First appearance: Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG · watch it on YouTube
Grimnar Stormclaw is a towering white werebear, played by Mudcat. He serves the Grandmaster as one of the Knights of the Void at The Dread Fortress, and he lets the chaos storm strike his hand with lightning as a form of prayer. He is huge, earnest and deeply religious about chaos. Sent with Muffy and Nehebka to hunt down a growing darkness at the edge of The Void, he finds a fragment of The Shadow King and a crisis of faith to go with it.
Story
Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG
We first meet Grimnar wedged into a small candlelit office deep in the Dread Fortress, too tall for the doorway and too big for the table, arguing with his brother. The brother had followed him to the fortress and now studies magic under The Arbiter. He bristles at being told that “taking this shape is not our way.” Grimnar can’t understand it and offers the only explanation he has: “Maybe it is the will of chaos.” When his brother scoffs at “unseen energy,” Grimnar tells him the truth of his life: he was touched by chaos as a child, and “I hear his voice inside of me.” They make up the way brothers do. The brother gives the verbal lashing, and Grimnar slugs him in the arm with giant-bear-man force.
Summoned to Knight Commander Stolas’s star-filled equatorial, Grimnar is briefed alongside Nehebka and Muffy. The Grandmaster and the Arbiter have left the fortress to deal with “something big that could kill us all,” and Stolas’s divinations point to shadows gathering at the edge of the Void. When Stolas asks if they know the Shadow King, Grimnar is blunt: “Of course we are. But he’s dead. The Arbiter killed him.” Stolas’s readings suggest otherwise, and they point to the bleak world of Dämmerung. Grimnar also notices Nehebka eyeing books on leaving the Void, and he mutters a warning that “perhaps it is not the will of chaos just yet.” Before they go, he pulls Stolas aside for a very loud whisper. He asks Stolas to watch his brother “because he is an idiot,” not to let him stay up too late, and to keep him away from cheese, because “sometimes he gets a little gassy if you let him have cheese.” Nehebka hears every word: “He’s a large bear. You’re probably screaming it.”
His preparation for the mission is a pilgrimage. He walks out through the mouth of the fortress’s giant orc skull onto the lava plains and raises his hand to the multicolored storms, and lightning strikes it. Years of doing this have left his fingers black and blistered, and it doesn’t faze him. This time the storm gathers right above him, lightning dancing close without striking. “Allow me to be your vessel,” he asks. At the portal relay, the relay master Zzhitopp praises a comic-book barbarian as a hero, and Grimnar wants to know: “What makes him a hero? What has he done?” Zzhitopp explains the goo pit where fortress resurrections happen, then begs the squad not to bring him back any fecal matter (he already has three iron-lidded barrels of it). When he wonders whether they put dung in the goo pit, Grimnar asks, “Is it the poop pit?”
The squad landed not at a gate but in the middle of a battlefield, with constructs advancing under banners of gears and circuitry. Grimnar stretched his hands to the sky, took the lightning through his chest, and his eyes went completely black. “Maybe it is you who should submit to the will of chaos,” he declared, and he hurled a storm sphere behind the enemy. One bolt wrapped a construct’s limbs, burst its eyes out and melted it into slag. Another blast of multicolored lightning picked up the purple of Muffy’s paint and struck as a psychic blow. When a goblin slapped his thigh mid-battle and warned of incoming artillery, Grimnar knelt before him: “You are an emissary of chaos. Sent here to deliver us.” Then he scooped the goblin up (“Come with me if you want to live”) and ran as the shells landed. Heading for the tunnels, Grimnar insisted “I have a great sense of direction,” but he went where the goblin told him anyway. He introduced the squad as “emissaries of the Dread Fortress,” and the goblin introduced himself as Grym, welcoming them to the Rust Blood Alliance.
Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind
The Rust Blood Alliance was launching its counteroffensive against The Warmind when this episode opened, and Grimnar had already done his share. In the battle against the giant walking Titans, he announced to a commando, “I will meet you at the top,” began floating upward on electromagnetic lightning, and promptly fell on his face. He climbed it the hard way under fire instead. At the top he leapt to the Titan’s neck in a superhero landing and called down bolt after bolt until the metal under his feet turned white-hot. The shoulder ammunition exploded, the head sheared off, and he rode it down before tumbling clear to the cheers of the troops. “There is still a weapon to deliver, is there not?”
Riding a burrowing creature toward the Warmind’s mountain with a celestial warhead, Grimnar never trusted the physician who had helped build the Warmind. When the physician asked why he would align himself with chaos after all this destruction, Grimnar turned the question around: “What has chaos done? All I have seen here is that what you have done.” In a tunnel ambush, Nehebka swapped places with him through her sand and took the bolts meant for him. Grimnar then borrowed a resistance to necrotic energy from a bladed construct through the lightning between them, deciding which trait to take with a coin flip. At the Warmind’s door he read the chaos pouring out of the chamber and found it wrong: “a choked and clogged river,” with “something pure and black at its center.”
