Post by Valdyri on Jan 1, 2017 15:29:09 GMT -5
DREYI, VALDYRI
SPIRITUALIST
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Height & Weight: 5’6” & 120lbs
Hair & Eye Color: Red and Green
Positive Traits: Sympathetic, Fiery, Honorable, Passionate
Negative Traits: Arrogant, Domineering, Obsessive, Impetuous
Loyalties: Valdyri is loyal to her family, her country, and her morals.
Snapshots:
Born: October 31st, 1998
Begins basic training with her mother and grandparents: March 1st, 2004
Receives tattoo on Winter Nights celebration (and her birthday): October 31st 2008
Activates tattoo for the first times and experiences Dreyivaldyr: December 1st 2008
Decides to follow in her mother's footsteps and become a diplomat: April 16th, 2012
Finishes upper secondary school: June 27th, 2016
Accompanies her mother to Japan: January 1st, 2017
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description: Valdyri is tall and lithe, her muscles lean but well-defined from countless days spent training and wandering the wilderness. There is next to no fat on her frame, leaving her with an almost willowy figure. Her skin is pale but not unhealthily so, and it is scattered with constellations of small nicks and scars. Her face is a bizarre combination of regal and rugged, high cheekbones and a small bow mouth combined with large, vibrant emerald eyes that almost seen to burn in their intensity and a wild mane of fiery hair. When she smiles, her incisors seem just a tad too sharp and her gaze just a bit too bright. Her feet are hardened, the ends of her long, elegant fingers callused, and her lips are ever chapped - she portrays an image of natural beauty, something too wild and free to be chained by the boundaries of modern convention.
Her voice is silvery and almost musical, though rarely louder than it needs to be. It is beautiful in an eery way, like the hidden music of a wolf's howl. She moves with a hunter's grace, not quite cocky so - more quietly self-assured, confident in her own abilities. Even when still she always seemed prepared to leap into motion, muscles relaxed but ever ready. She holds her head high and keeps her spine straight, not rigid, simply firm. Almost everything about her puts off a confidence on the edge of arrogance, and she makes no effort to hide it. The only thing that doesn't fit into this image is her style - she almost always keeps her hair long and free, cascading down her back like a fiery wave. She prefers loose-fitting and soft clothes in various muted shades, though she is particularly partial to green and brown. All is all, her image and demeanor portray the clashing of two worlds - that of the humans and that of the wilds.
Spiritual Description: Visually, her Reiatsu flickers and curves around her body like a bizarre combination of water and flame, a bit too fluid and soft to be a fire but a bit too bright and alive to by liquid. It is mostly transparent, and seems to glow ever-so-slightly. The colors and intensity vary greatly on her current emotions and state of mind. But it's true vibrance is in the feelings and sensations it invokes.
When she is happy or calm, Valdyri's Reiatsu brings to mind the vibrant life of an ancient forest, the sound of leaves crackling under foot and the rich smell of loam heavy in the air. It feels like the touch of sunlight on the skin, coming in dappled through the leaves, and the soft feeling of fresh grass against bare feet. It feels like the touch of life itself.
However, in the depths of her cold rage or in the fury of battle, this peaceful cadence of nature changes into a the cacophony of a tempest. Gone are the warm days of summer, replaced by the cruel bite of cold rain against bared flesh or the cold burn of gasping breaths in the midst of a winder storm. It is the creeping agony of ice crystals burrowing into the flesh, the burn of the desert sun against water-stricken flesh.
In anger, her spirit is painted with the primal wrath of nature itself.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Valdyri is, in a single word; intense. Everything she does, says, or feels is done to the maximum. She is burns bright in fullness with which she lives her life, and it is a fascinating thing to witness - but she can also be overwhelming in this intensity. Speaking with her or observing her actions is like seeing someone with the power of an almost-adult propelled by the energy of a small child. She is deeply compassionate and able to find the good in just about anyone or anything - it's not that she doesn't see people's flaws, just that she believes that it doesn't define them. Some would call her overly trusting, as well as too quick to forgive - this would all be true as well, but she doesn't personally see it as anything to be ashamed of. As kind as she is, however, she does have a temper - and if you should chance to ignite it, it is a fearsome thing indeed. All of that passion turns to rage, and it can take her hours to calm.
