Sköll

## Application Sheet

Sköll was a gray-furred male wolf with bristly fur and one rusty-orange eye. He entered the pack of Fellfang under Jarl Valera's rule, and his story is just beginning. Sköll was created and RP'd by sea-lamprey.

## Personality

* ***Crass**.* Most wolves’ first impression of Sköll is that he’s a bit rough around the edges, to say the least. His way of speaking is loud, blunt, and filled with less-than-polite language… And his jokes are cringeworthy. More prim types might find his poor manners grating.
* ***Forthright**.* Sköll’s as honest as they come. If he’s got something to say, he’ll say it, and damn the consequences. Though he isn’t out to hurt anyone’s feelings, he believes telling the truth is always the best policy — even if it’s a truth someone would rather not hear.
* ***Gentle**.* Beneath the fearsome looks and the foul mouth, Sköll has a soft heart and a surprisingly delicate touch when it comes to those in distress. He’s become the wolf he is today due to the unexpected kindness of others — all he wants is to pass on some of that care.
* ***Steady**.* Sköll is a wolf who has seen a lot of life, and no longer allows its ups and downs to shake him as much as they once did. Life goes on, until it doesn’t — he won’t waste his time worrying about the little things. Others might find his unflappability calming.
* ***Principled**.* Above all else, Sköll wholly believes in Fellfang’s potential to be a positive force in the world — and if he could spend his sunset years being a part of that force, he could die happy. To him, the Code of Honor is more than just a set of rules — it is a way of life, one that he spent years struggling to attain. Not even the Trickster herself could drag his hard-won ideals away from him.

## Pre-Group History

The Fellfang Sköll was born into was very different from the coastal pack that exists today. They were a barbarous band, a merciless pack of pirates helmed by the most bloodthirsty pirate of them all — their Jarl, Story. Story was ferocious and paranoid in equal measure, and this earned him resentment not only from the packs he raided, but from his own packmates as well.

Sköll grew up in a fractured home. His father, Solvarg, was one of the Jarl’s most loyal warriors and believed their current way of life was both necessary and natural. His mother, Laufey, however — she whispered to her pup of the all-but-forgotten First Ways of Fellfang, of wandering healers, of honor attained not through victory over the enemy, but through living in harmony with the land.

Ultimately, though, Solvarg’s force of personality and gory tales of victory won out over Laufey’s fantastical tales in young Sköll’s mind. He wanted to become a raider and chase his father’s rarely-offered praise. And so he submitted himself to Solvarg’s harsh tutelage, and, caught up in visions of future glory on the battlefield, did not think to wonder why his mother vanished shortly before his rite of passage into adulthood.

Life continued on this way until Sköll was a little over a year old, and Fable returned to challenge his brother for leadership. Even after Story fell in battle, even after it came out that Fable had not killed his father after all, Solvarg refused to accept the rule of a softer Jarl. Fable and the outsiders that came with him would lead the Fellfang to ruin, he claimed. He went into exile willingly, expecting his son to follow in his footsteps.

For a moment, Sköll wondered what it would be like to stay — what it would be like to live in harmony, like in the stories of Fellfang’s distant past his mother had taught him as a pup. Many of the wolves he had grown up with had thrown in their lot with Fable, regardless of what Solvarg and his ilk said — could his father be wrong…?

But Solvarg ordered him to come along, and he knew better than to disobey his father.

This was a choice he would come to regret.

Sköll was not the only exile who chose to follow Solvarg; several of his loyal subordinates accompanied them as well.  It was a lively group for a time, and though the nightly conversations were dripping with vengeful bitterness and plots to retake Fellfang in their dead Jarl’s name, Sköll was not as lonely out in the wilds as he thought he would have been.

Of course, that state of affairs did not last long. The exiled raiders soon discovered that most packs in the area were all too accustomed to defending themselves from raiding parties much larger than their ragtag assembly. They lost, and lost again, and even when they won they paid a heavy cost in blood and infections that no one among them knew how to cure. Their numbers dwindled — some succumbing to their injuries, others slipping away in the night. Solvarg snarled at the empty nests where his lackeys once slept: Weaklings! Cowards!

And then it was only the two of them. Solvarg and Sköll, a father-and-son raiding party. Life under Story’s rule seemed like a breeze in comparison to this hell. Sköll was constantly sick with hunger; they lived in an empty no-wolf’s land, and the only time they could eat was when they managed to sneak meals from the territories of neighboring packs. They treated any unfamiliar wolves as mortal enemies, and they were treated the same in kind. Solvarg still believed that the power he’d once wielded was still within his reach — but the words that had once been gospel to Sköll now began to sound like the ravings of an old man who couldn’t admit when he’d lost. Still, though, Solvarg was his father — what else could he do but follow him?

