Brynjar Grau-eck-Shanno / Eanian / Warlord

Given Name(s): Brynjar Grau-eck-Shanno
Birth Name(s): Brynjardyr Runol-fey-Shyu

Race: Human
Tribe: Eanians (Ice-Tribe)

Occupation: Warlord
Title: Whiteclaw

Age: 39
Gender: Male

Hair Color: Eopharian Brown, greying (dark brown)
Eye Color: Barsca Dusk (bright grey)
Skin Color: Dark Elken (dark tan)

Height: 1 ped, 2 fore, 2 palmspan (6'1")
Weight: 1 pygge, 8 hebs, 1 om (200lbs)

Overview: Cold and coarse, Brynjar is a true man of the north, a man of hardship and silent grief, a man of endurance. He has forsaken his kin, and fled south in self-exile.

Physical Appearance:
Brynjar is broad of chest with a strong back, developed from years of javelin hunting and tribe battles. Strong legs are used to traveling great distances, for game can be sparse in the winter and the pinnip is a clever creature hiding close to its holes. He is muscular, though rounded by a layer of fat essential to northern life, a warrior of his tribe and defender of those who cannot wield weapons.

He is roughly-hewn, with harsh angular features. Brynjar has high cheekbones and a wide, almost consistent in girth from bridge to the thick tip, nose common to the members of his tribe. Bright eyes shine from his dark face, a clear sign of southern breeding with slaves of the south. His face is kept clean-shaven, even in exile, as a sign of his rank as warlord. Dark brown hair falls in sleek sheets, braided and twisted in a haphazard array, and provides a heavy frame liberally streaked with grey and white. His skin is darkly bronzed in the face and hands, much more so than other areas of the body.

Red and white paints are common practice, especially during what he knows as the 'summer months' when the ice in his homeland would have begun to melt and the game would move back to the far reaches of the north. The face is painted white, and a red handprint on the left side and excess red paint is used to coat the arms up to the elbow. Simple knotted designs are painted on the arms, face and chest. A permanent red pinnip tattoo is on his throat.

Brynjar has several old scars. Most are minor scratches that fade a little more every year, while others will be with him until the end of his days. This includes several lacerations on the back of the skull and a heavy criss-cross pattern on both hands from an encounter with a white bear. Scarring on the back of his scalp causes the hair to grow a bit erratically around it.

Distinguishing Features:
Barsca Dusk eyes, red pinnip tattoo, red and white tribal war paint

Clothing:
Winter clothing is thick with few layers. Pinnip is the favorite hide, worn with the fur against the skin, since it is thick and sheds moisture well. The long hair of the cloaked pinnip is often trimmed and sewn around the brim of the hood and sleeves. These pinnip coats are highly treasured. Gloves are also worn, with a 'one-finger' mit or a 'two-finger' mit variation that is favored by hunters. Often long pants are made out of the same materials using the same technique. They are tucked into high boots.

Boots consist of multiple layers. A soft inner boot made of light hides, a hardier boot with a sewn on heavy sole and a third hide that is wrapped around the boot and fastened using sinew strips, again with the fur facing inwards. The summer variation only excludes the third hide.

Summer clothing is considerably lighter. It often consists of lighter hides, wison or elk, made into trousers tucked again into high boots. Wool jerkins are a common sight, as well as fur mantles or 'wraps'. Brynjar is known for the white bear pelt, worn much like a cape, with one heavy paw thrown over the shoulder. The fur is kept 'dirty', not a pristine white, to distinguish it from white furs worn by the Lanrul.

It is common practice to smear a charcoal-based mixture around the eyes in the summer months to prevent 'snow-blindness' caused be the reflection of light off the snow and ice in the far north. The summer is also a time when warriors of the tribe take to the making and applying of war paint in tribe-specific designs on the face, throat, and arms.

Weapons:
Headcutter: About 4 fores (4'0") long, the bone head is a fore and three palmspans (2’1”) and lightly curved, the shaft is an elk antler with some tines sawn off. A tine has been added just beneath the blade to ‘catch’ and opponent’s weapon and deflect damage to the wielders hands while parrying. Tines (between seven nailsbreadths and one palmspan and five nailsbreadths long [0’3-0’6”]) at the end of the ax are shaped into lethal points and may be used to piece an opponent in close quarters. It features a rawhide grip from a palmspan (0’3”) above the base to four nailbreadths (0’1”) below the base blade.