She is fascinated by everything around her, but that by no means implies that she is easily distracted from a task. If anything, once she is focused on a goal, it all but consumes her. If it gets bad enough, she forsakes even food or rest to accomplish something she is working towards. One of the only things that will successfully divert her from such a focus is interesting conversation - she is always willing to discuss things with people, and her favorite topic of all is anything relating to the spiritual world. As her own opinions and realities in relation to this are always changing, she is ever ecstatic to hear other being's views. She has a habit of making a decision about something in the heat of moment and believing it as absolute truth and then realizing later that perhaps it was a hasty choice. Whether this is truly a facet of her personality or simply immaturity remains to be seen.
While she enjoys talking with people and tends to be a relatively enjoyable person to talk to, working with her on any common goal is not for the faint of heart. She is determined to get her way, and will bowl over weaker-willed individuals to do so. She is quite controlling, and is not overly subtle around being so. With temperance, she could be a fine leader, but in her youth, it is simply frustrating for those around her. Combined with her tendency to make impulsive choices, she is definetly a handful. She is working diligently on becoming less... volatile, but it is an ongoing process. She tries her best to model her mother, but she just has too much fire in her soul.
Her reactions to the three races varies greatly. She has never met a gifted human outside her family, and would likely be fascinated and not at all wary. She knows they are out there, and she desperately wants to learn more. Shinigami would elicit a similar if slightly more cautious reaction, as they are a complete unknown. And as for Hollowbreeds, this is a deep conflict for her. Everything her parents and grandparents have ever taught her screams for her to draw her bow, shoot, and not look back. But an experience she has never shared with anyone tells her that there is more to them than hunger, more to them than rage. She would meet them with bow drawn... but whether the arrow flies or not would be their choice.
Goals & Achievements: Currently, the sum of her goals is to follow in her mother's footsteps as a diplomat and to quietly discover more about the spiritual world. She knows (though she would never dare to say it) that her family's viewpoint is just that - a viewpoint, and that there is more to learn. She also desperately wants to locate a spiritualist who can train her, as ever since her grandmother passed, she has been wandering blind in regards to her own powers.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Weapon of Choice: Slightly beneath her shoulders, an intricate tattoo is inscribed upon Valdyri's fair skin. This tattoo allows her to manifest her weapon,Vigalmr - a powerful and elegant recurve bow. When she calls upon its image in her mind, her tattoo alights and glowing threads of energy weave from her back to her hands and manifest the bow inside her grasp. She forms the arrows from her own spiritual energy, each one weakening her ever so slightly.
Power: Her tattoo holds another secret. The two wolves it depicts, one hunting the sun and the other chasing the moon... they are known as Hati and Sköll, divine figures from ancient Nordic lore. The design of both the wolves and the celestial bodies they forever follow are imbued with considerable power. When Valdyri calls upon the wolves themselves, the tattoos begins to glow and the wolves move upon her skin before fading from it and reappearing as the physical manifestations of Hati or Sköll to fight by her side. The mystical wolves are large, almost half the size of an average base hollow. In battle, they are similar to trained war dogs, instantly following given commands but also having their own basic degree of sentience, able to act independently on feral instinct and moderate intelligence. If one is slain, the other and Valdyri are considerably weakened, and the tattoo in question temporarily disappears from her flesh. Which wolf appears depends entirely on when it is summoned - during the day, Hati will appear. During the night, it is Sköll.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: To truly understand a person, you must understand where they are from. And Valdyri... Valdyri is from the cold lands that the Vikings once called home, filled with fjords and bitterly cold oceans, steep mountains and deep woods. She is from a place where nature still can run wild, and it runs wild within her. But even more important than where they are from... is who.
Her family's legacy dates back to an age of fire and steel, but in the face of the modern world, it was crumbling. Their bloodline may have been ancient...but it was dying. From the time Valdyri's mother had been a young adult herself, she had decided that she wanted nothing to do with the spiritual world, and had left her old life behind, trying to pretend that she didn't see what she did. She declared the old ways forsaken, and did her best to ensure that her daughter would never know the secrets of the spiritual world. From marrying a spiritually- blinded man (although she did tell him of her past) and moving to the big city, to undergoing an expensive procedure to remove her ritualistic tattoos that held the key to summoning her weapon, she did everything she could to leave the old ways behind. She cut herself off from her family and settled into her new, rich life...ignoring the knowledge that something was missing.
But some things are not meant to be. From the very moment she opened her eyes, Astrid knew in her gut that her daughter's veins surged with the power of the ancient blood.
