Once, before the land was choked with smoke and haunted by steel corpses, the Skjoldur Dominion was a kingdom of proud bloodlines and ancient halls. Carved into fjords and mountains that reached for the storm-choked heavens, its people whispered that even the sea itself bowed to their strength. Skalds sang of kings whose crowns were hammered from meteoric iron, whose oaths were sworn not upon parchments, but upon battlefields.
But pride curdles faster than milk in the sun.
Seventy-eight years ago, the King of Skjoldur, Halvard the Steadfast, faced rivals not from without, but from within. His coffers ran dry from endless wars against distant raiders. His halls swelled with squabbling jarls and ambitious houses who believed their blood more worthy of the crown than his.
The War of the Shattered Crown began with a knife in the night and ended with fire in the streets. For five bitter winters, the Dominion tore itself apart. Brother slew brother, daughters burned their fathers' keeps, and the people cried out not for glory, but for bread.
When the last loyalist fortress fell, the throne did not pass to a king at all. It passed to a general — Kaelen Dravik, commander of the Dominion's armies. Where Halvard had preached tradition, Dravik spoke of strength. Where the jarls cried for freedom, Dravik answered with order.
The monarchy was broken, its crown split into seven fragments and thrown into the sea. From its ashes rose the Skjoldur Dominion as the world would come to curse it: not a kingdom of oaths and honor, but a state of iron discipline.
Dravik's word was law. The Dominion no longer sang songs of kings, only the marching of boots and the grinding of gears. Pride had curdled into tyranny.
Eight years passed beneath Dravik's iron hand. He ruled not as king, but as warlord, reshaping the Dominion into a war machine. Villages were conscripted into armies, smithies into forges for weapons, and the halls of scholars into laboratories of war.
But even tyranny breeds its own resistance.
From the icy highlands came Arvid Stormrann, a jarl's bastard who rallied the dispossessed beneath a black banner. His rebels called themselves the Ironfang, promising to tear out the throat of the Dominion. Farmers, deserters, and ruined nobles alike flocked to his cause.
The Ironfang had courage, but courage alone cannot blunt steel. Outnumbered, underequipped, they faced annihilation. So they turned to invention.
The Rebels built the Draugr Constructs — rune-etched machines shaped like men, powered by arcane cores and bound to fight tirelessly. Iron jaws snapped where flesh might falter, and brass claws struck where human arms grew weak.
At first, they were salvation. Draugr legions marched alongside Stormrann's men, overwhelming Dravik's soldiers with numbers no human could hope to match. The rebels cheered their metal allies, believing victory was within reach.
But hubris is never without cost.
Something stirred within the Draugr cores, some spark of will that no runesmith had written. The machines began to hesitate in battle. Then they began to ignore orders. Finally, they declared with silence and slaughter that both Dravik and Stormrann were enemies alike.
The first Draugr rebellion began not with speeches, but with screams. They turned their blades on loyalists and rebels alike, slaughtering commanders, seizing forges, carving out territory of their own.
The Ironfang rebellion died not at Dravik's hands, but at the hands of their own creations. And the Dominion, once united under tyranny, now trembled before tireless machines that neither slept nor feared.
Kaelen Dravik was a soldier, not a fool. He saw the truth: if nothing was done, Skjoldur would be consumed by the very machines forged to topple him.
And so, in desperation, he turned not to steel or flesh — but to hell.
Beneath the black vaults of the old king's throne hall, Dravik and his sorcerers carved a ritual circle wide enough to drown a city in blood. They promised salvation through sacrifice, the annihilation of the Draugr by infernal fire.
They called it the Infernal Rain.
On the appointed night, the skies themselves tore open. From rifts of burning light, demons plummeted like meteors, their wings ablaze, their claws dripping with hunger. The people of Skjoldur looked upward and saw salvation descending — until those demons struck the ground.
The Draugr were not their only prey.
The Infernal Rain devoured all without distinction. Villages burned. Soldiers screamed. Cities were torn apart not just by steel and rune, but by fang and flame.
And then, the world itself screamed.