Throwing Ax: (x3) 1 fore and just over 1 palmspan (1'4") long, elk antler shafts with leather grips, heads are rectangular in shape and made of stone.

Javelin: 2 ped and 3 palmspans (7'3") made of very flexible wood, elongated-pyramind-shaped head made out of very precious iron, was taken from another Ice-Tribe in the south and passed down father to son for a number of generations.

Knife: 2 palmspans (0'6") long, made completely out of bone, primarily used for skinning.

Personality:
As untamed and unrefined as the land he comes from, Brynjar is hard and enduring. He runs more on instinct than reason, a slight against him rebuked with violence, pity with cold anger and threats. Aggression is his fallback, for things he doesn't understand or doesn't wish to accept.

Grief wears on him, and it is beginning to show. Times of silence and far-off looks that meet accusations and slurs instead of fists and bare blades. The south is a place of much luxury, compared to the Icelands, and leaves more time for reflection where those dragging hours would have been filled with hunting trips and battle and celebration.

A distrustful man, he has a disdain for anything different. The ways of the far north have been ingrained in his very essence, and the comfort of familiarity is not something he is easily parted with. He is a solitary creature that longs for companionship, a type of kinship that he has gone far too long without.

Strengths:
Ax-man: From a very young age, Brynjar was taught how to wield an ax and to do so very efficiently. His strength lies primarily in the use of his three throwing axes, always within his grasp, that have a comfort range of 5-8 peds (16'4"-26'2"). He is also proficient in using his headcutter in close quarters.

Spearsman: Brynjar is most skilled with a javelin, he is able to throw it 30 peds (98'2") but the most effective range is 15-20 peds (49'2"-65'7"). It is used as his primary hunting weapon as well as his preferred long-ranged battle weapon.

Hunter: Men of the tribe are warriors and hunters. They are trained from a young age how to utilize the environment they live in. They are trained with javelin and ax and knife how to track and kill the prey of the Icelands (elk, sheep, wison, hares, foxes, pinnip, bears, etc.).

Weapon-making: Various natural materials such as tusks, horns, antlers, bone and stone are used to make weapons and tools. Brynjar is skilled in carving these materials into desired shapes and is able to inlay basic design work often in the form of animal totems in homage to the gods. Materials like rawhide and sinew are used to attach separate components; on occasion hide grips may be applied with fish glue.

Hardiness: Iceland-ers are naturally hardy people, resilient to cold and moderate amounts of pain. This is a necessity in order to survive in the harsh landscapes of the far north where such extremes are common.

Weaknesses:
Ax-Thrower's Elbow: Many years of extensive, repetitive action of throwing the ax has strained the outer tendons of the elbow. This makes gestures that involve raising the wrist, clenching the hand and twisting the arm painful, most times requiring a type of painkiller or numbing agent to relieve pain. This is a developing condition and gets worse with continued strain.

Primitive Culture: Raised from birth to fight to keep his tribe's territory and resources, Brynjar doesn't know what to do with himself otherwise and suffers from a lack of purpose beyond acquiring food and shelter with is easily done in the southern countries where resources are very abundant. This makes him willing to pursue concepts not accepted in more modern society, such as the personal claim of 'territory' and the violent defense of this.

Ethnocentrism: Brynjar has a strong belief that his tribe is superior, compared to any other Ice tribe or human tribe, or race. This makes him come off as condescending, boorish and very stand-offish when interacting with other races, especially other Ice Tribes and non-human races. Offense given to him about his tribe will invoke violent repercussions.

Misogynist: Ingrained expectations of women as the caregivers of children in infancy, making of clothes and cookers of food, whose primary purpose is to bear male children. He does not accept that women can be hunters or warriors or any other profession other than those previous listed and frowns upon women who act in such a way. This can offend most women, who may take complaints to persons of authority and engage Brynjar in a physical manner.

