A Voyage to Arcturus

Maskull

Maskull arrives on Tormance with no wife, land, or profession to hold him back — a man deliberately unencumbered, which makes him both free and dangerously available to whatever force wants to use him. When Surtur appears and names him servant and helper, Maskull accepts a destiny he cannot yet imagine, and the thought lodges in him like the growing image in a creative artist's soul. His journey through Tormance's peoples and temptations — Joiwind's love, Oceaxe's hunger, Panawe's beauty — becomes a test of whether a man of destiny can keep faith with a purpose he doesn't understand.

Krag

Krag materializes with unsettling familiarity, knowing Maskull's name, his companions, and his readiness to leave Earth, and speaks of the star Arcturus as casually as a suburb. His manner swings between scraping laughter and sudden gravity, and he warns plainly that a gift declined is not offered twice. As the agent who sets the voyage in motion and later steers Nightspore toward his ordeal, Krag embodies the story's insistence that some summonses are not invitations.

Nightspore

Nightspore stands beside Maskull at the moment Krag announces the voyage, and it is his strangled question — has Surtur gone to Tormance? — that reveals he already knows more than he admits. Later, urged up a cold, deserted staircase that feels like a ladder to heaven, he labors under a weight like a man on his shoulders while strange pulses of laughter and machinery beat against the windows. His ascent, and the luminous sphere he glimpses, mark him as a soul being prepared for something Maskull himself may not be ready to face.

Joiwind

Joiwind moves through Poolingdred with a calm, low-voiced grace, teaching Maskull to walk on the heavy lake water and laughing with a joy that shows all her teeth. When the unholy music calls her away from Polecrab and her sons, she kisses her children convulsively and wades into the sea without protest, leaving Maskull to wonder what music could tear a wife and mother from all she loves. Her quiet surrender establishes the moral register of Tormance — love that costs everything, offered without complaint.

Panawe

Panawe receives Maskull with a candor that unnerves him, naming the Earthman's half-truths as half-truths and comparing him to Prometheus, the thief who ennobled his fellow creatures. He walks on the swampy lake as if it were solid ground, and when he coughs up a delicately beautiful egg-shaped crystal, he lets it fall with no further interest — an overflowing of beauty, Joiwind explains, and nothing more. His serene detachment gives Maskull a model of Tormance's strangeness at its most generous, before the harsher regions begin.

Oceaxe

Oceaxe sits on a fallen tree pulling off bark and telling Maskull plainly that he cannot resist her forever, her scornful voice carrying both mockery and genuine hunger. When he invokes Surtur as his master, she laughs — rich, sweet, and enchanting — and asks whether love is such a manly sport, or whether he simply thinks himself above nature. Her persistence and her contempt for the passive creed of Poolingdred pull Maskull toward a life of appetite and action, testing the vow he made to a god he barely understands.