Nicoli is a very large man, well over six feet tall.  He looks worse for the wear of the world with a weather beaten face used to the wilderness and old clothes than have seen many days since they were mended or washed.  He has keen blue eyes calmly peer from his wild face.

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When he was eighteen, a strapping young lad enjoying the manual labors of rural Ussaran life, Nicoli fell in love with a strange woman.  She had wandered into the village a month earlier, worn and hungry.

The village elders had warned against turning her away, and she had gratefully accepted their hospitality, helping out around the village and slowly slipping into place as just another one of the villagers.

She spoke with a strange accent Nicoli didn't recognize, and she could have been one of the Ussarans with her dark hair and pale skin.  There was something about her eyes that made her seem foreign, and Nicoli fell hard for those eyes.  They had many a day working and laughing in the woods and fields.

One day he woke up next her, his heart still joyful from the night before when he felt the silence.  When he went outside his hut, the entire village was dead.  He walked past the huts of others, peering inside to see corpses, withered and lifeless.  The only living being he met was the stranger standing naked in the center of the village waiting for him.

All she said to him was - "I'm sorry"

Then she turned and the last he saw of her was the bright red tattoo on a firebird on her back that started glowing and spouting flame until she disappeared into the ashes leaving him alone in his village.

Nicoli has been a survivor and a loner ever since, wondering what really happened and who he had really fallen in love with.  As he turned deeper and deeper into the mountains, he felt the call of Matushka and finally when he talked to her (as much as any do) she told him to that to find his answers, he would need to find her again.

Nicoli has been traveling the world for the last three years searching for any sign, taking any job that would keep him moving and headed to new places where there might be someone who knows about the lady he is seeking, still unsure what he will do when he finds her.