Failed Duty: Brynjar believes he failed his duty to his tribe, by considering going against the rightfully chosen Lanrul and relinquishing the control of Eanin to a different tribe. He also believes he failed his family and dishonored them by losing his son and many other young boys to another tribe. He further dishonored himself by running south instead of leading the remnants of his lanne, as a proper warlord would have done. This makes him extremely reluctant to take a position of responsibility or leadership.

Fight or Flight: In the Icelands, Brynjar relied heavily on his fight or flight instincts to survive. It is a very ingrained part of his nature and a first-reaction, meaning that it is not a conscious decision. Anything threatening (such as a loud noise, a shove, bump, or some other physical stimuli) interactions can trigger this, and his brain does not pause to register his life is not in danger, but the event has occurred and he is already reacting.

Language Barrier: Brynjar has very limited training in Tharian from interactions with the southern ice tribes, who trade with men from the south. This is limited to the vocabulary of a child learning his first words, and he is only able to form very simple questions (usually only using question words like Who, How, Why and What). He is unable to read or write, in either his own language, the Eanians having an oral history, or Tharian. This makes communication very difficult, as he is only able to convey the most primitive of needs and desires.

Magic: Magic is something Brynjar neither understands nor wishes to. He is completely against its uses, as are the members of his tribe and most other Ice-tribes (the only exception being the Himinko), and highly disdains anyone who practices it. There is also a sense of fear that comes with witnessing the use of magic, igniting a fight or flight response.

History:
From an early age, Brynjar was expected to achieve great things. Born in the mid-winter as Brynjardyr Runol-fey-Shyu (roughly translating to 'the sun of Runol' in the belief that the male offspring will outshine his father, due to his youth and the accumulation of skills learned from not only the father, but other warriors of the lanne as well), rocky stone walls and firelight were all he knew for the first months of his life. But he survived, because he was expected to do so. He was the first born of Runol, a highly decorated warlord with strong potential to become Lanrul of the ice tribe, and he would endure, as his father and his father's father had before.

It was not long after his birth, when Brynjar was about to witness his fourth winter, that his grandfather received an honorable death in a skirmish with the Tarkyns to the southeast. He had been forty years old, the oldest man in living knowledge of Runol's lanne. Another year and he would have lived to see the birth of his second grandson, Bjorrar. The Eanians that fortified themselves around the settlement of Eanin were no stranger to assaults, as other tribes attempt to take their village.

In his youth, his full name was shortened to Brynjar. As all young boys of the far north, he was trained in the art of combat as soon as he was big enough to wield an ax. Games in the years before his eighth winter were designed to form his base training, wrestling with the other boys and chasing the dogs, Icemuts that pulled sleds and hunted with the warriors. At eight years old, Brynjar was training with weighted sticks. He was taught to throw the stick tilted downwards with his strength behind it. He would not receive his first true weapon until he was eleven, when his father would pass his throwing axes down to his firstborn.

It was at that age that Brynjar and the other boys were brought on their first hunts, the opportunity to test their skills and further hone the instincts instilled in infancy. Though they had throwing axes on their belts, they would not see battle for another three years. It was with modified javelins they took to the land. In summer, they pursued wison and wooly boars and cloaked elk, and even trapped snow hares in their burrows. When the snows came it was to the ice they took. They speared pinnips off the coast as they darted from breathing hole to breathing hole in the ice shelf. And sometimes, where the self ended and the Ice Sea became visible, they would bear witness to breaching white whales. Magnificent creatures with rounded heads, perfect marine predators, the embodiment of Aleshnir.

But it was the land form of Zundefor, the white bear, which commanded the most awe and reverence from Brynjar in his youth. It was this spirit form that he identified with, of the many gods and animal faces he bore witness to, carved in snow and ice at each Chelarrin, the Icecoming. Celebrations, chanting and burning of pinnip fat in the great flames. And winter would come, and go as it always did. The Parginlnag, Icebreaking, would mark summer with the melting of the ice totems. With it came the return of the wison and the elk and the beginning of the battle season, marked with the crafting of talismans and mixing of paints. Warrior's tattoo'd totems are renewed with fresh color, a red totem upon their skin. A red pinnip on the waves for Ascendin, the force of the sea, and Aleshnir, the sea animal spirit.

