The wind sang a wordless song across the fjord, a lament of frost and ancient pasts. Inside the stony hall of Raven's Peak, the central hearth's blazed in defiance of the biting cold. For eighteen winters, Leif Hartvigsen had felt that cold in his very bones, not from the weather but from the lack of a spark within.
All his peers had long ago felt the call of their fated rune - the latent affinity for one of the elder runes, the symbols by which one could be connected to the World Tree Yggdrasil. It was a common sight: maybe a young man's eyes would glow with the fiery light of Kenaz, or a woman's skin would ripple and harden with the solid, stony gray of Thurisaz. To cultivate the knowledge of the runes was to claim a part of the world's raw essence, to draw upon the same energy that fed the roots of Yggdrasil, to forge a destiny for one's self.
But not Leif.
Leif sat on a lonely bench, silently whittling a piece of oak into a rudimentary carving of a longship, the wood resisting his knife with a stubborn indifference that seemed to mockingly mirror his own life. The only thing worse than the jeers and insults of his peers from when he was younger was the dull, resigned pity that now took its place. "Leif the Lifeless", "Leif the Lost", "Leif the Lackluster", they used to call him. Now, he was just 'poor, poor Leif'.
As the wind howled outside and the elders of Raven's Hall recited tales of jötnar and gods, something else held Leif's mind as his knife stilled in his hand. A subtle pins-and-needles feeling prickled in his finger like the prelude to frostbite. Despite how close to the hearth he was, Leif suddenly felt as if his blood had turned into icy water, a cold so biting it burned. At his core, Leif felt a deep, all-consuming chill, a coldness so profound and still that it felt like there was a snow-capped mountain sitting in his gut. Leif's gaze focused in on the half-carved wood in his numbing fingers, and a singular, deep vertical line caught his eye - an engraving he didn't recall making.
The knife slipped from Leif's hand, bouncing off his well-worn boots before softly clattering to the floor.
Leif had always felt a sort of connection to the stone, the wood, the ice, as if they'd been a part of him. As a child, he would sit for hours by the shore, tracing patterns in the fine gravel. Now, he understood why - the cold, the objects in stasis, they were more than just things, they were conduits. The cold he felt was no mere chill; it was the echo of primordial power. Leif stared at the gouged line in the wood, until it no longer looked like a mere gash in the material. It was a broken, raw etching, like broken ice condensed into a singular shape.
It was Isa, the rune of ice.
Leif held back a gasp, feeling as if he'd been plunged through the surface of a frozen lake. The resonance was too strong, too raw, his soul finally forming a tether to the Tree far later than other Runeborn had. It felt like a dam had finally burst inside of Leif. Even as he closed his eyes, he could still see Isa, now envisioning it as a fragmented, serrated shard of ice. The elders had said that the runes were a gift from the World Tree itself, but this felt more like a curse. It was not one of the mighty, heroic runes that the Asgardian Holds specialized in, runes that drew from Asgard, Midgard and Muspelheim. Isa was of Niflheim, wielded by mystics, seers, and scholars associated with the Niflheim Holds.
The pain that Leif felt was immense, like a thousand splinters of ice biting into his veins. Leif bit his lip until he drew blood, riding out the Rune Awakening - the first stage of rune cultivation.
He finally had a fated rune - and it was one of the worst ones someone living under the Asgardian Holds could get, all but forbidden in their halls.
The pain subsided as the rune's essence coalesced in his core, forming a skjöld, the core by which all runes were bound. Leif looked down at the half-carved ship in his hands and imagined a ship not carved of wood, but of ice. It was at that moment Leif made his decision - he would leave Raven's Hall behind and embark on a journey across the realms, in search of the runes that resonated with his Isa. And once he found, bound, and mastered those runes, he'd achieve whatever every Runeborn sought out - to become a Branch of Yggdrasil.
But before he could do any of that, he had to leave Raven's Hall behind. Leif stood up from the bench and slunk away, gathering a satchel, some warm clothes, and stealing some mead and trail rations from the hall's larders. Then, when everyone was asleep, he left the hall and its surrounding village. Snow softly crunched under his feet as he walked, the cold seeming almost comfortable to him now that he'd awakened to Isa.
No more would he be Leif the Lifeless, no more would he be Leif the Lost. From here on out, he was Leif the Rimetouched, and this was the beginning of his saga.