Npcs

Valhalla treats its love interests as a collection, and like most collections in this game the entries are not equivalent. Some partners move into Ravensthorpe. Some are a single scene attached to the end of a regional arc. One of them is not really available at all. This bucket covers the clearest example of the third kind: a character the game builds up across an entire expansion and then declines to let you keep.

Ciara, and the two choices she needs

Ciara is a poetess Eivor first meets in Dublin Market during Wrath of the Druids. The romance turns on exactly two dialogue choices, and neither is easy to miss because both sit inside main quest objectives you cannot skip.

Both options carry a heart icon, which is Valhalla's standard signal for a romance line. The second one comes when Ciara goes swimming under a waterfall, and picking it puts Eivor in the water with her. Talking to her is a main objective in both quests, so there is no way to reach the end of the expansion having accidentally walked past either conversation.

That is the whole mechanical requirement. There is no gift to find, no minigame to win and no earlier favour to have done, which makes Ciara one of the least demanding romances in the game to trigger.

And then she stays in Ireland

Our page is blunt about the outcome: Ciara is mostly a fling, and you cannot take her to Ravensthorpe. Whatever happens in Connacht stays there.

That is worth knowing in advance because it makes her the exception in an expansion built around permanence. Wrath of the Druids otherwise pays in things you carry home, from the Celtic Armor Set scattered across Meath, Aileach and Connacht to the Gae Bolg spear that Balor drops. Ciara is the one storyline in it that closes with nothing added to your inventory or your settlement.

It also puts her outside the rule that governs the rest of the system. Our romance guide notes that Eivor can only be in one relationship at a time, which is the constraint that makes the base game's love interests a real choice. A partner who cannot come home does not compete for that slot, so a Ciara romance costs you nothing anywhere else.

Where she sits among the rest

The base game's nine candidates are covered on the romance page rather than here, and they vary far more than Ciara does. Bil wants a comb recovered from the bottom of a lake. Stigr the Amorous has to be beaten at flyting first. Gunlodr needs Thor's Bridal Circlet carried out of Asgard as a gift. Randvi is the one with a real cost attached, since romancing her while she is still with Sigurd counts as a Sigurd Strike and pushes you towards the worse ending.

Set against that, Ciara is unusually clean. Two obvious dialogue options, no prerequisites, no consequences and no reward. If you are working through the expansion anyway, the choices cost nothing but a click; just do not plan a settlement around her.

One thing this bucket makes obvious by omission: Ciara is the only named character in the folder with a page of her own. Every other person in Valhalla, from Sigurd and Randvi to Vagn at the raid dock and Hildiran at the Mastery shrine, is documented inside whichever system they operate, which is why the mechanics guide is where most of the cast actually lives.