Myling Frost-Song

"How can life be worth living if you aren't loved?"

- Myling

 is a Nord wanderer. Never staying in one place for too long and always on the move. In her earlier days she met up with a mysterious witch of the woods calling herself Riamide, who provided Myling with Gastbane, a wooden sword made out of ghost oak with the ability to banish evil spirits.

Biography
Myling was born and raised in a small settlement named Maiden's Rest consisting of three cottages. The families living there were the Frost-Songs, the Snow-Fogs and the Cold-Howls. She had a strained relationship with her family, in particular her father, who was heavily drinking and abusing both her and her mother. He also never got along with Skugil Snow-Fog, the patriarch of the Snow-Fog clan, constantly arguing with him. Mostly over land properties.

Myling however got along well with Grita Snow-Fog, the family's youngest daughter. They would both play in the woods and travel to nearby settlements like Morthal to feast and to drink. One day they even got so drunk they ended up dancing naked in a fountain, kissing and touching each other, until they were cast out by the guards for their behaviour. However it was in Morthal that Myling fell in love with a strapping young lad. They would become engaged within matter of days.

When Myling returned to Maiden's Rest to tell her family of the news, her father went mad with rage. He dragged his daughter out to the nearby lake by their cottage and attempted to drown her unless she would break up her engagement.

From there on Myling was struck with an unexplainable amnesia. She couldn't remember who she was, what her name was or where she came from. She started aimlessly to wander around Skyrim with no real goal in sight. During her travels an unknown entity known as the Shadow started to haunt her, constantly repeating the curse:

Life is for the living and you have already paid the price

That since long gone dead shall never again rise.

Myling did not know what this meant and no explanation was given. A little while afterwards, she found herself attacked by wraiths lurking in the shadows as they attempted to drag her with them into darkness, to the voice of the Shadow. She managed to escape their clutches, but the attacks started to happen more frequently, until she didn't know where to go or where to go. One day when she was tired, down on her luck and crying she came across an old witch of the forest named Riamide. The old woman took pity on the girl and took her in to stay for the night. She offered her an enchanted wooden sword named Gastbane, made from the trunk of the infrequent ghost oak. It had the ability to banish evil spirits and would never break or shatter. This weapon would help her on her journey to find the truth about herself and to protect herself from the growing threat of the Shadow.

Riamide became somewhat of a mentor and guardian angel for Myling, offering her counsel and guidance during her hardest time. However it is strongly implied that Riamide is not all she appears to be as she seems to know alot more about Myling's situation than she does herself.

As revealed later on in the Brave New World RP, Myling has actually been dead for the last 500 years. Her spirit has lingered to the world due to her consciousness being split at the moment of her death.

Brave New World
Myling is introduced early in the Brave New World saga where she dispatches a group of bandits in a local inn. And with their gold in hand she heads towards Riften, staying at The Bee and Barb for the night. She quickly overstays her welcome by getting drunk. When the night falls, she has nightmares in which "a most disturbing voice" calls out to her.

During the daytime when she is buying fish, she is ambushed by a thief who steals her gold. With the help of Rowan Autumn-Arrow, the brother of the fish merchant, she tracks the thief down, but he manages to escape their clutches by throwing a smoke bomb in her face. After the failed attempt to track her gold down she begins to get aquainted with Rowan as he offers her a fish for free. But she fails to say her full name. She feels that there is something inexplainable keeping her back from uttering her full name, except for her first name. When he recommends her to seek out a priest at the temple she does so, but collapses on her way.

Rowan interferes and carries her to the temple. She is looked over at by the temple by Mautarn, a Redguard priest who examines her strange loss of memories about her past. She can't remember her last name, her parents' names, where she came from or even what her fiancé's name was.

When she leaves the temple she immediately heads out in the wilderness to regain some gold by "bandit hunting". However during the night she is ambushed by the dark malevolent being known as the Shadow, that has been stalking her. She survives the attack and defeats a gang of bandits lead by the Imperial Cermonius the next morning. With their gold she thinks of returning to Riften and repaying Rowan for his kindness. As she meets up with him back at The Bee and Barb the city is besieged by Imperial soldiers.

Rowan offers her shelter in the cellar of his family home as the siege is being handled by the Stormcloak city guard. However due to her constant worries she makes his family rather uncomfortable. She notices this and chose to leave before things got awkward. Rowan however runs after her. As she heads towards the docks she is seemingly struck by an Imperial arrow which goes straight through her chest and out on the other side. She doesn't have time to reflect over it and instead falls into Lake Honrich. Half-awake as she sinks slowly into the depths the Shadow attacks once again, sending its wraiths after her. She is saved by Rowan. With no visible wound after the arrow and the apparent frustration from Rowan's behalf, she leaves the city saddened to lose his friendship.

As she breaks down crying on the road, she is visited by Riamide. A witch she met a couple of years ago during her wandering, who bestowed upon her the peculiar wooden sword Gastbane. The old woman tells her that there is a reason why the Great Shadow keeps haunting Myling and that there are answers to be found, yet she has no intention of revealing them since they are something for Myling to discover herself.

Further up the road she is viciously attacked by the bandit Cermonius and his gang who has come back for revenge. She is brutally beaten and then held beneath the water in the nearby lake by the leader, even to his comrades objections. Later she awakes floating face-down in the lake. She crawls up to the beach and studies her face only to realise that all her wounds have mysteriously healed as it had done with the arrow she was hit with back in Riften.

