Lore
Dulurs are found in the places Valhalla has already forgotten: scorched clearings, abandoned campsites, the quiet aftermath of battles long since decided. No one has ever seen a Dulur arrive. They're simply *there*, wide-eyed and smiling, patient as something that has never once been in a hurry. What unsettles isn't the silence around them. It's what happens after. A lost Viking finds a smiling Dulur walking alongside him, a little too close, a little out of step. He stumbles against it and catches his footing on a path he hadn't known was there. A wounded Hushroom, mid-fight, catches a Dulur staring at it from the edge of the field, turns its head to look, and the claws meant for its throat pass through empty air. The Dulur does not flinch. The Dulur does not look at the claws. It is still smiling. The Vikings who take the smiling thing along find their stories grow longer. The ones who turn it away find their stories grow shorter. The eldest skalds tell of something older. They say that long before the first Viking set foot in Valhalla, before the great dragons that still crown the Gauntlet peaks, an ancient being, too vast to be remembered without unmaking the rememberer, pressed itself into a shape that could be smiled at. When a Dulur's smile does not change and the ground splits beneath its supposedly clumsy feet, the skalds look away. They've seen enough to know that some truths are better left smiling.
