Tenris is a major antagonist in Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series. He serves as the unseen overarching antagonist of Wolf Brother and the main antagonist of Spirit Walker.
He is the uncle to the main protagonist Torak and a brother to Torak's father. He pretends to be an benevolent spirit guide for the Seal Tribe who wants to protect his tribe and and pretends to work together with Torak to find a cure for a deadly sickness which has spread, but in truth he is a manipulative and power-hungry Soul Eater who is the one responsible for the sickness as well as for the Demon Bear which killed Torak's father.
His Evil Ranking[]
What Makes Him Close to Being Pure Evil?[]
- He feels frustrations over the fact his brother became the mage to the Wolf Clan while he didn't become the mage to the Seal Clan which is a very weak excuse for his future actions. He also gets horribly burned when his brother starts the Great Fire and shatters the Soul Eaters' power, but that also doesn't serve as a legitimate Freudian Excuse because he along with the rest of his group have already become evil and at that same moment they were attempting to summon a horde of demons into the human world to do their bidding.
- He used to be very close with his brother as a young boy, but in the present he has nothing but resentment for him because his brother became a mage and he didn't and because his brother started the Great Fire after realizing that the Healers have turned into the evil Soul Eaters and it leaves Tenris scarred. He sends a possessed bear to kill his brother and later calls him "worthless". He also used to be good friends with Fin-Kedinn as a young boy, but it's not clear if those feelings still hold up in the present especially considering that Tenris infects the entire Forest with his deadly desease which also includes Fin-Kedinn's clan among many others.
- While initially the Healers, the group he was part of, sought to help other people and were genuinely well-intetioned, in time they grew power-hungry and Tenris along with most of the other Healers subverted their good qualities and in the present are only interested in ruling.
- Although he presents himself as a kind man who cares about the wellbeing of the Sea Clans, especially the Seal Clan, in truth, he is just a very manipulative man who cares about acquiring more power and he even secretly unleashes a deadly desease on his own clan to test it out and gleefully breaks their traditions for his personal gain.
- While he sends a message to his fellow Soul Eaters stating "The Wolf Lives" to tell them that the son of their rival is alive, it's uncler if he actually cares about them or if he just keep in touch with them and works with them out of pragmatism. He also slept with his fellow Sould Eater Seshru, but it's left extremely vague if there was any real romance between them.
- After his scarring from his brother, he becomes the new Seal Mage and causes his clan along with all the other sea clans to be more isolated and more hostile towards the Forest clans.
- He devises a sickness which makes the victim's souls drift apart which turns them mad until they die. Tenris unleashes the sickness on the Seal clan which kills four members of the clan including the son of the chieftain Islinn who is just a child and is also Bale's little brother.
- He has kidnapped two children from their parents and has turned them into tokoroths. The process of turning a child into a tokoroth includes the Soul Eater trapping the child inside a hole in the ground and giving it just barely enough food and water to keep them alive. Once the child has become an empty husk of itself, the Soul Eater summons a demon and traps it inside the child's body and from then on the newly created tokoroth can only follow its master's orders and is a slave to the person who has created it and the child suffers from a fate worse than death.
- Tenris tricks another person to capture a bear for him and then traps the strongest type of demon, an elemental, inside the bear's body. He sends his creation to find his brother and kill him. Tenris loses control of the bear and it not only kills his brother, but also goes on a rampage throughout the Forest and kills other people as well as many animals, but Tenris is uncaring about it.
- Six months after his nephew Torak had managed to kill the bear and save the Forest, Tenris devises a plan to draw out the bear's killer to himself. He sends his two tokoroths to poison the Forest's juniper berries to spread the sickness he had created years prior. This leads to mass plague across the Forest which affects most of the clans with possibly dozens of people dying and many more being sick.
- He secretly hunts down a young orca, kills it and only takes the teeth for his spells while he leaves the rest to rot. These actions are forbidden by Sea Clans' laws because predators like the orca are sacred for them and shouldn't be harmed and it's considered disrespectful to kill an animal and leave most of its body to rot. This causes one of the orca's kin to start attacking people in search for the killer and one such attack even cripples Detlan, but Tenris is uncaring about it.
- When Torak's friend, Renn, who had been hiding on the island, discovers Tenris' identity as a Soul Eater and tries to warn Torak and the others, Tenris manipulates everyone into thinking Renn had been infected with the sickness which has driven her mad and she needs to be cured. While she is under his care, he sends for her a soup of poisoned juniper berries to infect her and make it look like he didn't have anything to do with her death. She is only saved at the last moment when Wolf knocks the soup over to prevent her from eating it.
- Tenris attempts to sacrifice Torak in a ritual by tearing his heart out of him while Torak is alive and eating it while it's still beating, so Torak's powers to spirit walk would transferred to him and he would become the greatest mage who has ever lived. He tries to do this despite knowing at that point that Torak is his nephew.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
- Despite trying to sacrifice him for power and killing his father, Tenris does have some care for his nephew Torak. When Tenris realizes he is about to die because the orca who had been searching for him to avenge their kin is attacking him and he doesn't have a magical amulet to protect him because Torak has taken it from him, Tenris tells Torak he should ask Fin-Keddin about his father and to make him tell the truth moments before he is devoured. Torak notes that Tenris did sound genuinely kind in his last moments. Torak then talks to the Seal Clan chieftain, Islinn about this, and Islinn expresses his belief that Tenris did care about Torak to an extent even though he wouldn't admit it to himself which indicates that this is how the narrative wants the readers to see the situation. This is how Torak learns that his father had been a Soul Eater in the past and there is no indication Tenris had any ulterior motives to tell him that other than some form of care for his nephew, considering that he was about to be devoured by an orca and he knew he couldn't save himself.
Trivia[]
- Tenris is the only Soul Eater in the series who is a hidden antagonist at first because for most of the book Spirit Walker, he manipulates Torak into trusting him. Meanwhile the rest of the Soul Eaters are revealed as villains from the very first moment they appear.
External Links[]
- Tenris on the Villains Wiki
- Tenris on the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness Wiki