Herte is a scholar of history at the Royal University of Maadigan, a man who rose from poverty through intellect, discipline, and an almost devotional respect for structure. He organizes his life around facts and frameworks, trusting records more than memory and archives more than people. Where others find comfort in relationships, Herte finds stability in chronology, citation, and proof. History offers him patterns that the present rarely does.
His attachment to the past borders on reverence, but it is not romantic. He studies ambition, failure, and power with clinical care, preferring distance to immersion. Emotion unsettles him. People change too quickly. Texts do not. This detachment leaves him effective as a scholar and uncertain as a man, capable of sharp insight yet hesitant when insight demands response.
Herte respects intellect wherever he encounters it, especially when it exceeds his own. Such minds draw his attention, though rarely his pursuit. His personal relationships, when they have existed, tend toward brevity and impermanence, shaped as much by avoidance as by circumstance. He understands desire well enough in theory, but struggles to live within it.
Once surrounded by peers and mentors, Herte now occupies an uneasy middle ground. He observes events that pull him closer than comfort allows, recording what others would prefer to deny or ignore. He does not lack conscience. He weighs consequence carefully. Yet he has long believed that understanding is not the same as action, and that witness can be its own form of responsibility.
Herte’s first impression is one of quiet intelligence and measured restraint. He watches, records, and endures, uncertain whether history is something he studies from a safe distance or something that has already begun to claim him.