PLAYED BY: Jared Levine
CHARACTER NAME: Dúrnir Stonegut
GENDER: Man
PRONOUN(S): He/Him
CLASS: Warrior
AGE: 31
RACE: Ulven
HAIR: Brown
EYES: Blue
OCCUPATION: Most recently, Dúrnir has been acting as a shiphand and militia fighter. Previously, he was a farmhand.
KNOWN SKILLS: Combat training, navigation, knot-tying, fishing, basic armor and weapon maintenance, agriculture.
BIRTHPLACE: Originally, a large fishing village along the southern coast of Stormjarl territory
APPEARANCE: Dúrnir has long hair, often kept tied in a ponytail, as well as a full, bushy beard.
NOTABLE TRAITS: None to the eye, though he would come across as unusually good-natured for an Ulven man.
RELATIONSHIPS:
- Saga Elinsdottir – Wife
- Mæva— Infant daughter. Missing, presumed dead.
- Joni Thoginsson – Employer
RUMORS: The people from Dúrnir’s original village might cast aspersions on him as ‘the son of a fool’, while those that knew him during his time in the militia may blame him for the death of his first wife.
BIO / BACKGROUND HISTORY:
Dúrnir’s story begins before his birth. His father, Ráðgeirr Stonegut, was possessed of great convictions of the nature and destiny of the Ulven. He believed that the Great Wolf demanded independence and self-sufficiency, and that an over-reliance on clan and community was a stain of weakness upon the soul. While living in one such community, a large fishing village that stank of that weakness, he schemed, disappearing for days at a time, occasionally weeks. Over the years he built himself not just a family, but also a homestead, which sat along the river nearly half a day’s walk from the place he had begrudgingly lived in for over a decade. With his new home deemed fit to live in, he took his family there in the night, without a word to any of the people who had mistakenly called him friend.
Dúrnir himself was one of many, a pair of hands created so that family could do the work that most would expect of community. He was paradoxically raised from a young age to believe in the same independence of his father, and also in an unending obligation to his parents; to keep their home strong and thriving, no matter the cost. These beliefs pulled Dúrnir in opposite directions, and he resolved the contradiction in a way only a child could- falling ill and failing in both regards, requiring constant aid and attention while being unable to attend to his family’s well-being in any way.
Ráðgeirr was unreasonable, but not insurmountably so. When his son’s life appeared to be in genuine danger, he returned to their prior place of living and fetched a healer. A terse visit and exchange of coin alleviated the worst of the boy’s symptoms, for a time. The second time the spectre of death came to visit, Ráðgeirr delayed a touch longer than he ought to before making the journey once-more. When it returned for the third time, the man hardened his heart and waited for nature to take its course.
But through some miracle of circumstance or upbringing, the boy did not die. Rather, he gradually recovered, and when vigor finally returned to his body, he was set back to work, a sense of duty to the family that had so graciously kept him alive weighing down doubly upon him. It took several more years for him to realize the position he was in and the treatment he received in it, and for the small ember of resentment to develop from that realization.
His life continued in isolation, the only people he knew being his family, and the fever-hazed memory of the healer who had attended to him. He didn’t even know where the village he was born in was, having moved so early in his life that the memory of it had all but evaporated. When a Stormjarl warrior appeared at the edge of their homestead, having been told of its location by the healer, speaking of a civil war and a need for soldiers, Dúrnir could only manage to fear her as he would a wild animal, despite having reached young adulthood.
Ráðgeirr was unreasonable, but not insurmountably so. With war on the horizon, he accepted that one man alone could not face all of clan Grimward, and set off to join the army, so that violence would never fall upon the sanctuary that he and he alone had built. He never returned, and in less than a year of his absence, his family was forced by starvation and helplessness to return to the fishing village. By all accounts, they had instilled within them the skills they needed to survive, but without their patriarch, the cohesion forced upon them had dissolved.
Dúrnir found community to be frightening and confusing. He had been denied decades of socialization and education. He had nothing to his name, not even the means or words to ask for help. He was a native outsider, having only been trained on his father’s particular strain of faith and culture. It would take him years to make up what had been denied to him.
Luckily, he found a home in the Stormjarl militia. The Ulven Civil War had not yet abated, and time working on the farm and hunting in the woods had equipped him with the basic motor coordination needed to wield a weapon. The militia provided him with a softened form of the hierarchy and structure that he was used to, and offered food and lodging, so long as he kept his blood in and his enemies’ out. The next few years were a whirlwind. He fell in love with one of his fellow soldiers, Lopthæna Stormjarl, though lacked the experience to recognize it for what it was. Luckily, she didn’t, and pulled him, as an equal, into marriage. When she fell in battle next to him, the grief and rage he felt came much more naturally.
When the Civil War ended, Dúrnir found himself without purpose, but now enough wits to know that he needed one. He did odd work where he could, and eventually found himself a hand on a whaling ship, serving under a man by the name of Joni Thoginsson. Joni was something of a brute and a scoundrel, but the two of them developed a genuine friendship over their first few months at sea together, bonding over the mutual hardship each had withstood in their youths.
After a particularly bountiful and perilous voyage, he returned to port, finding it full of new faces, many of them refugees. With Joni’s ship too damaged to set back out any time soon, he settled down, no longer the outsider, and stained his soul with the weakness of community. He made friends, and even some healthy rivalries. With one of those friends, Saga Elinsdottir, he found the movements and stirrings of love, which he now had the words and motions for, and found himself bound once more in marriage, embodied in their child, Mæva.
It was a good life, for a time. But the war that had broken his first family had not died, merely slept, and in its waking thrashings, it tried to break his new one. A raid, carried out by clan Grimward, descended upon their village in the night. By all accounts, Dúrnir, having served in the militia before, should have been one of the Ulven ready to defend his home with grit and steel. But when he imagined violence crashing upon his wife and daughter, panic overtook training, and he tried in desperation to get the three of them to the docks and out onto safe waters.
They were waylaid briefly, as Saga looked for her sister and parents in the chaos. Having found none of them, they turned instead to try and make their way to the docks. It was overstuffed with countless others who had the same idea, forming a solid wall of flesh and bone that pressed in on all sides as they attempted to push their way through. Dúrnir clung to his wife tightly, and she to their daughter. Among the cacophony of shrieking and movement, he heard Saga scream, and by the time he turned to look at her, their daughter was gone. They pushed back, trying to find her, but the tidal wave of Ulven dragged them, almost in punishment, towards the docks.
They did not find safety there. Raiders set upon them. Dúrnir, in his unwillingness to simply stop looking in hopes of seeing his daughter somewhere among the crowd, allowed an attacker to sink a blade into his back. Saga set upon the Grimward soldier with arcane magic and dragged her husband away to safety, as shock consumed him.
They fell upon a boat, lacking the time or wherewithal to find its proper owner, and cast themselves out upon the sea. It was a marginal vessel, not made for long voyages, but it seemed to be fueled by the rage inside of them, and so they sailed for the Fire Isle. As days passed, and the island was nowhere to be seen, they realized that they had traveled too far east. Rather than turn around, though, Dúrnir took this as a sign. During his time in the militia, he had come to know one of the Stormjarl Einherjar. He knew of their deeds, and their mettle, and knew they would not leave this aggression unanswered. The two continued eastward, fire in their hearts, eager to lend their blades in the name of vengeance and justice.