As she grew, the signs only grew clearer. She spoke of seeing demons in the park she spent all her time in, drawn to nature like a moth to a flame. So her mother forbid her from leaving the urban fortress they called home. But one cannot keep a wolf from the woods. So she snuck away, and when she would return with leaves in her bright hair and dirt on the feet, her mother would sigh and remember that some spirits can't be tamed. And so, trying her best to be a good parent and do what was right for her child, even as it pained her, she reached out to her own mother. And thus Valdyri was spirited away from all she had even known.
Rise to Power: All but the moment Astrid told her mother that Valdyri had displayed signs of being gifting, the girl was sent to live with the old woman. She lived alone, deep in the wilderness, surviving off the land. Her husband had been killed by a vándrhugr, or evil spirit, years earlier - and she had been on her own ever since. She was delighted to have finally meet her granddaughter...almost as delighted as she was to find out that her daughter hadn't ruined a bloodline that had existed for millennia. While she loved her granddaughter, she always saw her as more of a soldier than a child. She was immediately thrust into intense training...and to both their delight, she loved it. She was naturally an inquisitive child, and she was finally getting answers - not to mention the ability to fight that which she had feared for so long. During the day, she trained and wandered the wilderness, and at night, her grandmother told her of the old myths and legends. In the place of celebrities and actors, she grew to idolize Thor and Odin, Freya and Baldr. It was not a perfect childhood by any means, but she was happy. She also learned the history of her own family - and what a vast and varied history it was.
By the time she was ten, her grandmother deemed that she was ready to receive the tattoos that their family had used as a spirit focus for as long as was recorded. The application was a very ritual process, involving many manners of things. The ink itself came from the ashes of her practice weapons and other meaningful possessions, symbolizing rebirth and new growth. When it was all said and done, it took her nearly a month to recover. Once she had healed, a new and even more strenuous stage of training began. One day in the fall, when she was out hunting in order to stock up the last of their winter provisions, a whiteout snowstorm caught her by surprise. It nearly caused her death, and as she wandered blind, she grew colder and weaker by the second. When she collapsed into the snow, she thought it was all over. She didn't expect to awake at all.
But she did, and she awoke to the smell and sight of a small fire. On the other side of it, an inhuman figure watched her with unblinking eyes. Valdyri froze, completely silent. It was one of the powerful vándrhugr that her grandmother had warned her of, the ones that took a human shape. Or, in this one's case - nearly human shape. It's skin was as black as the soot that had created the tattoos upon her back, and it's eyes burned with hellfire. But... it had saved her. Why?
And so, trapped by the storm as they were, she began to ask the creature many things. She learned that it's name was Verbrennung, though she didn't think to ask the name of the raven beside it. She learned that such creatures were, in English, called Hollows. She learned that not all demons sought only to kill. And when the blizzard ended and they parted ways, she left with even more questions that she had begun with. She questioned everything she had been taught.
What do you do...when the monster is human? And what do you say, when the demon is beautiful?
When she returned to her worried grandmother a few days later when the storm blew over, she knew she had to lie. So she told a half-truth - that she had found shelter in a cave and waited it out. Having never given the old women reason to doubt her, it was accepted with a gentle reprimand for her carelessness and not a question beyond that. As the years passed and she grew, it never left her mind. Who was she to define evil?
Call to Action: Soon after she turned seventeen, Valdyri realized that she barely remembered her mother's face. Her training was nearing completion, and she tentatively expressed a desire to experience the world. Her grandmother, though not pleased, had been expecting this. If anything, a small part of her had still been worried that her granddaughter would turn her back on the old ways just as her daughter had. At least that wasn't the case. And so she gave the girl her blessing, and she returned to her parents. Everything seemed almost alien... it had been more than a decade since she had seen a car. Everything was overwhelming and fascinating. As the next year passed and she learned that her mother had become a diplomat for Norway, she saw her chance to see the world. And maybe to make a difference. So she decided that she would follow both the old ways and the new...perhaps even someday be the bridge between them.
Soon after her eighteenth birthday, her mother was informed that she was being transferred to the Japanese Embassy for the foreseeable future. Valdyri begged to go with her, and the older woman didn't have the heart to deny such a request after being apart from her daughter after so long.
Little did the two of them know that they were about to walk onto a battleground...