At fourteen, Brynjar killed his first man--an Inlerin warrior in a tribe war that had come with the ice. The frozen sea between the islands was still soft, too soft to wage war upon. It would only be a few weeks until the Warrior's Chant would mark his fifteenth winter, and his initiation as an Eanian warrior. He would receive an headcutter, an ax with a long cutting edge. But the ice was thin, and many men were lost to the water, including Runol and the Eanians Lanrul. In moments that stretched too long, Brynajr took up his father's headcutter and slew many around him in his sorrow. Brynjar had won his civil rights that day on the ice, by killing his first man.

It was in those days Brynjar learned the ways of the Icelands, lessons the Ice-Tribes were well-versed in--the land cold and without pity. And so were the men. He can still recall the blue faces of boys he played with, men who taught him how to spear a pinnip or snare a hare, and his father, teaching him to throw an ax. In the quiet of the night he grieved, silent tears that froze on his face, and his younger brother, nine year old Bjorarr, sat in silence. Sound traveled swiftly in the ruhmir (snow homes not far from the banks where many were lost), and both boys were privy to their mother's weeping. In those hours, Brynjar transitioned from boy to man, the sole provider for his family.

That mid-winter, Brynjar and four other boys were given right in a Warrior's Chant as they became warriors. By the fire, boy’s fathers shaved the hair from their bodies as they were born anew as warriors and the fresh growth of their hair would make them men. And battle merit would determine how they wore it. They were marked in red; tattoo'd on their throats was the winding knot-work visage of a pinnip.

That winter, a man from the Gourdynn settlement was chosen to be Lanrul, and under his guidance those on the western island began to prosper. Those to the east were not so fortunate, even under leadership of a strong warlord. They were under siege, in every direction other tribes encroached and raided and slew their kin.

In the seasons to come few children were born, and fewer warriors were initiated to fill their depleted ranks. They lost their seat in Eanin to invaders and took to the ice shelf. The old went hungry first, and were given swift deaths by their sons. Then the women, wives and mothers became scarce as the warriors tried to safeguard their future--boys forced to wear their long-dead father's mantles. Bjorrar was one of few boys left, soon to be initiated and become a warrior in name, though he had done his duty as such long before those days.

The world weighed heavily on Brynjar, and he took to wandering the ice self. Twenty years old, unmarried with no heir to carry his name, and too thin to survive the winter that was so rapidly approaching. Then he saw it, a cloaked pinnip and a late-born pup, perhaps two months old, sunning themselves far from their breathing hole. Javelin in hand, he crept towards the gap between. He was swift as the snow hare, but so was she--the white beat. And between them, the cow and her pup escaped beneath the ice.

The she-bear rose to height, towering of Brynjar and his stick so delicately tipped in precious iron. A might blow from her paw sent him skidding over ice; she huffed and snorted and hollered her fury. Then she charged. In a moment of clarity among the panic that flooded his mind, Brynjar curled upon himself. The ice was cold against his skin, and his gloves made his neck itch. The talisman slipped free from beneath his coat and stood in red fury against a field of ivory.

She smacked him, claws snagging on the wool of his summer jerkin. Hot, her acrid breath was on his skin, around his gloves. Pressure on his scalp, but only hair trapped beneath his bulk. Her teeth snapped at his hands, at his neck and he cowered beneath her, praying to Necteref and Zundefor for a swift death with his javelin so far from his grasp. Blood sluiced around his fingers, and that's when he felt it. Something hard prodded his arm, and as the she bear stood on her haunches, he snatched it from under himself. It was a blade of white bone that had slipped from his boot when he fell.

As the bear dropped her weight down, Brynjar rolled and thrust his knife up through the bottom of her jaw. The blade snapped from its hilt as it slid into the precious flesh in her skull. Over the blood thundering in his ears, Brynjar head barking as the bear's bulk hit the ice. Icemuts, a sled team of men with faces painted the red and white of his tribe. Witnesses of his struggle, of his conquest. It seemed fortune had turned an eye to the bitter cold struggle for survival in the north, and man had conquered once more.

The warriors who bore him back to the village on the ice named him Grau-eck-Shannow, and Brynjar was known from there forth as Whiteclaw, for the bone knife he used to strike down the white bear. This story is passed down by wise women who hold much of the tribe history in their minds, and is a common favorite among young boys.

