Otmar was a small county in the ironically named region known as the Emerald Steppes. A collection of townships and settlements located smack dab in the middle of the most arid, empty and dry portion of the otherwise lush and fertile continent of Harta.
Rus was the third biggest town in this county, not to the level of a city but big enough.
Within Rus there were five families of influence, not quite nobility of course, the only nobility who’d be found dead out there, that would dare announce themselves as such, were the McBriars, whose senile, doddering head was the Count who ruled this County.
Still the clans held influence, usually owning a fair share of industries in the townships of the county, as well as being responsible for the county’s defense.
Amongst these clans was the Oddmund family. Headed by Carlo Oddmund who may or may not have been related to the deposed Oedheim noble house that was deposed several generations prior.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
As a clan they were bound to have branch families, extended relatives who shared the same name. And the head of one of those Oddmund clan’s branch families was a man by the name of Jarek.
Jarek vis-Oddmund, a knight of some renown who was crippled during one of the continent’s last great wars. Retiring with his trusted lieutenant turned wife to become one the guard captains for the Rus Township and a protector of the County.
While Jarek was unreconciled to life as a crippled old war dog, and his wife Olivia might have expected more than a life struggling to make ends meet in the middle of nowhere, things were what they were and life progressed as it would.
They had children, they made friends, they set down roots.
And eventually before they knew it, on a certain year, near the tail end of the rainy season when things would just barely grow, the Jarek and his wife would be a middle-aged couple welcoming their youngest, and according to their plans and what the household could afford, their last, child to the world.
Edwin vis-Oddmund, a runty little thing weighing barely nine pounds at birth. His green skin, still pale and thin enough for the veins beneath to be seen. The nub of his future horn bearing the odd trait of glowing blue when left in the dark. His eyes, a striking shade of silver, a luminous blue-silver, the color of sky-steel.
Though he came out sopping wet and covered in blood like any other child of the Jotnar, He didn’t cry when he was born.
Instead on that night it howled and rained so fiercely it was as if the heavens that hung above the world of Embla, were crying for him.