SPIRITUALIST
[ AT A GLANCE ]
Age: 18
Gender: Female
Height & Weight: 5’6” & 120lbs
Hair & Eye Color: Red and Green
Positive Traits: Sympathetic, Fiery, Honorable, Passionate
Negative Traits: Arrogant, Domineering, Obsessive, Impetuous
Loyalties: Valdyri is loyal to her family, her country, and her morals.
Snapshots:
Born: October 31st, 1998
Begins basic training with her mother and grandparents: March 1st, 2004
Receives tattoo on Winter Nights celebration (and her birthday): October 31st 2008
Activates tattoo for the first times and experiences Dreyivaldyr: December 1st 2008
Decides to follow in her mother's footsteps and become a diplomat: April 16th, 2012
Finishes upper secondary school: June 27th, 2016
Accompanies her mother to Japan: January 1st, 2017
[ ON THE SURFACE ]
Physical Description: Valdyri is tall and lithe, her muscles lean but well-defined from countless days spent training and wandering the wilderness. There is next to no fat on her frame, leaving her with an almost willowy figure. Her skin is pale but not unhealthily so, and it is scattered with constellations of small nicks and scars. Her face is a bizarre combination of regal and rugged, high cheekbones and a small bow mouth combined with large, vibrant emerald eyes that almost seen to burn in their intensity and a wild mane of fiery hair. When she smiles, her incisors seem just a tad too sharp and her gaze just a bit too bright. Her feet are hardened, the ends of her long, elegant fingers callused, and her lips are ever chapped - she portrays an image of natural beauty, something too wild and free to be chained by the boundaries of modern convention.
Her voice is silvery and almost musical, though rarely louder than it needs to be. It is beautiful in an eery way, like the hidden music of a wolf's howl. She moves with a hunter's grace, not quite cocky so - more quietly self-assured, confident in her own abilities. Even when still she always seemed prepared to leap into motion, muscles relaxed but ever ready. She holds her head high and keeps her spine straight, not rigid, simply firm. Almost everything about her puts off a confidence on the edge of arrogance, and she makes no effort to hide it. The only thing that doesn't fit into this image is her style - she almost always keeps her hair long and free, cascading down her back like a fiery wave. She prefers loose-fitting and soft clothes in various muted shades, though she is particularly partial to green and brown. All is all, her image and demeanor portray the clashing of two worlds - that of the humans and that of the wilds.
Spiritual Description: Visually, her Reiatsu flickers and curves around her body like a bizarre combination of water and flame, a bit too fluid and soft to be a fire but a bit too bright and alive to by liquid. It is mostly transparent, and seems to glow ever-so-slightly. The colors and intensity vary greatly on her current emotions and state of mind. But it's true vibrance is in the feelings and sensations it invokes.
When she is happy or calm, Valdyri's Reiatsu brings to mind the vibrant life of an ancient forest, the sound of leaves crackling under foot and the rich smell of loam heavy in the air. It feels like the touch of sunlight on the skin, coming in dappled through the leaves, and the soft feeling of fresh grass against bare feet. It feels like the touch of life itself.
However, in the depths of her cold rage or in the fury of battle, this peaceful cadence of nature changes into a the cacophony of a tempest. Gone are the warm days of summer, replaced by the cruel bite of cold rain against bared flesh or the cold burn of gasping breaths in the midst of a winder storm. It is the creeping agony of ice crystals burrowing into the flesh, the burn of the desert sun against water-stricken flesh.
In anger, her spirit is painted with the primal wrath of nature itself.
[ BEHIND THE EYES ]
Personality: Valdyri is, in a single word; intense. Everything she does, says, or feels is done to the maximum. She is burns bright in fullness with which she lives her life, and it is a fascinating thing to witness - but she can also be overwhelming in this intensity. Speaking with her or observing her actions is like seeing someone with the power of an almost-adult propelled by the energy of a small child. She is deeply compassionate and able to find the good in just about anyone or anything - it's not that she doesn't see people's flaws, just that she believes that it doesn't define them. Some would call her overly trusting, as well as too quick to forgive - this would all be true as well, but she doesn't personally see it as anything to be ashamed of. As kind as she is, however, she does have a temper - and if you should chance to ignite it, it is a fearsome thing indeed. All of that passion turns to rage, and it can take her hours to calm.
