Character · Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Fern
She casts faster than mages twice her age and treats her master's bedtime as a discipline problem.
In Otakana the clue reads: The elf mage's diligent apprentice
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Fern was orphaned in a war, raised by the priest Heiter, and handed to Frieren as an apprentice while she was still small. Eighty years of an elf's attention span compressed into a human childhood produced a mage who can fire ordinary attack magic faster than most veterans finish a thought. Speed is the whole style. She has no need of a rare spell.
The rest of the job is administration. Frieren would sleep through a week and live on sweets, so Fern schedules, budgets, wakes her up and delivers the flat stare that has become the series' most quoted expression. It reads as nagging for about two episodes. After that you notice it is how she says she intends to keep this person alive.
She grows over the story in a way elves cannot, which is the reason for standing her next to Frieren in the first place. Her mage examination, her irritation with Stark, her quiet insistence on being treated as an adult: all of it runs on a clock her master does not feel ticking.
Spelling FERN
FERN is four letters, an English plant and a German word meaning far or distant, which is the joke this series keeps making with its cast list. Nothing to romanise and no long vowels, because the name never passes through Japanese sounds on its way in. One vowel and three consonants, and that E is the tile worth placing first.