One day, they got sloppy. Desperate for an easy win, they went for a dead elk that seemed to have been abandoned — but of course, it was an ambush set for them by one of the packs they’d harassed. Solvarg went down in an instant, his enraged screams abruptly cut short by teeth in his throat. Sköll managed to escape the same fate, but only by a hair’s breadth.

He knew that even if he used all his remaining strength to beat those wolves away from his father, there was nothing left to save. Sköll ran, and he kept on running until he could run no more.

Three wolves stood over him when he awoke.

Sköll didn’t recognize any of them from the ambush, but he was certain he was dead. He snarled and braced himself, ready to go down fighting — but one of them, an elderly she-wolf, shushed him.

“No need for that, son. We ain’t here to hurt ya.”

To his utter shock, she offered him a freshly-killed rabbit. It was the first act of generosity he’d experienced since he’d left Fellfang, and it nearly brought him to tears.

Sköll didn’t grow to trust the little group immediately; their bond formed in bits and pieces. He learned that the eldest she-wolf’s name was Lea; that the other two were Barley and Lou, her son and daughter. They belonged to no pack and no credo — there’d been others traveling with them, once, but they were long gone now. But as little as they had, they were still kind enough to share it with a perfect stranger.

The way they lived reminded Sköll of the stories his mother had once told. What Fellfang was. What it might have become, now, with Fable leading it.

Lea was intrigued by Sköll’s tales of Fellfang; the group agreed to seek out the pack together. Over the journey, the four of them became very close. Sköll grew quite fond of Barley in particular; they romped and wrestled like pups in the daylight, and shared gentle kisses when night fell.

Of course, there was no Fellfang to find at the end of that adventure; only an ash-covered mountain devoid of life. Sköll was crushed, but his friends — his new family — were with him. He set down his dreams of his homeland, and he moved on.

Years passed, and for the most part, they  were happy ones. Friends came and went; Lou took on a loner as a mate, and he, too, joined their travels. They had children, and those children grew up under the benevolent eyes of two loving parents, two uncles, and a wise grandmother, until it was their time to embark on their own adventures. Sköll taught his family the Fellfang traditions he could remember, and he learned some new ones from them, too. Lea grew older and frailer, until one day she passed away in her sleep. Her family mourned, and sent her body down the river — to Ondheim, Sköll hoped, but regardless of what afterlife she found, it would surely be a gentle one.

Life went on in its slow, peaceful way.

Until it didn’t.

One day, Sköll and his band noticed something …odd. Foul smells lingering on the wind, carcasses left partially eaten. Some new pack, marking its territory? They hurried their steps, hoping to leave whatever was going on far behind them.

For a little while, they thought they had succeeded. They let down their guard. Sköll split off from the group to fish while the others followed the trail of an injured elk.

The fishing was good that day. Sköll caught four fat trout and buried them for later; he howled his success to his family.

No answer.

Perhaps they were in the midst of a hunt and couldn’t reply? Sköll decided to follow the scent trail they’d left, hoping to catch up and help if he could.

What he found at the end of that trail…

Even now, he does not like to think of the state he found their bodies in. Lou had clearly lasted the longest; she’d died with her jaws clamped around the throat of one of the white raiders that had ambushed them. The others — Lou’s mate, his dear Barley…they were nigh unrecognizable. The elk, too, was dead. Half-eaten, like the other carcasses they’d found.

He sent them all down the river, and prayed that they would find a peace in Ondheim that they could not in their cruel deaths.

He learned later, from other grief-stricken wanderers, that those white raiders were massacring wolves across the land in much the same way as they had done to his family. Monsters, they said. Entirely without mercy. Life as a traveler was no longer safe; but neither was life in a pack — the Hive was powerful enough to threaten them all.

Sköll was all alone in the world, and he was beginning to feel the weight of his years pressing down on his bones. He had little hope that he could cheat death a second time if it chose to come for him. All he could do was spend whatever time was left in this sunset of his life offering comfort and assistance to those he encountered, as Lea had done for him so many years ago.

In the end, he did survive the Hive’s reign. He did not witness the final battle that drove them out for good; but he heard the tale after, told a dozen times in a dozen different ways. Seven packs united to save the land, they said, with loners, birds, and even cougars fighting under their banners. One of the alphas even sacrificed his life in that battle, they said. What was his name again?

Jarl Lincoln, of Fellfang.

Fellfang still lived.

All at once, Sköll’s long-abandoned dreams rushed back to him.

## Trivia

* He has one blinded eye from an injury sustained long ago. He tells a different story every time someone asks how he got it.

## External Links

* Official Application Sheet
* sea-lamprey's deviantART Gallery