Nash Tringham

Nash is a human alchemist of Amestrian birth who settled in the gold-mining town of Xenotime. He belongs to a small set of figures who never surface in Hiromu Arakawa's manga, existing only within the 2003 television series after being lifted from the debut light novel, The Land of Sand. Audiences of that adaptation come to know him chiefly through his two sons and the long shadow his research casts over them. His name is rendered as Nash Tringum on the anime's official reference sheet.

Nash is defined above all by an obsessive pull toward his craft, a hunger to unlock the Red Stone that gradually eclipses everything else in his life. He marries and raises two boys before that fixation, or perhaps a wish to shield them from harm, drives him to walk out on the household entirely. For all his single-mindedness, he keeps a hard moral line intact: when a wealthy backer proposes a monstrous shortcut, Nash refuses outright rather than trade lives for progress.

Much of Nash's life is spent chasing the Red Stone by way of the toxic Red Water, an amplifier he hopes to tame. A stint at the Central complex known as Lab 5 leaves him disillusioned with its methods, so he departs and drifts to Xenotime, teaming with the landowner Mugear to revive the dying town using the mineral. He works out a faster means of crystallizing the Red Water, but the partnership collapses when Mugear demands he inject the substance straight into unborn children so that pregnancy might refine it, a scheme sure to doom mothers and infants alike. His refusal seals his fate, and Mugear has him killed.

His legacy echoes through his sons. When Fletcher speaks of him to Alphonse Elric, the parallel to the Elrics' own father, Van Hohenheim, becomes plain: both men prized alchemy over family and vanished without a trace, leaving gifted sons to inherit their ambitions. Yet where Russell reveres Nash's memory and longs to complete his dream, the Elrics carry only resentment toward their own missing father.