifetime. The recovered correspondence does not engage it directly. The omission is consistent with his pattern.
Personal Life
Nordvik was, by every account, careful, deliberate, and difficult to know well. He did not marry. He maintained a small private circle that did not overlap with his public life. His correspondence with Kara is the longest sustained record of an Alvaldi-Ehrveil bond on either side of the throne and is, on the available evidence, the closest thing to a true family relationship either of them had in adulthood.
Sources
- The Night of the Veil (his role in the post-Veil destruction and the cabinet’s coverup)
- What Kara Carried (his decades-long knowledge of Kara’s self-injury and his role as the keeper of her secret)
- Amlooi’s Diary (his brother’s first-person account, including the entries naming “the brother of my great lord” who set charges during the psychotic break)
- The Roscarte Coup (background on Seraphine, whose figure later became the content of Nordvik’s break)
- The Constitution of the United Provinces of Lilaris (his co-drafting of the document, and the X-Seven clause he is not known to have read)