Þordil
Þordil the Great, demigod son of Orling the Wary and Hurdania, Goddess of Justice, was the founder and namesake of the dynasty that bears his name, and is remembered in the chronicles of his own line as the First Emperor of the Nortr.
Origins
Þordil was born on the day of the firestorm itself, the year that the calendar of the age would mark as OFS, its singular zero. By 3 AFS, the boy had been adopted as the fifth Son of Oykrig, a divine sonship without precedent for a Primevean child, and the foundation of his later epithet Oykrig’s Chosen.
In youth he was regaled with tales of conquest and glory, and with quieter accounts of his father’s failures. The mixture cured into something hard. Where Orling the Wary had been a gentle giant slow to violence, the son grew bitter and spiteful, filled with contempt and wanton ambition, a child who dreamt of a land unified under his imaginary coat of arms, and a young man who at the age of fourteen was prepared to bring that dream into being at any cost.
The Unifier
At 14 AFS Þordil challenged and slew Voldin the Wretched, and was crowned Chief of the Nortr in the same year, a coronation that few older chieftains expected him to survive. They were proven wrong almost immediately.
From 16–21 AFS he prosecuted the Wodarukniten (War of Unification) against Kronorn, Zodorn, and Gelagorn, the three rival chiefdoms whose territories together comprised the unconsolidated North. Each campaign opened with diplomatic provocations so abrasive that war was the only remaining recourse; each ended with Þordil’s banner over a subjugated capital. In 21 AFS the Logrutenfounencrok (Last Stand at Foundry Crag) ended what remained of organized Nortr resistance to him. He was crowned High King of the Nortr in its wake, taking the imperial coronation name Ekkurn I, the Victorious.
The songs hold that in all his thirty-seven wars, Þordil never lost a single battle.
The Conqueror
The High King’s appetite did not end at the borders of his own people. The Wodarsubjuten (War of Subjugation), 21–41 AFS, was the work of his middle and late years, a twenty-year campaign against the Northern Isles, the Northern Tribes, and Enonia, waged with full divine backing from Þonart, Exar, and Sketzuum. Where the Wodarukniten had unified, the Wodarsubjuten subjugated; the names are not coincidence.
The campaign was not without its near-disasters. At the Battle of Relanor, confronted with Þordil’s terms of surrender, the Enorn king Argyllic I returned a single line that outlived him: “I shall not treat with this Scourge from the West.” He then sallied unexpectedly from his defensive position against Þordil’s force, which had been force-marched for weeks and bloodied by Graoigorn mercenaries, and nearly broke the High King’s line. Argyllic sought single combat and was slain by Þordil’s hand. Military scholars in the centuries since have generally held that, had the Enorn king not pressed for the personal duel, Þordil would have lost the engagement, and possibly the war. The Enorns venerate Argyllic for the attempt to this day, and his rebuke, modified in the mouths of his surviving peoples to “Scourge of the West”, became their standing euphemism for a name they would no longer speak aloud.
It was during the Wodarsubjuten that Þordil opened the Thrakheddenol, the systematic delivery of conquered Primeveans into Drakhullic slavery, a practice the chronicles of his line have, by and large, declined to record.
Family and Succession
By Ingrid Þordil fathered four sons:
- Garðwin I, Great-storm (b. 18 AFS)
- Kael, the Rich
- Ule, Bear-heart
- Jargsnek (b. 24 AFS)
Ingrid died in Jargsnek’s childbirth, a loss Þordil seems never to have reconciled with his youngest son. And yet within the same year, against the counsel of his brothers and chieftains, the High King named that youngest son sole heir to his throne. He cited prophecy. The court did not ask which.
In 40 AFS, near the close of his life, Þordil was formally recognized as Son of Stone, the Daia honorific that elevated him above mortal Primevean rank and confirmed the divine sonship Oykrig had granted him decades before.
Death
In 41 AFS, in the same year the Wodarsubjuten reached its conclusion, Þordil, the single greatest swordsman ever to live, who in a twenty-seven-year dueling career had lost only one fight, lost his second and final.
He was slain by his fourth-born son and chosen heir, Jargsnek, during what the official accounts record as a sparring match interrupted by an altercation over Jargsnek’s religious beliefs. The accounts add that Jargsnek struck his father in the back, fled into exile, and was thereafter remembered as the Kinslayer.
They do not address how the greatest swordsman ever to live, who had personally trained the son in question, could be caught off-guard and struck down in a single blow.
It is a question those who fought alongside him never ceased to ask.
Legacy
The dynasty Þordil founded would, within a single decade of his death, tear itself to pieces in the Revekwodargilgran (Great Vengeant War) of 51–63 AFS, fought between his three surviving sons and the exiled Jargsnek, a war from which the line would never fully recover. The “greatest domain any Primevean had ever achieved” fragmented along its old fault lines, and within centuries his descendants would face the second Drakhullic invasion of Raetun from a position of severely diminished strength. The restoration awaited Ekkurn II, remembered posthumously as the Venerated, who would inherit both the dream of Þordil’s empire and the imperial regnal name itself, long after the empire it had once crowned was gone.
In the chronicles of the Nortr, Þordil is the First Emperor, the Unifier, the Great. In the records of the Enorns, the Northern Isles, and the Primeveans sold across the Sea of Garðwin in chains, he is remembered in less generous terms. The distance between those two readings is the distance between the Þordil his sons would inherit and the Þordil his subjects would survive.