This night the lanne celebrated and so did Brynjar, with his head wrapped in cloth and ribs bound beneath his jerkin, for the first time in many seasons. His mother skinned the bear, and it roasted on a spit, his brother sharpened his headcutter. In front of a blazing fire, the chants in his ears and white fur on his back clutched with his raw fingers, his father's friend, warlord of the lanne, stripped the scruff from his face and neck and named him warlord. This night they thanked the gods for their benevolence, the wind had changed and the Eanians of the east had found a new Lanrul in all but name. The man who finally fit his father's mantle.

Parginlnag brought with it new life. Lanne of the eastern island had come to the coast, where Brynjar and his company lived on the ice shelf, to bear witness to the fur of the white bear. And so Brynjar's impoverished lanne began to swell as the ocean under the moon and warlords of the east island took conference together on the ice, with the man who struck down a white bear with a stick of bone. So salvation came, herds of cuncu sheep and wison gazed in the summer greens.

The summers that came were red. Brynjar rallied his warriors and razed villages to the north, where Inlerins camped on the ice, and to the south, where Tarkyns had gathered around the conquered settlement of Eanin. By right of conquest, he took young women to bear sons, domesticated herds to feed warriors and pelts from the fallen, leather from their feet, to dress them.

In lieu of their many victories and prosperity at their own hand, the warriors began to paint themselves differently from their kin in the west. They were white-faced demons, with red handprints speared on their faces, their arms red up to the elbows. Along the coast they passed like a storm, snarling faces and gnashing teeth. The Eanians of the east proved themselves a force to be reckoned, but their clashes with the Tarkyns were double-edged blades. For every scout they took, the Tarkyns took slaves and livestock. As winter approached, they became more desperate and no quarter was given.

At twenty-two, Brynjar went to his first Langral meet at the side of a Lanrul who, before that summer, he couldn’t have put a face to. The Lanrul hand-picked warriors of great renown, who would serve as escort and witness, as he made way to the meeting of the ice tribe Lanruls in Langral, a modest settlement in Aeidin territory. His coming was not met with celebration and feasting but with dark eyes and sallow faces. It was in war paint the warriors of the lanne greeted their Lanrul.

Their laws would have called for death at such treason, but the Eanians could not afford the loss of another warrior, much less at their own hand. The story of the white bear had spread from mouth to ear of slaves, taken by Inlerin, captured by Eanians, stolen by Tarkyns, all the way down the coast. The north respects strength, and other tribes would expect such a warrior to be at the meet. So Brynjar left the shelf and went south and west. The Eanians traveled in two groups, westerners painted with red and white stripes, and the easterners with red hands on white faces.

For one summer the ice tribes knew peace and rested their weapons outside the walls of Langral. Warriors in green and black and blue and orange and red stared in deafening silence, and the weakness of the tribe was displayed for all to see. They saw white-faced Eanians, whispered of by Inlerin and Tarkyn, and striped Eanians, and the displayed wealth. They saw white fur on the shoulders of two different men. But Brynjar did not enter the seat of the Lanruls, and instead dined with his kin, from east and west. And that afternoon, along with dozens of others, he washed the paint from his face and was neither Eanian nor warlord. He was an Icetribesman.

The following summer brought the promise of bloodshed like no other. The eastern Eanians bore full pelts on their backs, claws sewn on their gloves and teeth in the mouths of bear and seal and fox. The tribes came in force, Inlerin and Tarkyn and Faeron.

The east was ready to fall.

But a blessing came the second month of the season. A bitter cold crept in, winter came with ice and wind and snow. Barely able to see a wison length in front of themselves, Brynjar and his warriors dug furrows into the ice around their camp. Many fell victim to the trap, and more to javelin and ax. Those who didn’t flee across the ice paths, starved upon them.

The early winter would buy them a season without assault, a summer to wage war on the tribes that dare not cross the ice paths to the eastern island.

Twenty and five, Brynjar was a pride to behold. Taller in stature and fairer of face, he was widely renowned for his feats in battle against the Inlerin that also roamed the ice shelf and the Tarykns that still held Eanin.

