Godot

Godot is a small, weathered old man of slight build, no more than roughly 155 centimeters tall. Gray hair frames a lined face lit by olive eyes. By the Conviction Arc he has passed his late sixties and grown so frail that he is confined to his bed.

Blunt, prickly, and often plain rude, Godot hid a genuine tenderness under the scowl. On a whim he took in the orphaned Erica and raised her as his own, and after the Eclipse he gave the drifting Rickert both a roof and a trade. He carried a moralist's streak, taking Guts to task for leaving Rickert and a defenseless Casca behind to chase vengeance, and warning that revenge does nothing but break the one who pursues it. Though he had spent his whole life bound to his forge above all else, he refused to hold that up as anything to imitate, sending Guts a blunt caution through Rickert: do not end up like me. For as long as his failing body could still keep him on his feet, the old smith went on mending Guts' equipment.

In his youth Godot lived far off in a castle town, where his liege handed him a king's demand for a blade able to slay a dragon. Sick of forging showpieces for nobles who prized elegance, he answered instead with the Dragon Slayer, an iron monstrosity so huge and cumbersome it was worthless as an ordinary weapon. The work nearly got him killed, so he fled to a remote mine, and there the giant sword sat untouched for years. Somewhere in the Hundred-Year War he found a weeping, orphaned Erica beside a scorched house and carried her home to raise as his daughter.

Guts first wandered into his life after quitting the Band of the Falcon, when Erica accidentally hurt the swordsman by tumbling logs down a waterfall. Guts lingered about a year before rejoining the band, and returned much later gravely wounded, borne in by Rickert alongside Casca amid a solar eclipse. Once he had healed, Guts received a parting blade from the grumbling smith; after that sword shattered against a roaming apostle, Guts was hurled into Godot's shed, laid hands on the long-hidden Dragon Slayer, and split the creature in two with one swing.

When Guts came back two years on, age had left Godot bedridden. The old man looked over the rusted prosthetic arm whose mechanism he had first devised before Rickert put it together, proof of the medical grasp his trade required, a knowledge he later passed to Erica so she could treat the hurt. He scolded Guts for casting off Casca and Rickert and cautioned that revenge would wear him down like a sword drawn too long on the battlefield. Still, he reforged and tempered the Dragon Slayer and forged fresh armor, laboring the night through with Rickert before parting from Guts a final time. Godot died soon after, and by the time Guts returned in the wake of Griffith's rebirth, only a gravestone remained to greet him.