She is fascinated by everything around her, but that by no means implies that she is easily distracted from a task. If anything, once she is focused on a goal, it all but consumes her. If it gets bad enough, she forsakes even food or rest to accomplish something she is working towards. One of the only things that will successfully divert her from such a focus is interesting conversation - she is always willing to discuss things with people, and her favorite topic of all is anything relating to the spiritual world. As her own opinions and realities in relation to this are always changing, she is ever ecstatic to hear other being's views. She has a habit of making a decision about something in the heat of moment and believing it as absolute truth and then realizing later that perhaps it was a hasty choice. Whether this is truly a facet of her personality or simply immaturity remains to be seen.
While she enjoys talking with people and tends to be a relatively enjoyable person to talk to, working with her on any common goal is not for the faint of heart. She is determined to get her way, and will bowl over weaker-willed individuals to do so. She is quite controlling, and is not overly subtle around being so. With temperance, she could be a fine leader, but in her youth, it is simply frustrating for those around her. Combined with her tendency to make impulsive choices, she is definetly a handful. She is working diligently on becoming less... volatile, but it is an ongoing process. She tries her best to model her mother, but she just has too much fire in her soul.
Her reactions to the three races varies greatly. She has never met a gifted human outside her family, and would likely be fascinated and not at all wary. She knows they are out there, and she desperately wants to learn more. Shinigami would elicit a similar if slightly more cautious reaction, as they are a complete unknown. And as for Hollowbreeds, this is a deep conflict for her. Everything her parents and grandparents have ever taught her screams for her to draw her bow, shoot, and not look back. But an experience she has never shared with anyone tells her that there is more to them than hunger, more to them than rage. She would meet them with bow drawn... but whether the arrow flies or not would be their choice.
Goals & Achievements: Currently, the sum of her goals is to follow in her mother's footsteps as a diplomat and to quietly discover more about the spiritual world. She knows (though she would never dare to say it) that her family's viewpoint is just that - a viewpoint, and that there is more to learn. She also desperately wants to locate a spiritualist who can train her, as ever since her grandmother passed, she has been wandering blind in regards to her own powers.
[ GUARDIAN ANGEL ]
Weapon of Choice: Slightly beneath her shoulders, an intricate tattoo is inscribed upon Valdyri's fair skin. This tattoo allows her to manifest her weapon,Vigalmr - a powerful and elegant recurve bow. When she calls upon its image in her mind, her tattoo alights and glowing threads of energy weave from her back to her hands and manifest the bow inside her grasp. She forms the arrows from her own spiritual energy, each one weakening her ever so slightly.
Power: Her tattoo holds another secret. The two wolves it depicts, one hunting the sun and the other chasing the moon... they are known as Hati and Sköll, divine figures from ancient Nordic lore. The design of both the wolves and the celestial bodies they forever follow are imbued with considerable power. When Valdyri calls upon the wolves themselves, the tattoos begins to glow and the wolves move upon her skin before fading from it and reappearing as the physical manifestations of Hati or Sköll to fight by her side. The mystical wolves are large, almost half the size of an average base hollow. In battle, they are similar to trained war dogs, instantly following given commands but also having their own basic degree of sentience, able to act independently on feral instinct and moderate intelligence. If one is slain, the other and Valdyri are considerably weakened, and the tattoo in question temporarily disappears from her flesh. Which wolf appears depends entirely on when it is summoned - during the day, Hati will appear. During the night, it is Sköll.
[ LEGACY CREATED ]
Origin: To truly understand a person, you must understand where they are from. And Valdyri... Valdyri is from the cold lands that the Vikings once called home, filled with fjords and bitterly cold oceans, steep mountains and deep woods. She is from a place where nature still can run wild, and it runs wild within her. But even more important than where they are from... is who.
Her family's legacy dates back to an age of fire and steel, but in the face of the modern world, it was crumbling. Their bloodline may have been ancient...but it was dying. From the time Valdyri's mother had been a young adult herself, she had decided that she wanted nothing to do with the spiritual world, and had left her old life behind, trying to pretend that she didn't see what she did. She declared the old ways forsaken, and did her best to ensure that her daughter would never know the secrets of the spiritual world. From marrying a spiritually- blinded man (although she did tell him of her past) and moving to the big city, to undergoing an expensive procedure to remove her ritualistic tattoos that held the key to summoning her weapon, she did everything she could to leave the old ways behind. She cut herself off from her family and settled into her new, rich life...ignoring the knowledge that something was missing.
