Character · Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Heiter
A priest who drinks through every scene he is in spends his last years arranging magic lessons for somebody else's child.
In Otakana the clue reads: Drinking priest of the old hero's party
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Heiter travelled with the hero's party as its priest and came home to a comfortable posting, a large house and a reliable supply of wine. He is a hypocrite about most of it, cheerfully so, and Frieren calls him a corrupt priest to his face. Neither of them appears to think this affects the quality of his faith, which is the most interesting thing about him.
He takes in Fern after a war leaves her with nothing, and once he works out how little time he has left he starts on the real problem, which is what happens to the girl afterwards. So he lies to an elf about wanting a spell for eternal youth, gets her to stay, and lets her discover the actual job while she is teaching.
The German word heiter means cheerful or bright, and the series gives him exactly that register right up to the end. His last conversations with Frieren are about whether prayers ever work, asked by a man who has spent decades saying them professionally, and answered by nobody at all.
Spelling HEITER
HEITER is six letters, and here the German runs the opposite way from FRIEREN: this one is EI, not IE. Two members of the same party carrying the same two vowels in reversed order is the cruellest thing this series does to spellers. Say it as hi-ter and the E before I order still holds, since the sound gives you no help.