Ylva Solveig, of the Free Folk.

[Ylva Heavenshield]

'The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage'.​

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Clan Solveig never had much to offer, not in life and not following their untimely end by the end of her knife. Ylva, the little savage girl who was taken the eve her true family name had been sundered and wiped from whatever recordings foretold the history of the peoples in the Galaxy. To murder an entire tribe of kinsman while they slept, to meticulously move from tent to tent and cut their throats; many a person would hear of this and cast the blame believing her an evil person. To Ylva however, it was the difference between living a slave to the killer of her blood, or earning her freedom having risen above the ashes of a campfire had having taken a claim upon the people that had tormented her for years growing up under the shadow of their aggression and constant humiliating judgement. She the girl with fire in her hair and eyes of ice, from a foreign world lost to memory and raised by their leader Akron, killer and marauder of the weaker Clans.

Staring down into the fire of her encampment, her mind wandered, lost to the night. Darkness surrounded her though she feared none for the wilds, this was her home under the stars; a world that was too small against the horrible memories she held over the place, recollections of days passed, pains felt and deaths she had brought upon others. It was true, she wasn't a good woman, she had done the things she had to in order to survive, yet to know her heart, you had to know her story...

A story that she intended not to tell a soul.​

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A story she relived every night in the company of her own guilt...​

 

[Ylva Heavenshield]

'I never had much as a kid. Living wasn't as simple as relying on a loving family,​

living was a choice and if you wanted to survive, there was no room for weakness'.​

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"She's not ready Akron! you put too much pride in your foreign pet!!"​

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They never explained to me why the other children's mothers never stuck around. Why so many of them grew up like me, on their own forced to kill for the first time before reaching their tenth sun season. Back then I questioned it often. These other kids there that seemed to be part of the Clan by liking. What happened to these women? Why did so few of them stick around...-Had I known what I know now, I'd have been afraid to ask. The first time I witnessed the truth for myself, it was my seventh cold season.

A dull slap of bone and skin cracked against the jaw of the man whom questioned "my strength". That's what they called the man who killed and took the child of his victims. They did this to raise them as their own, to make them strong and live on for the sake of Clan Solveig. None of us were blood, all of us were the product of murder and abduction. The crimes of Clan Solveig reigned in the many, yet some things were easier ignored than having to live with ones self in knowledge of such evil in men.

"She will lead the new bloods and she will take the first kill, that is my right. ​

You will learn to obey or I will split your hair from your skull and wear it on my shoulder, Brak!!"​

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Akron argued with his stone fist, Brak that morning. A stone fist was a clan leaders second and questioned only by the first. He did not like me, I watched as a youngling as he cut my mother down, her blood wet my nurse blanket while the flames licked at my heels and I made sure not to let him forget it. I cast a stone that caught him in the eye once, it drew blood and he beat me for it. My Strength stood and watched while my lesson was learned and I never spoke out against him again. That did not cease his hatred for me however. As I stood there watching the two argue, seeing as my strength put his stone fist to the ground with an ironic example that equaled the mans title, I knew that come the next morn I would be responsible for leading other children to die in a foreign camp. Kill or be killed, our task was to take a rival clan's ground for the Solveig.

 

[Ylva Heavenshield]

'Overtime I learned to accept death as an every day part of life'.​

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"Those who cannot fight their own battles do not deserve the honor in victory"​

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Akron's words were not my own, yet I feared arguing him for I knew where that would leave me. Growing up in the Clan, you had to be hard. Some days you could be as likely to kill one of your own kin for trying to take something that did not belong to them, as you would be in fulfilling your duty as a warrior facing down rival clans. There were nights were I would lay awake, unable to sleep, remembering of the faces that looked to me with that windowed gaze of fear before my axe took to their chest. Names that I never bothered to know. I justified these kills by telling myself that if I did not strike them down, one of my own would eventually turn on me in the night; fear in Clan Solveig wasn't tolerated, especially among women.

It was funny in a way, how Akron claimed everyone outside of our own were weak and feral. The night that they all died, it didn't come from outside but from within his own clan. The ones that fell had not been weak, they had been blind and I had stomached so much to get there...-They took me in at the cost of my families lives, they taught me their ways of war and of the hunt at the cost of many a broken bone and bruised face for my defiance, yet I remained strong.

Was I an evil person - It's a question that comes about from time to time when it's quiet enough in the word for my conscience to speak louder than the winds and the wilds, enough so for me to realize that I still have one, that I'm still human. For Akron, victory and pride of strength meant everything to him. For me, I just cared to justify the means at the end of the day. Whatever reason I could use to tell myself that what I've done could not have been avoided. That beneath it all, there's still something good there...

