Skadi - Maiden of Vengeance

The invisible middle child of the Himlingr family, Skadi often felt outcast from siblings. While Frøya received the adoration of her father and brother, and Hel was praised for her wits and spirituality, Skadi felt as though she had little to offer her family, thus did her best to live as their second son, rather than their third daughter. While her sisters tended to livestock; milking, eggs, feeding, she joined her brother and father in hunts in the forest, cutting firewood and hauling hay bales across the farmland. Thus, Skadi always felt a greater pull to her brother than she thought either of her sisters did, and confided in him in ways she never could with her sisters. Thus when he passed, none weeped greater than Skadi, though her wails were stifled and her tears hidden, lest her family take her sorrow for weakness. When the powers of the divine manifested themselves into the family, Skadi was blessed by immense strength, enough to lift an ox, and the cart it pulled. Though her family splintered with the death of their eldest, Skadi thereafter fell into isolation. Their father’s relinquishment of his own gift and the self-imposed exile of their mother left her sister Hel to dominate as the matriarch of the family. Though Skadi cursed being subservient to her sister, Hel claimed to speak to their brother from beyond, and it was his wish for the remaining family members to be bound together as sisters, rather than further fracture their already broken clan. Yet it was her father who appeared to her, long after his disappearance, in the guise of the One Eyed Wanderer. He told Skadi that the words of her sister were lies, and Hel had never once spoken to their brother’s soul since his death, for it had eluded her, yet was the lone thing that drove her on. Scorned by betrayal, Skadi wears a mask of candour with her sister, though plots her downfall in secret, now understanding that Hel will bring the downfall of Nordheim if she continues unchecked.