Eir

Eir, called the Healer, was one of the nine Valkyries cursed by Odin to remain in a corporeal form until madness took her. Before she joined the order she had been a mortal healer in Midgard, and as a Valkyrie she tended the Einherjar. After she grew too dangerous she was sealed away by the Valkyrie Queen, then freed by Kratos and Atreus and reborn by Freya as one of the Shield Maidens.

Early life#

Eir was raised in a small Midgard village by her father, the latest in a long line of herbal healers, who trained her in herbs and natural remedies and held that herbal healing was the only true medicine. Visiting the cities beyond her village, Eir saw healers cure their patients with magic alone, to surprising effect. She tried to tell her father, but he dismissed magical healing as a dangerous shortcut that betrayed tradition, and out of respect she deferred to him. Then her father fell ill with an unknown disease. Eir offered to fetch a mage healer from the city, but he refused, insisting that herbs alone would save him. He died before the spring.

Devastated, Eir came to hate her father's philosophy and rejected herbal medicine entirely, devoting herself instead to magical healing, certain that herbs had failed him. She left her village for the city, scraped by until she became apprentice to a renowned mage healer, and proved a gifted student, cutting herbal medicine out of her life completely. In time she came to see her mentor as a mother. But the mentor fell ill with the same disease that had killed Eir's father, and mage healing alone could not save her. Eir learned too late that only a blend of magic and herbal remedies could cure it, and the knowledge of herbs she had let fade was gone. Her mentor died, and her soul passed into Helheim. For years afterward Eir labored to reconstruct her father's teachings and fold them back into her healing arts, learning at last to value even the techniques she had reason to hate. Some time later she became a Valkyrie.

Curse and rebirth#

As one of the nine Valkyries cursed by Odin, Eir was bound into a corporeal body, an unnatural state that drove her toward madness, and was sealed away in Midgard by the Valkyrie Queen. Her corruption turned her skin black, and she fought with bladed wings and a Valkyrie mace. Kratos and Atreus found her prison and destroyed her physical form, freeing her spirit, which thanked them and rejoined her sisters.

During Ragnarok, Freya reborn Eir in a pure new body, her skin restored and her metallic wings replaced with organic, birdlike ones. As a Shield Maiden she joined Sigrun and Gunnr among those who assaulted Asgard. Before Surtr delivered the final blow, Eir shielded Atreus from the explosion, and she was the first person he saw when he woke. She was one of the few Shield Maidens to survive the war.