Wahrheit

A quiver crowded with arrows rides at Wahrheit's hip, the mark of his trade. Middle-aged, he keeps his hair cropped and parted to one side, and wraps a wide scarf around his neck. A dark, high-collared shirt worked with embroidery sits beneath his long-sleeved hunter's coat, paired with dark trousers and boots that climb past the knee.

Composed, dutiful, and firm of will, Wahrheit carries a bravery and martial skill that even Macht concedes are real, though the demon also writes him off as rash and a nuisance for presuming to stand against him.

Through the war between humans and demons, the Emperor charged Wahrheit with wiping out the Demon King's forces, a duty that led him through settlements laid waste by Macht of the Golden Land. Noticing that gold had claimed certain settlements while others stood untouched, he reasoned that Macht's spell, Diagoldze, must depend on specific conditions to take effect. Decades before Himmel's death, in the years before either the Hero of the South or the famed Hero Party had emerged, he tracked the demon to an emptied town.

Stepping into view, Wahrheit named himself as one of the Northern Lands' three Great Knights. Macht brushed him aside and made to leave, only for the archer to strike, declaring that he would not withdraw and that the Emperor himself had ordered the demon's destruction. He loosed a rapid storm of arrows, all of them dodged or deflected with ease, and pressed on in the conviction that he could deny Macht whatever conditions his gold magic demanded. Macht merely laughed, revealing that Diagoldze asked nothing of him at all and came as naturally as raising an arm. As his body hardened into gold, Wahrheit managed only the words 'Then why,' a question the demon answered, unheard, by admitting that sparing him would simply have been dull.