It’s been a couple of days since Mighty Nein Origins: Caleb came out, and I know not everyone has received their copy yet, but I hope everyone has enjoyed it! I was a very small part of the team that worked for a very long time to pull it together, and I hope that–at least on my end–I delivered the best possible quality.
Please enjoy Caleb’s story, the good, the bad, the horrific, and even the themes that are hard to swallow or tolerate.
Also, keep your cat close. Dog lovers: you’re safe for now.
A non-exhaustive list of shattering little details in The Mighty Nein Origins: Caleb Widogast in no particular order, bc I haven’t thought about anything else in the past two days (spoilers below):
Frumpkin running after the cart that is taking Bren away from home for the first time
Bren fidgeting with various objects while studying and concentrating until Wulf grabs his hand and stops him
Wulf with one arm around Astrid’s shoulder and one hand in Bren’s pocket
With long hair and no beard, Caleb looks like a splitting image of Una. Do you think after he shaved in Rosohna, he stared in every mirror because he could finally see her face again? Did he avoid his reflection altogether?
Bren baring his arms at the Ikithon estate but keeping them covered with bandages and bracers back at home so his parents could not see the evidence of what was being done to him. Him keeping the bandages on in bed so even Frumpkin was none the wiser
Wulf with a literal wolf – or at the very least a large dog – next to him when we meet him first. Bren apparently falling for a dog person
The hair cuts that make three teenagers look like grown-ups, like the soldiers they are being trained as
The slow escalation of the residuum experiments. The looks of the other students, how they must have wondered what was happening to these three. How competition and Academy indoctrination probably made them feel envy more than anything else
Trent altering Bren’s memory to him holding Frumpkin when he overhears his parent’s betrayal. Trent knowing Frumpkin. Trent not nearly caring enough to recognize his fey successor 16 years later
Wulf doubting that his parents would ever betray the empire. Astrid wondering how they could have ever been so stupid. Bren not doubting at all. “I was so sure. I was so sure… until I wasn’t.”
The broken furniture in Wulf’s house where he strangled his parents with his bare hands, his mother first. His father must have seen it, must have watched his son kill his wife before he was overpowered himself
Una and Leofric dancing in the living room when flames and smoke starts to appear around them
Frumpkin’syooowl
Astrid and Wulf leaving Bren in Blumenthal and returning with one empty horse. His neighbors, the people he grew up with, finding him nonresponsive next to his burned down house. Them likely finding the corpses of the Grieves and Beckes during the day. One small town with an scorch mark on their history, the ugly story of its three most gifted children turned harbingers. No one finding out the full story until Trent is captured and tried, years and years later
Astrid coming to Bren’s cell at the Sanatorium to show him her burn scar, desperate for any kind of reaction, not getting so much as an eye blink
The overturned bench in Bren’s cell that stays overturned for 11 years until he is woken up
Caleb fresh out of the Sanatorium gathering his sparse coins to buy a copy of Der Katzenprinz. Caleb trading the book with a little girl for a scarf to stay warm on the road
The matching bandages on Caleb’s and Nott’s arms when they first meet, both of them trying to hide what was done to them
To end on a slightly lighter note, a (possibly incomplete) list of Vox Machina easter eggs:
Percy and Vex dancing at the Biergarten
A Trinket figurine on a shelf at the Ermendrud house
Statues of a male half-elf with a snake and a female half-elf with an arrow next to the bath
