Profile

runeskin

Grant Access
Subscribe
Track Account
Private Message
Gift Paid Account

We come from the land of the ice and snow

from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow

Free Account

Created on 2012-01-08 19:47:17 (#1401217), last updated 2013-01-24 (678 weeks ago)

187 comments received, 3,687 comments posted

33 Journal Entries, 9 Tags, 0 Memories, 15 Icons Uploaded

View extended profile

About

Name:	ℳᴇᴊᴀ ʊʀᴅᴀʜʟ, tʜᴇ Шᴏʟғ ᴏғ ℳɪᴅɢᴀʀᴅ
Birthdate:	Aug 17

Mini Bio

Meja Urdahl

Meja was born on a world already called Earth, but not the Earth familiar to many creatures of the Multiverse. This Earth had suffered: nuclear fallout from skirmishes during a much different Cold War left most of the planet uninhabitable, its human population almost extinct overnight. Much of the planet is covered in nuclear winter, but the northern-most regions and countries suffered the least. The surviving population took to the north, as far as they could go, and the world was more or less moved back in terms of development and sophistication. Technology, as a whole, took a back-burner to making sure that everyone — more or less — survived what had happened. No one could agree if Russia or the United States had made the first move, and people generally stayed away from those kind of debates anyway.

But that was just a splash on the canvas of her life. Everything else was much more important, to her.

Meja was born on August 17th, 1948 to Stellan and Freya Urdahl, situated in the lonely town of Vardø, Norway. She was 15 when the nuclear bombs went off in 1963, and she was far removed from the danger zones — but she had bigger, more personal, problems. Her childhood was marked by exploration and pretending to be someone else, with her father vanishing sometimes for days into the wilderness and coming back with bruises and scratches and broken bones. Sometimes her mother was home, and she would help her, but more often than not her mother was in the nearest hospital and couldn't see visitors. When she was 5, her mother had caught a series of illnesses that stayed, despite the doctors' best efforts, and contributed to her death when Meja was 15. Her father wasn't the warmest type and chose to drown his sorrows in the town bar, coming home to sleep and continuing to vanish into the woods. She was a disaffected girl who preferred to be alone — which suited her situation well, as she lived on the edge of town, and the town all thought that her family were weirdos.

On the first eve of her mother's death, her father returned home early and sat next to her for an hour before speaking, staring into the fire she'd prepared. He was covered in bruises and told her a long story that she wasn't sure she believed before smiling, patting her shoulder, and going back into the woods. When Meja woke up she tried, frantically, to remember the story.

I'm going to tell you a story, as my father told me. You may make your own judgments for now, but know that this story lives. Long ago, our ancestors lived in a village only a few miles to the south of here. They hated it, but they couldn't move because there were trolls in this region so thick that even going hunting was taking your life into your hands. One winter it was particularly bad, and several children were taken. A group of men got together and went to find a tree. Our ancestor, Aksel, tied himself to a tree, one of the few in the area, and said he wouldn't move until he received help from Odin. The trolls, they all agreed, needed to be dealt with.

Two days later, he was so thirsty he could barely see, and numb from the cold, but still he wouldn't move until the children received some sort of justice. Finally, a man appeared in front of him with two ravens, dressed in a ragged cloak: Odin. Aksel told the Allfather why he was there and begged him for some kind of help against the trolls. In his mind, the gods would deal the justice directly, as soon as they heard of his village's troubles. But Odin was much craftier than that. He told Aksel that he would, indeed, help him, and walked into the woods after severing the ropes securing him to the tree. But he also told Aksel that, if he helped him, Aksel would be his servant for the rest of his life. And, of course, Aksel agreed.

He returned to the village and recovered in the span of a few hours, shocking everyone. The next night he woke up to find thirty trolls assaulting the village, destroying homes and carrying people off to eat them. Aksel fell to his knees and begged Odin for help. As he did so, runes came alight on his arms, and a brilliant axe appeared in his hands: The Daybreaker, he later called it. Thanking Odin, he flew into combat, vanquishing troll after troll. The axe would flash, you see, and turn them into stone, and then Aksel — with a strength he'd never felt before — would swing Daybreaker into them and they would crumble to dust.

But it was a bittersweet victory. As he'd fought, killing most of the trolls, some of them had killed his wife and one of his two children, leaving only a son behind. The village declared Aksel their champion, and Odin had gained a servant.

That's who we are, Meja. We're the servants of Odin, and the protectors of the town.

Meja, remembering this, put on warm clothes and headed out into the wilderness to find her father. She didn't believe it; she was worried about him overreacting to the anniversary of his wife's death. Resolving not to go back until she found him, she moved through the wilderness in a smooth and steady way that had always come naturally to her.

She walked, tirelessly, for the better part of a day before she heard him grunting and yelling. Running to find him, she came over a rise and saw what she'd thought to be impossible: her father, wielding an axe made of what looked like light, fighting a troll nearly ten feet tall (who was wielding a log from another region). He fought bravely as she watched, but he seemed tired as well. Stellan managed to cleave the log in half before, right in front of Meja's eyes, he was knocked to the ground with one of the halves. His skull didn't make the trip in one piece.

As Meja watched the troll poke and prod her father's body, she felt a flow of anger like she'd never felt before. All trepidation she'd felt upon seeing the troll suddenly vanished. Though she barely comprehended it at the time, light spilled through her forearms and burned permanent runes in the palms of her hands. As her father lay dead, it was as though all of his knowledge — and the knowledge of her ancestors — entered her head. She knew exactly how to call Daybreaker to her hands (and she did), and she knew exactly how to race down the hill with the axe ready for battle. The troll could barely react before she'd turned him to stone and then killed him in retribution.

Though so many questions remained unanswered in her mind — such as what kind of a life being a champion of Odin was — she arranged for her father to be buried in the same graveyard as her mother.

As she discovered, protecting towns from trolls and other nasty creatures was a full-time gig. She, like her father, began to vanish into the woods, going on hunts for creatures who had wandered into the area, and policing the trolls when they started to move toward the town. She was able to eat because a few of the older citizens knew what she did, and left her packages and presents by the cottage. She didn't bother telling anyone directly, figuring that no one — in the modern age — would believe her.

Directory ♦ Contact ♦ Musebox

profile codes