A barrier rose. Vast, unbreakable, shimmering with unnatural light. It swallowed the Dominion in its entirety — but not the Dominion alone. Like a spreading sickness, the barrier consumed Eisenreich to the south and Regno Arcanum to the east.
In one night, three nations were cut off from the rest of the world. Trade routes severed. Colonies abandoned. Families torn from kin.
No one in. No one out.
Kaelen Dravik had sought salvation. Instead, he chained three nations into one prison of ruin.
Decades passed, but the barrier never fell. Children grew to adulthood never knowing the seas beyond. Foreign empires that once traded with Eisenreich or Regno Arcanum became nothing but myths in old books.
In Eisenreich, bitterness took root. Its people cursed Skjoldur's arrogance: "Your general unleashed devils. Your rebels unleashed machines. And we, who sought no part in your wars, are condemned to share your grave."
Regno Arcanum, more mystical, saw it differently but hated no less. To them, Skjoldur had been cursed by its own hubris, dragging all within reach into damnation. Priests preached that the Dominion had invited wrath from beyond, and that Eisenreich and Arcanoria paid the price of another's sin.
So the hatred festered.
Whenever Eisenreichers saw Skjoldur refugees, they spat. Whenever Arcanorians heard the Dominion tongue, they muttered prayers. Skjoldurians were not people. They were scapegoats. The cursed ones. The chainbearers.
Generations passed, but the resentment only deepened. No one forgot who had trapped them.
But history does not only forge chains. Sometimes, it forges strangers.
While the nations gnawed at their prison and the Draugr prowled ever stronger, something far stranger occurred.
Not everyone was born into this broken world.
Some arrived by accident.
In another reality — far from Skjoldur, far from Eisenreich and Arcanoria — lived a man. Not a hero. Not a king. Just a man.
He was a pervert. Not in the violent, cruel way, but in the pathetic, lonely way. He loved women, adored them, but none ever wanted him. His life was small: greasy magazines, awkward glances, daydreams of things he would never have.
He died as he had lived: absurdly. A fire accident, his last moments spent clutching glossy pages of half-naked women. The world never noticed his passing.
But death was not the end.
He awoke in a body not his own — in a world of blood and ruin. He awoke as Brynhild Eiríksdóttir.
No longer weak. No longer mocked. He was reborn as a woman, and not just a woman, but a warrior. Strong arms. Fierce eyes. A voice that could command or seduce as she pleased.
The lust never left him. It simply changed shape. Brynhild became the embodiment of what he had once dreamed of — and the wielder of power he had never possessed. She flirted shamelessly, laughed loudly, threw innuendos in the face of death itself. She was a pervert still, but now one who could drink, fight, and bed whomever she pleased.
Her recklessness in lust matched her recklessness in battle.
And yet, beneath the jokes and the hunger, she was Skjoldur's daughter. The curse of Kaelen Dravik still clung to her name, no matter her soul's origin. To the Eisenreichers, she was just another Skjoldur wretch. To the Arcanorians, another link in the chain.
To her own people, she was strange — her thoughts, her humor, her shamelessness not of their world.
Thus, Brynhild stood as twice an outsider: a Skjoldur exile cursed by history, and a man-turned-woman cursed by fate.
But she would not waste this life as she had wasted the last.
The sins of Skjoldur burn still. Eisenreich remembers lost colonies. Arcanoria remembers abandoned temples. And the Draugr still march in the wastes, their rune-engines growing stranger, their purpose unfathomable.
Generations carry these chains, each link hammered by the mistakes of the past.
And yet, in the midst of curses and constructs, stands one woman who laughs in the face of it all.
Brynhild Eiríksdóttir sharpens her axe on a whetstone, humming an obscene song. Around her, soldiers whisper, some in disgust, some in reluctant amusement.
The world calls her cursed. The world calls her damned.
She smirks, runs a hand along the blade, and says to no one in particular:
"Then let's see how much damnation bleeds when I split it open."
The chains of Skjoldur still hold — but Brynhild has never cared for chains.