Puck

Puck belongs to the pisky race of elves, a lineage said to descend from the old spirits of wind. He is small enough to perch on a companion's shoulder or nest inside Guts' satchel, and he flies on delicate wings as his usual means of travel. His hair and eyes are blue, and in lighter moments he shrinks into an exaggerated, rounded chestnut form for comic effect.

His body carries several gifts unique to his kind. Fine dust sloughs continually off his wings, and that elf dust speeds healing dramatically while easing pain almost instantly, the very trait that first earned him a grudging place at Guts' side. He can also feel the emotions of those around him, taking on real physical pain from nearby sorrow and finding relief in kind thoughts. On top of this he emits light, which he weaponizes into a blinding flash he calls Puck Spark, useful for dazzling foes and destroying small spirits.

Bright, playful, and irrepressibly warm, Puck is the exact opposite of Guts' cynical, closed-off nature. He looks for the good in people rather than writing them off on first sight, and he shows remarkable patience with rough company, enduring stretches of Guts' verbal and physical abuse in their early travels. That patience has limits, though, and the two have split apart more than once over the swordsman's cruelty, only for Puck to return after sensing something worth saving in him.

A streak of stubbornness runs through him, most famously when he refused to hand back Guts' beherit aboard the Seahorse, wanting to use the fetish as fishing bait after nicknaming it Becchi. He plays mentor to the boy Isidro, teaching him a bogus Elf Dimension Style that amounts to swinging a burdock like a sword, and clashes with the more serious elf Ivalera. For all the gags, he turns deadly earnest when it matters, befriending gentle souls like Jill, absorbing their grief, and openly condemning Guts whenever his companion crosses into needless brutality. He is also prone to breaking the fourth wall, cracking jokes that treat him as aware he lives inside a story.

Puck once picked a pointless quarrel with a seagull over fish and rode the bird toward home, only to doze off, tumble from its back, and wash up stranded on the mainland by accident, though he later insists he simply left Elfhelm out of boredom. He joined a troupe of traveling performers and met the young Rickert as the troupe headed for Midland's border; its fortune teller read an ominous vision of countless evil stars swirling around a single white one before a moon swallowed them. Sometime after, the troupe was massacred, and Puck ended up caged in the village of Koka, kept alive as target practice by the Snake Baron's bandits.

When Guts slaughtered those bandits, Puck was freed almost by chance and repaid the debt by slipping into the swordsman's cell to heal him, though an early clash left the elf flying off in tears before he chose to follow Guts anyway, sensing that death was all the man knew. He grew fond of the beherit while befriending the Count's former physician Vargas, struck up a bond with the Count's daughter Theresia, and witnessed the God Hand's brief appearance. In the Conviction Arc he trailed Guts to Jill's village and the Misty Valley, where he gave the dying apostle Rosine peace by proving to her that elves truly exist, and was at last accepted as a proper traveling companion.

Learning of the Eclipse and the pain radiating from Casca, Puck suggested his homeland of Elfhelm as a refuge and helped gather Isidro, Serpico, and Farnese into the party. He guided the group past the disorienting field of stones on Skellig, staged a mock coup against the Flower Storm Monarch with Magnifico, and reunited with his kin. When Griffith and Zodd triggered the collapse of Elfhelm, a stunned Puck watched the island crumble, then found himself detained aboard the Seahorse by Kushan soldiers, one of whom turned out to be Rickert.