Saga of a Drengr Skald: A Child Raised by the North
The world is about what you make of it...darkness is all around.
This is a character-driven, grimdark action-adventure, slow-burn mythic thriller with psychological horror and Norse saga-inspired progression elements.
The story unfolds in the brutal world of Viking Scandinavia around the year 750, where childhood itself is a battlefield. A realm where survival is demanded from the cradle, and fate is carved by blood, toil, and steel. Childhood is not a sanctuary but a crucible, one that forges warriors, breaks the weak, and leaves scars that echo across generations.
The magic system is grounded in ancestral runes, divine pacts, and the shadowed realm of memory. Songs of skalds shape perception, while the whispers of forgotten gods twist the minds of children raised in violence. Vidar Rahaldson, scarred by imprisonment in his youth, discovers the Realm of Shadows, a place filled by creatures of another world and age whose aim is still unknown.
This saga is told through the different perspectives of children forced into labor, girls traded as commodities, boys trained for war, and Vidar himself, whose survival becomes a mirror of his society’s descent. It hosts rival jarls, shieldmaidens, and wandering skalds who struggle to preserve stories of those lost to brutality. The people in Midgard believe the gods remain silent in their thrones, while mortals wrestle with the cost of resilience without compassion to be granted favors for their amusement.
Every oath, betrayal, and sacrifice echoes across time, and each revelation unravels slowly, like a long winter night.
Though his beginnings were thought to be horrible in the icy forests of the north, where infants are exposed to death if deemed weak, and those who survive are thrust into labor and violence. As a child, Vidar is brought into a world different from his. He is taken as a member of the child of a family who showed him warmth from the beginning. Though events will later take him on to a bitter and hard survival forged in brutality, can it ever lead to honor, or only destruction?