Inside, the Warmind was already dying, and two knights of the Order of Shadow stood over it. Glauccous and Taupe recognized the party as Dread Fortress at once, helped by the fortress skull Grimnar wears as a belt buckle. The knights served another Grandmaster, Grandmaster Payne, and came for the remnant of the Shadow King lodged in the Warmind’s brain. The party knew from fortress books that the Shadow Knights had once been The Dragon Knights. Grimnar insisted “there is only one Grandmaster,” and when neither side would yield, he said “it does seem like we must let chaos decide.” He opened the fight by dragging his hands across the floor and sending two walls of lightning up the knights’ bodies to fry their brains. Both were left incapacitated. He then went for the remnant while Muffy choked Taupe unconscious and Nehebka charmed Glauccous by forcing her sand into his mouth and inside him. A baffled Grimnar asked, “are you on our team now?” Then he asked the knight for a boost.
Digging through hot “brain soup,” Grimnar felt a pins-and-needles numbness creep up his arms and let Glauccous take over. He then learned that Taupe’s belt held a warded cylinder built to contain remnants. “You didn’t ask. You just told me to dig,” Glauccous explained. With the cylinder protecting him, Grimnar touched the remnant: a finger bone of Agdrel, overflowing with chaos. It showed him a memory of the Shadow King in plain clothes, studying how to master the unmasterable, and wondering in his notes whether it might mean sacrificing kin, “somebody like his niece, the Grandmaster, Elusia Skypiercer.” This bone was one of the first places where chaos began to change him. Grimnar was shaken. “Nobody who has this kind of power just puts it away,” he told Glauccous, who admitted the order held at least five.
The discovery cut against everything Grimnar believes. He sees himself as a vessel for chaos, never its master, and he told the others that the remnant was “the defilement of chaos,” that they couldn’t let Payne have it, “but I’m not sure that we can let our master have it either.” He merged his chaos with Nehebka’s sand so they briefly shared one body, her right eye and his left, and she saw the vision too. When she asked what the Grandmaster would do with it, he was honest: “I don’t know her mind anymore than I know yours.” Nehebka ripped open her own chest and hid the cylinder inside. Grimnar closed his eyes and asked chaos whether he was making a mistake. A shiver up his spine told him he would find answers at Umbracor, and chaos came first. “This could possibly be treason. I just want to make that clear,” he warned. Muffy replied, “Well, it’s just a regular Tuesday.” After agreeing that Nehebka should bind Glauccous as a “reliable ally,” Grimnar followed the knight through a branching vein of the Void toward Umbracor.
Personality and Abilities
Grimnar stands over seven feet tall, with white polar-bear fur and minimal armor. Burns branch across his chest, arms and hands like lightning through wood, and the fur around his eyes is singed black. He has, as Muffy puts it, “the voice that you feel before you even hear it.” His whispers are audible across the room.
His faith in chaos is the center of his life. “It is not for me to decide” is his creed, and he listens for whispers or cracks of lightning to tell him he is on the right path. He is gruff, protective and very literal, and he is often funnier than he means to be. He is suspicious of anyone he has decided not to trust, and he doesn’t trust anyone, even his own ruler, with the power to bend chaos.
In battle he draws lightning from the sky through his own heart, and his eyes turn completely black. He can raise storms of wind, hail and lightning, throw blasts of many-colored chaos, send lightning through an enemy’s mind, and float on electromagnetic force, though not always successfully. He can also copy a trait from an opponent through chaos energy, and he can link his power with an ally’s.
Relationships
- Grimnar’s brother: a scholar and mage studying under the Arbiter. Grimnar disapproves of the path his brother has chosen but loves him and warns that cheese makes him gassy.
- Muffy: his squadmate, a tiny fennec-fox painter. Grimnar teases her height and goes along with her plans, including the one that made them “team stained glass.”
- Nehebka: his squadmate. Grimnar is wary of her wish to leave the Void, but he trusts her enough to let her carry the remnant inside her own chest.
- The Grandmaster: Grimnar is her acolyte. He says she has never given him reason to distrust her, but he is no longer sure he knows her mind.
- The Arbiter: Grimnar believes the Arbiter killed the Shadow King, and his brother studies under him.
- Knight Commander Stolas: the commander who sent the squad out. Grimnar trusts him to look after his brother.
- Grym: the goblin of the Rust Blood Alliance whom Grimnar hailed as “an emissary of chaos” and carried out of an artillery barrage.
- Glauccous: the Shadow Knight Grimnar fought, then worked beside, and finally followed toward Umbracor.
Memorable Quotes
- “I was touched by chaos. As a child… I hear his voice inside of me.” (Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG)
- “You will look after my brother while I’m gone… because he is an idiot.” (Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG)
- “Allow me to be your vessel.” (Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG)
- “What has chaos done? All I have seen here is that what you have done.” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)
- “It is the defilement of chaos. We cannot let their master have it. But I’m not sure that we can let our master have it either.” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)
- “This could possibly be treason. I just want to make that clear.” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)