Orling
Orling the Wary, bastard son of Farnek and a Jonorn woman, fathered Þordil the Great by Hurdania, Goddess of Justice, a fact he died without ever learning. Born in 20 BFS and raised in obscurity outside the Northern Isles court that had produced his father, he is remembered to history not for the line he carried but for the single war he fought, and for the discovery, made too late, that the reasons he had fought it were not the reasons he had been given.
Origins
Orling was the unacknowledged grandson of Yanterr Wave-master, born to a Jonorn woman who had taken Prince Farnek to her bed on one of his more debauched nights during the seven-year stewardship of his disappeared brother Jolim Salt-lung. The Jonorn line accounts for his stature: staggeringly tall and physically powerful, a blatant foretelling of the demigod son he would one day father.
By disposition, however, he was nothing like the warrior his bulk seemed to promise. Orling was a gentle giant, averse to violence and visibly disturbed by bloodshed.
The Other Orphan
The village in which Orling was raised housed one other child of consequence: a girl left in its keeping by no traceable parent, raised on the same charity that had raised him. The two orphans fell in love over the years that followed, and by the time the firestorm approached its outbreak, she was carrying his child.
The girl was Hurdania, Goddess of Justice, exiled by her grandfather Exar to live out a span among mortals as one of them, a punishment whose terms she had not chosen to share with the boy she had fallen in love with. He believed her as mortal as himself.
The Raid
In the opening months of OFS, a band of armed men descended on the village. They killed many of its people, struck down the pregnant Hurdania along with the rest, and rode off into the country. The survivors called them bandits, and the chroniclers of the years immediately after recorded them as such.
They were no such thing.
The mercenary commander who had been quietly trying to recruit Orling, by reputation a man worth a company of ordinary fighters, had grown impatient with his refusals. The “bandit” raid was his solution: a detachment of his own men in disguise, dispatched to take from Orling everything that had kept him content, so that he might at last have reason to take up the blade.
Orling never knew his lover had survived. A god is not so easily killed by mortal hands, and Hurdania passed not into death but into a coma indistinguishable from it, left in the rubble of the village among those who had not survived. Orling believed her dead, and the child she had carried lost with her. He took up arms within days, and presented himself to the very man who had ordered her killed.
The Rift
What followed was unprecedented. A man with no martial training, who had only that morning been a peaceful giant in a coastal village, set himself against the Legions of Voitykras, the invasion forces pouring into Nurrheim from the Second Plane under the Moslager’s hand, with a violence that astonished both sides. He fought with the strength of the dragons, and the Doghul who fought alongside him through the duration of the war gave him the epithet Doghul-friend in those years. The conflict, which had been turning against the defenders before his arrival, swung decisively on his presence in it.
Across the same months, in the village he had left behind, Hurdania lay in a coma indistinguishable from death. The son she carried, Þordil the Great, was born in OFS to a mother who could not yet wake to him. Hurdania woke within the month and raised her son alone; word of her survival, by routes the records do not specify, never reached Orling.
The Truth of His Past
The Rift ended in 1 AFS with the defeat of Adersxitzzqynjer. In its aftermath, by routes the records do not specify, Orling came at last to know what had been done to him: that the men who had razed his village were not bandits, that his lover had been struck down on the order of the very man under whose banner he had fought for the duration of the war, and that every blow he had struck across that war had been struck in the service of her killer.
He turned his attention immediately to the mercenary.
Death
Orling pursued his revenge for some years. He did not reach his target. He was met instead by Viedskavn, the legendary Drakhul then rising through the ranks of his people’s exodus, not yet the Crimson Emperor he would one day become, and slain in single combat. The mercenary commander whose death he had sought outlived him.
He died believing his lover dead, and the child she had carried lost with her. He had never met his son.
Legacy
The blood Orling never had the chance to claim, Jonorn on his mother’s side, Kiegzorn through Farnek, divine through the orphan girl beside him whose nature not even her lover ever knew, pooled instead into the son he barely lived to father, and from there into the First Emperor of the Nortr and the dynasty that would bear his name. The throne of the Northern Isles he never knew to seek would be taken, two generations later, by his grandson Garðwin I in the conquest of Kiegnarrzsk, claimed by force of arms by a man who never knew the claim had been his grandfather’s by right.
In the chronicles of the Nortr, Orling is a footnote, Þordil’s father, briefly. In the longer chronicles of the Doghul, he is something more: the Primevean who fought with the strength of the dragons, the man they called friend, the one death they remember from a war whose outcome he helped decide.
What Hurdania found when she woke, and how her father, Olden, the Wise, eventually came for her and redeemed her, the chroniclers of his line have left to the keepers of hers.