That summer his brother Bjorarr took a wife and before the Icecoming she was with a child. Many boys earned their civil rights and became men in skirmishes with the Tarkyns in attempts to take back the settlement of Eanin. The season was bloody and no tribe rang victorious as the ice came and the herds moved south. Winter took his mother that season, though Brynjar did not grieve for she was old and had long been just another mouth to feed, but with it came a man from the far reaches of the Eanian eastern island.

He came in gleaming plate with a train of slaves, astride the back of a great bull wison. Among his horde Brynjar found a southern woman, a slave taken from below the wastes, that drew his attention. He led the Icecoming ceremonies, and the Warrior's Chant that introduced five new boys into the ranks. Winter was mild and predators ventured far, close to their temporary villages. But summer came with a vengeance. The ice melted more than it had in living memory. It would be remembered for many generations as the year of the whale.

As the ice receded and the rock of shore was uncovered, a whale carcass washed ashore. Its flesh was rotting and falling off the bone, an evil thing for a creature to come to the Eanians in such a state. The gods were angry, their fury in the unknown heat of the summer. The tribe was divided east and west.

Brynjar set the men about the carcass and they collected bones. Javelin and throwing ax and headcutters they crafted, sewing strips to jerkin and leather shields. But Brynjar did not go to war with his kin. Nor did he seek to reclaim Eanin.

Years overdue, Brynjar took a mate, the southern slave. Their union was not happy as his mother's and father's had been. She bore him no love or kindness but did her duty with a sullen face and empty eyes. The women born of the Icelands whispered ill of her soft look, surely she would not survive bearing a northern child when she was as delicate as the snow fly, whose wings they made into chimes. And they were right.

Three years it took, before the slave was with a child. As he grew through the winter, she waned, and summer brought with it no sanctuary. Winter came again and the child, a boy, came into the world as his mother departed. Brynjar held no grief for the end of his affection-less union or the bitter woman who died in the childbed. There was something much more important.

The boy was strong, and showed promise to reach such girth and height that was unseen in the Icelands. His father's look was upon him, a dark tuft of hair and stormy eyes in a dark face. Bjornol he was named. In those days Brynjar thought not of wars or Lanrul, he was content with his simple life on the ice and the daily struggle of survival. At thirty, Brynjar had a son.

The lanne was strong, and Brynjar proud. He sought to reclaim the seat of his people in Eanin through strength of arm against the Tarkyns in hopes that his son may one day claim it and the title of warlord, perhaps even Lanrul. On the horizon were days of teaching his son how to hunt, to catch the pinnip in its hole, how to throw an ax and strike a man down. There would be stories of his conquests and victories, and those of his forebears. But the summer was fruitless and blood made the ocean run red, so Bjornol saw his first year on the ice in a ruhmir not so different form how his father face the first months of life.

It took six years for Brynjar to take back Eanin. But the victory was hollow. The Tarkyns had slain his son, and his brother's son, and many of his kin's sons like thieves in the night. That summer the Lanrul of the Eanians was slain by a white bear on the ice in the Bay of Calnith. And that too was hollow. Grief and shame led Brynjar south, and he kept going south, and would keep going south until there was nowhere left to go.

In self-exile, Brynjar wandered south. He took care to avoid the settlements of rival ice tribes, and a trek south to the Gathorn Mountains that should have taken a fortnight took near two moons. But the southern slopes of the peaks offered strange new sights; trees, as tall as him, and a few higher still, bent and twisted by winds coming from the peaks.

He pursued game up into the mountains, where there, high among the peaks where no tree dare take rook, he encountered his first ‘southerner’. At first, it was nothing more than a small, pale child, a round lump in heavy, fur-lined wools. The child would have been an easy target, with its back to him, up to the elbows in snow. A head popped up, scratching on a skin with black markings. The child had an aged face, wrinkled with thinning hair. A girl with an old maid’s face. For all the strangeness, Brynjar was reluctant to draw his knife.

Could he kill a child? An unarmed child, like the boys in his lanne, when the Tarkyns had slit their throats in the night. What would one more child be? One more too many. Brynjar retreated down the mountains into the valley, knife still on his belt. The woman-child was gone from his mind.