-How foolish of me.

 

[Ylva Heavenshield]

'Freedom doesn't always look so grim,​

The land we claimed to own was wild, open and beautiful'​

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The forests were plentiful and living off of a land ripe for our taking gave us the means to learn to survive without the technologies the known galaxy outside of Nirauan are so accustomed to. The world itself was fairly isolated from the rest of the going on's out there. From time to time we'd see blue men with red eyes but they had more trouble with the Qom Jha than they did with us. Their blasters were faster than my bow and unless we got close enough, fighting would have put us at the losing end. Fortunately those times were rare. Everything else could be put down to the beauty in the natural and wild life of the world.

Arkon taught me how to hunt, how to remove skin and meat from a kill. He taught me the means to survive living off of the land, collecting all the goods I might need and using every last piece of my kill to my advantage, from the leathers and furs to the very bone itself for which often times armed my bow, later dubbed "Akron's Teeth" for it bit harder than he would come the end of his life.

If we weren't making the most out of the world's generosity then it would be the supplies of those I mentioned earlier. Just because we didn't fight these Chiss, didn't mean that we never raided them every chance we could get. They carried metals fashioned into shapes and strengths that were honestly beyond our capabilities at times. My War Axe's were made from these very metals as well as the chain mail that would later line my Armor.

True enough, our lives weren't honest livings but we lived in every day that came. Our hours weren't spent sitting idle on our hind quarters while better men or women rose up to challenge the limits of their reach. Hunting kept us fit, the constant rivalry within and outside of Clan Solveig kept us sharp and hard. Morale virtue wasn't something that went amiss because it simply wasn't a factor in our ways. Looking back, sure it should have been...-But I fight to live another day and I will always do so, so long as there's strength in my arm and fire in my veins.

 

[Ylva Heavenshield]

She awoke the next morn come the sunrise to find that the fire had gone out and the ashes that danced during the night were sprawled at her feet upon the cold earthen floor. Ylva Solveig had fallen a victim to sleep, it had come and the memories had been dreams, the subconscious reminding her of who she was before, who she fought against being now. How many weeks had she been on her own now, she could not rightly recall. Surrounded by nature on all sides yet knowing not what hers was meant to be, she felt she had wandered a path crumbling and being cast to the wind.

In her slumber it had all been so crystal clear, everything had made sense and piece after piece the puzzle that was her guilt and fragility had been solved, only to awaken and lose it all over again. It was tormenting in a way, feeling so close to being able to grasp some sense of ownership over herself yet too knowing she did not belong to anything anymore. Ylva yearned for retribution and yet there was no one to answer her call, no one to judge her for no one knew the things she had done. She knew she wasn't inherently bad, she felt remorse and the dreams that had left a turn in her stomach brought with it the return of her prior evening meal forcing her to curl over and release it to the dirt with a dry wrenching hurl.

She had become the epitome of wild, knowing not what even she was meant for anymore. Find it strange that there seemed that need to understand how she had come this far; for so long all she had focused on was the revenge against her families killers and now that that was done and dealt with, she knew not how to look ahead.

What meaning did Nirauan hold for her anymore. This was the world that her parents had chosen not knowing the fate that they were walking her into. They were dead and the dead did not suffer yet she had, Ylva who had paid dearly for their ignorance of the realm of wild folk. She had lost it all, been reborn in the blood of her heritage and then shed sweat and tears to reach this point; no turning away from ones fate.

Eyes lifting skyward as the sun rose gradually above the clouds and the avian creatures of the waking world rose to the light of day, Ylva Solveig soon found herself questioning her future and whether this was the place she would die. Would she resign herself to a world that had given her nothing but heartache and stolen her innocence; or would she use what she had learned from Akron and turn her fate around, grasp it with both hands and strangle it until something finally rang true in her life.

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She had no friends, no credits and no vessel or technologies to take her off world. Her leave of this hell would have to be timed and she would need to be ready come the next fool person to search for the tombs and ruins of former dead civilizations. The need to go digging through someone else's grave in order to gain some sort of jewel or piece to barter, many had tried and died ending up no better than Clan Solveig in the end.

The next visitor to cross her path, would willingly or otherwise be her escape from this place.​

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Perhaps, out there somewhere she would learn to truly be free. Free of Pain, free of guilt for what she had done to survive.​

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~ End Thread ~​