abstract
| - Why does that mongrel Hrafnauge call himself a Stygian? Few men have spoken such words more than once. My mother, Cervana - may her bones remain at rest - was a servant of Xotli in one of the coastal temples in the Styx delta. She was captured by a party of pillaging Aesir and held as trell by Eirik Theindallson, one of the chieftains in his clan. Eirik held a soft spot for my mother and just two years before I was born, he gave her free from trelldom. Much to the disdain of his clan, he shortly after took her as his wife. The other chieftains did not like the idea of foreign blood coming into leadership and laid her to hate. When I was born - my dark skin, dark hair and yellow eyes made my father laugh and say he had fathered a little raven, and he named me Hrafnauge - Raven's eye. I remember little of my father, but my mother said he was a kind and honest man, and he thought me how to carry myself and use a blade from the age of three. Sadly, Eirik the son of Theindall, fell to the blade of a tribesman after he tried to settle a drunken dispute, and my mother - fearing for our lives - fled Thule and returned to Stygia when I was four years of age. She raised me in the temple, but even in Stygia, I was still a halfbreed outcast that had to work twice as hard and be twice as good to satisfy his teachers. Even so, I was among the first of my peers to become a true Herald of Xotli, and truly the first of Aesir blood. As I grow older, my dark hair has taken after my father's blond braids and his cold blood of the north mixed with my Stygian mother's temperament, have made me a man of mood. I am Hrafnauge, Herald of Xotli.
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