Brynjar hunted in the valley, rich with game that dug through inches of melting snow to the awakening greenery underneath. He caught snow hares with sinew snares, and a fatty, thickly furred animal that tasted much better than the lean rabbit meat. Tracking another of these furred creatures with webbed feet, far from the cool snowcap-fed river it seemed to live in, he found the child again.

Or rather stumbled upon. In a terrified spurt, the creature had darted through a thick bramble, and crouched over, Brynjar followed. And there she was, stirring something in a small pot over a modest fire. He jerked his spear from the fleeing creature and jabbed its point towards her. The smell of stewing meat fogged his head, the lean rabbits he had dined on before he found the swimmer had left him hungry for fatter catches.

The woman-child showed him her hands, a gesture even he could understand. He lowered his spear, but kept his grip firm. Then the sounds came, an abhorrent mix of grunts and rumbles that meant nothing. A second string, and a third. She gestured to skins on the ground in front of her modest fire, ladled a scoop of stew into a wooden cup and held it out to him.

Brynjar perched himself on his haunches, fingers still curled around his spear, a wison length from the fire. Eleanna lifted the spoon to her mouth, blew, and ate. He watched still, and nothing happened. Again she offered. He didn’t move. In the brush, a stick cracked under pressure, and Brynjar was gone, hunched low and moving swift through the valley.

This continued for weeks, mistaken encounters from over a stone’s throw away and glimpses at even further. Figures among trees, shapes among rocks. The second time he encountered her camp, she was slicing a fat swimmer into chunks for her stew. Their proximity had ensured Brynjar that she was alone, and no threat to him. But strange things were best kept at a distance.

He was about to disappear into the brush when she saw him. The little thing hopped up and scampered close, holding her hands out and repeating a single sound, over and over and over. And for a fleeting moment a strangeness overcame him, a question, did she know what the swimmer was called?

It was a small change that would lead to so many more. That afternoon, Brynjar sat in front of her small fire and ate her stew in his cold silence. The initial communications were, strained at best. The weeks that it had taken for him to become at ease with the woman-child’s presence were all but erased by this new proximity. He saw a child, harmless, but he was on edge.

Days passed before he would stay longer than the time it took to slurp down a rich stew, and many more before they could hold a conversation. If it could be called such, the heavy-handed gestures and frustrated expletives. A simple exchange of names, the woman-child was called Eleanna. But the child was not so different from the tribeswomen, preparing meat and gathering herbs or berries. She pointed out shrubs and bent trees, naming them, and telling him of places where snow came for only a few moon turns and then was gone and places where it never came at all.

Brynjar wondered what they may look like, these strange places or trees thrice as tall as him. He couldn’t go home, no matter how bad his gut ached for the ice and the simple life he left behind. The only way to go was south, so Brynjar travelled with Eleanna and their conversations became almost coherent in broken words and confused phrases as they walked across the Heaths of Wilderon.

As spring began to fade, Brynjar found the heat of the southern summer almost unbearable. He was forced to discard his traditional pinnip clothes, and adopt lighter dress. It brought about his first interaction with a clearly non-human race—the Rhom-Oc. Eleanna acted mediator between the nomads, though Brynjar held fast to his ax and the orc settled close to the side of the massive warg. The elk hides were much thinner than those he was accustomed to, but the texture was familiar and the lightness astounded him.

It was after this encounter that Brynjar learned of Eleanna’s Gnomish origin. This sent him away for many days; a man of the ice did not let the world into his home, especially if that world was female and non-human. What use did he have for tiny people or green men on black beasts? The sickness in his gut made him turn northward.

But he returned. The months of travel in solitude were fresh in his mind, though long past, and even the company of this half-creature was more agreeable to facing the strange greenness of the south alone. Slowly, painfully so, Brynjar began to let tiny pieces of the south into his world of ice and snow, and the words came easier. Brynjar was able to relay patches of his life, settled in the foothills of the Imlith Mountains. Heavily edited, and vague, a complex world trying to fit into the language of the south.

Belongings:
Tribe talisman
Waterskin
Whetstone
Rawhide sack
Wool bedroll
Dried meats
Hrugchuck grass
Horn firepiston