But some things are not meant to be. From the very moment she opened her eyes, Astrid knew in her gut that her daughter's veins surged with the power of the ancient blood.
As she grew, the signs only grew clearer. She spoke of seeing demons in the park she spent all her time in, drawn to nature like a moth to a flame. So her mother forbid her from leaving the urban fortress they called home. But one cannot keep a wolf from the woods. So she snuck away, and when she would return with leaves in her bright hair and dirt on the feet, her mother would sigh and remember that some spirits can't be tamed. And so, trying her best to be a good parent and do what was right for her child, even as it pained her, she reached out to her own mother. And thus Valdyri was spirited away from all she had even known.
Rise to Power: All but the moment Astrid told her mother that Valdyri had displayed signs of being gifting, the girl was sent to live with the old woman. She lived alone, deep in the wilderness, surviving off the land. Her husband had been killed by a vándrhugr, or evil spirit, years earlier - and she had been on her own ever since. She was delighted to have finally meet her granddaughter...almost as delighted as she was to find out that her daughter hadn't ruined a bloodline that had existed for millennia. While she loved her granddaughter, she always saw her as more of a soldier than a child. She was immediately thrust into intense training...and to both their delight, she loved it. She was naturally an inquisitive child, and she was finally getting answers - not to mention the ability to fight that which she had feared for so long. During the day, she trained and wandered the wilderness, and at night, her grandmother told her of the old myths and legends. In the place of celebrities and actors, she grew to idolize Thor and Odin, Freya and Baldr. It was not a perfect childhood by any means, but she was happy. She also learned the history of her own family - and what a vast and varied history it was.
By the time she was ten, her grandmother deemed that she was ready to receive the tattoos that their family had used as a spirit focus for as long as was recorded. The application was a very ritual process, involving many manners of things. The ink itself came from the ashes of her practice weapons and other meaningful possessions, symbolizing rebirth and new growth. When it was all said and done, it took her nearly a month to recover. Once she had healed, a new and even more strenuous stage of training began. One day in the fall, when she was out hunting in order to stock up the last of their winter provisions, a whiteout snowstorm caught her by surprise. It nearly caused her death, and as she wandered blind, she grew colder and weaker by the second. When she collapsed into the snow, she thought it was all over. She didn't expect to awake at all.
But she did, and she awoke to the smell and sight of a small fire. On the other side of it, an inhuman figure watched her with unblinking eyes. Valdyri froze, completely silent. It was one of the powerful vándrhugr that her grandmother had warned her of, the ones that took a human shape. Or, in this one's case - nearly human shape. It's skin was as black as the soot that had created the tattoos upon her back, and it's eyes burned with hellfire. But... it had saved her. Why?
And so, trapped by the storm as they were, she began to ask the creature many things. She learned that it's name was Verbrennung, though she didn't think to ask the name of the raven beside it. She learned that such creatures were, in English, called Hollows. She learned that not all demons sought only to kill. And when the blizzard ended and they parted ways, she left with even more questions that she had begun with. She questioned everything she had been taught.
What do you do...when the monster is human? And what do you say, when the demon is beautiful?
When she returned to her worried grandmother a few days later when the storm blew over, she knew she had to lie. So she told a half-truth - that she had found shelter in a cave and waited it out. Having never given the old women reason to doubt her, it was accepted with a gentle reprimand for her carelessness and not a question beyond that. As the years passed and she grew, it never left her mind. Who was she to define evil?
Call to Action: Soon after she turned seventeen, Valdyri realized that she barely remembered her mother's face. Her training was nearing completion, and she tentatively expressed a desire to experience the world. Her grandmother, though not pleased, had been expecting this. If anything, a small part of her had still been worried that her granddaughter would turn her back on the old ways just as her daughter had. At least that wasn't the case. And so she gave the girl her blessing, and she returned to her parents. Everything seemed almost alien... it had been more than a decade since she had seen a car. Everything was overwhelming and fascinating. As the next year passed and she learned that her mother had become a diplomat for Norway, she saw her chance to see the world. And maybe to make a difference. So she decided that she would follow both the old ways and the new...perhaps even someday be the bridge between them.
Soon after her eighteenth birthday, her mother was informed that she was being transferred to the Japanese Embassy for the foreseeable future. Valdyri begged to go with her, and the older woman didn't have the heart to deny such a request after being apart from her daughter after so long.
Little did the two of them know that they were about to walk onto a battleground...
