In a dark, dangerous place, far from the woodlands, there was a Norn named Nith'eroi.
Her mother, a kind of creature known as a Grendel, abandoned her not long after her birth - but the Grendel died shortly after, once she had distanced herself from the child as much as possible. She may have been ill, or maybe she knew something was coming and didn't want her newborn to be near; whatever it was, her reasons were a mystery that Nith'eroi would likely wonder about for the rest of her days.
Nith'eroi, a Norn with a Grendlish name, grew up under the care of a kind, elderly creature that called itself an Ettin. The Ettin, whose name was simply ETN-01, took it upon herself to bring Nith'eroi up as her own, teaching the young Norn the Ettish language and telling her tales from Ettish mythology.
Ettins are very practical, calculated creatures, Nith'eroi found. They are born not from a living mother, but from a machine beneath the surface of a desert. They name themselves in the order of their birth, quite literally, using numbers. Their lives revolve around structure, logic, and routine: they believe that they have one purpose, and that purpose is to gather as much machinery as they possibly can. No matter which Ettin she spoke to, she found that each and every one responded to her in the same way, and they all had the same goal in mind! Nith'eroi, though she wasn't sure she understood, followed ETN-01 on a few journeys to locate such machinery.
And so Nith'eroi's life, though perhaps not quite as ordinary as the lives of the Norns in the woodlands, began. By the elderly Ettin's side, she wandered from place to place, in search of somewhere safe she could call home... not quite fitting in with one group or the other, rejected by Grendels, yet growing up without ever seeing another Norn.
During a lone search for gadgets to bring home, she found herself in the woodland terrarium. It was there that after spending the first half hour of her life struggling for survival in dangerous, barren lands, she finally found a place where fresh food was abundant and she felt like she truly belonged...
No comments:
Post a Comment