The Northlands: Crow Men

In the Northlands, it is said, crows are the bearers of many things. The men of the Icewastes say that crows carry a curse beneath their wings, and as such should never be eaten lest you invite that curse into yourself.  The valley folk know that crows are the eyes of their gods, especially Toolus who sleeps beneath the hills, and Palana who writhes and burns, and it would serve one well to be especially gracious and humble before the eyes of such strange, jealous gods. And the grim, dour men of the grim, dour mountains tell tales of crows that eat secrets from the heads of dead men, and share them with those who know the darker paths of magic.

There is an order in these things, a sense of purpose.

The Crow Men are not a part of this order. There is no sense about them, no purpose that men may ken.

A Crow Man is, in it’s essential parts, a man still. But it is also a grotesque parody of men, the un-men of beasts that so closely resemble them.  Men do not creep about the lonely places of the world. Men do not rattle and cluck and mutter incoherently alone in dark caves, waiting for passers-by.  Men do not crawl and creep on feathered hand and foot, hunched and shambling. Men do not cackle in mocking, maddening glee from long smooth beaks out of which roils the noxious odour of death. And men do not gibber and shriek and dance and caper around weird pyres on moonless nights when men ought be locked in their homes.

There are many tales of the genesis of these shuddering wretches.  The men of the Icewastes assert that it is result of the curse of crows.  These are beings who foolishly killed and ate crows, and are marked forever as such.

The valley folk know them as a grim reminder of the cost of forgetting the appropriate rites, the rituals of thanks for Toolus and Palana, and why the old ways must be preserved lest they all descend into such bestial madness.

The men of the mountains have tales of the Crow Men going back generations, and say that they have always been, and will always be. That there is no real explanation for them, that they simply are, despite how horrid and despicable and stomach-churning they may be.

And the scholars of the world shudder at the mention of the Crow Men, muttering vaguely about certain passages in tomes mouldering and ancient, and the rites described therein with their eerie similarity to the cavorting of those dark, moonless nights.

The Northlands: The Curse of the Jöttun

There was once a great kingdom of giants, far, far to the north, beyond endless miles of frozen waste and impassable mountains. Talented in sorceries and strange sciences known only to them, they inflicted storms and plagues upon men who lived near the wastes, and spirited away victims to their hidden kingdom for unknown purpose. But still men thrived, their numbers swelling, their communities growing, and growing ever more spiteful of the cruel giants in their secret home.

All things change, however, and time and fate work in mysterious ways.  Even with their sorceries and sciences, the giants could not stop their own doom, cursed with the knowledge of its inexorable march but unable to act against it.  The giants dwindled, their kingdom decaying, their knowledge in unknown arts evaporating before those that remained.  But they would not slip from this world without action.  The giants blamed men for their lot, spitting and cursing and burning with hate as their world fell apart around them.  And before the last of the giants faded from this world, they lay a curse upon men, an indelible mark upon the soul of anyone who should enter the frozen wastes the giants once ruled from afar.

The curse of the Jöttun.

Life is hard in the frozen Northlands, and those who would survive must do so by any means available.  Extreme circumstances push men to extreme acts, after all. Any man who consumes the flesh of another man, willfully or not, is taken by the spirit of the Jötunn. It eats away at the soul, quietly at first, then hungrily as it fattens itself on the sins of spirit.

A man who is thus corrupted is gifted the mighty strength of a giant of old, and hexed with a near-bottomless gnawing hunger, only sated by more manflesh. Ordinary food has no purchase on a Jötunn, and is more likely to make him violently ill than satisfy.  A hunger, unsated, will drive a Jötunn to frenzied madness, ravenous and desperate for the skin of his former brothers.  The more they consume, the faster the change takes hold, bones lengthening, skin, pale and stretching taut, nearly incapable of keeping pace with the rapid growth. Their hair dry like straw, their eyes sunken and wild. Their minds become something beyond themselves, cunning and devious.

The whispers begin as the corruption does.  At first it could be mistaken for howling wind, but quickly becomes obviously other. It is not a whisper of words, but of ideas. That your brothers and sisters don’t mean as much as you once thought.  That the hunger will never end unless they give into it.  That somewhere beyond the impassable mountains, there are secrets amongst a ruined kingdom that is theirs and only theirs to know.

When the transformation becomes too difficult to hide, when men whisper and stare and finger the hilts of their axes and blades, a Jötunn will flee civilization, running to wild freedom in the wastes, but enslaved by the curse of a world long past.

Most will lurk on the fringes of civilization, hiding amongst the crags and glacial peaks, no longer feeling the bitter cold, and watching for menfolk who leave the safety of their sturdy walls in small number. Jötunn without manflesh will become desperate quickly, and will even dig up barrows, the respite of the cold dead, to pick at whatever decaying flesh still remains. But these are Jötunn beyond desperation, beyond sanity. Some will head north, to return to a crumbling kingdom, for reason unknown even to themselves.

This is the curse of the Jötunn.