Further up in the forest she encounters the same bandits again, but this time they cover in fear before her as they were made certain that they had killed her. Enraged by the pain dealt to her, Myling buries the tip of Gastbane into the leader's chest and kills him, sending the other two bandits running away in fear. She also takes back any gold they stole from her "corpse".

As she travels further up the road, eventually finding her way to Faldar's Tooh, she encounters Rowan arguing with a group of people about his family's lost boat. She hands the bandits' gold over to him as a gift and then follows him back to Riften, talking about interests and whether the siege will end.

"Strange things are happening to me, Rowan. I don't know why and I don't know how, but somehow it feels like... I don't know... Like I am cut off from this world."

- Myling

As thanks for the payment of his boat, Rowan agrees to help Myling with her apparent amnesia as they head back to his family's home. All she knows is that the Hjaalmarch region of Skyrim is of some importance to her. Though she cannot relate to why, she believes that it should be the first place for them to investigate. When the siege is finally over he leaves her to go check on the surface. When she is alone she is once again attacked by the Shadow in the basement. Rowan comes to her eventually and the Shadow drifts away. When he offers her a meal she explains her situation to him. He agrees to help her out while they are on their way to Ivarstead to order a new boat for his family.

On their journey to Ivarstead they become close friends. While Rowan is sitting in at the inn in Ivarstead, he is visited by Riamide who warns him to help Myling remember her origin, seeing how the truth might cause Myling unbearable pain. She only reveals to him that the answers are to be found in Maiden's Rest in Hjaalmarch.

While on their way to Whiterun, they are attacked by a gang of bandits. As Myling interferes with the leader she is killed when the leader shoves his blade through her heart. Riamide appears to save Rowan from the bandits, by burning the enemies to ashes. As Rowan mourns over his companion's death, Riamide comforts him and tells him not to worry. Myling is abruptly and mysteriously brought back to life a short while afterwards, seemingly ignorant about the fact that she was killed. Rowan storms off in confusion and fear, and the two friends fall apart.

Eventually reaching Whiterun they visit Dragonsreach and its new jarl, an Orc female named Eilass. Apparently there is some unclarity as to how and why an Orc came into that position and what became of the last jarl. The pair check into The Drunken Huntsman that night, and Myling expresses her growing feelings for Rowan by pulling her sleeping bag close to his and kissing him goodnight. On the morning they find out that the former jarl had been killed as well as his entire family, and it is common knowledge that Eilass had something to do with it. Even though they had promised to visit the jarl this day, they plan to make a run from the city, but are stopped by the city guard and hauled off to a jail. While in jail they kill time by playing childish games and eventually goes to the point where Rowan asks Myling if she loves him. She confesses that she does, but that she does not know how to act on those feelings since she does not know whether Rowan feels the same.

"If there is one thing I have learned during my travels, it is the art of how to suffer in silence..."

- Myling

They are then being led out to a pit where they have to dig along with a countless number of other prisoners. At night the pair sleep separately due to the embarassment of Myling's confession. She also has a nightmare about her drunken, abusive father drowning her. After a failed escape plan, she is beaten by the guards. During their days of imprisonment Rowan eventually discovers some ancient Nordic catacombs. The pair hide there during the remainder of the day and comes out when its dark to retrive the possessions the guards took from them. They later return to the dig site in order to flee through the tunnels.

While walking through the empty halls she entertains him by comparing their own lifestory to that of Ragnfast and Ylva. The hallway later collapses and Myling saves Rowan from falling into an abyss by pulling him onto a fallen pillar, breaking her own arm in the process. As they eventually reach the surface they lie on the ground and look up on the stars, where they learn each others signs. That Rowan was born under the sign of the Warrior and that Myling was born under the sign of the Lady.

Myling suggests taking a shortcut through Labyrinthian in order to reach Hjaalmarch as soon as possible. Early in the morning they seek cover from a rainstorm where Rowan warns her that what she is looking for in Hjaalmarch might not be what she is expecting. She responds by saying that compared to what she has been through so far, nothing would be able to do her anymore damage than it already has. Later that day they make their way through the stormy and snowy mountain pass and Labyrinthian. They are attacked by a frost troll which Rowan kills, causing Myling to jokingly refer to him as Rowan the Troll-Slayer.

They later arrive to Morthal, a town Myling has memories from. When asking a guard what became of the fountain in the middle of the town, he mistake her question for a bad joke and tells her that Morthal hasn't had a fountain since the 3rd Era. Myling is getting a little worried hearing that fact, believing for a moment that she could be wrong about visiting Morthal sometime before she lost her memories. Even though she remembers Morthal fairly well, she claims that "this is not the Morthal she remembers" from 3 years ago.

Sad that her journey with Rowan is nearing an end she asks the innkeeper for the local inn Jonna for any nearby settlements, believing that her home could potentially be one of them. Jonna guides them on the map to a secluded settlement known as Maiden's Rest, but claiming that "not even a retarded troll would go there", stating that the place has a bad reputation for being haunted.

As the pair spend the night at the inn. Myling is having a breakdown. She has fallen so unhappily in love with Rowan that she doesn't want their journey to end, and at the same time she fears that Maiden's Rest will be just another dead end with no answers given, and that the Shadow would still come after her.

During the night she has yet another nightmare, however this one is different as it is actually a memory of a conversation she had with her childhood friend Grita Snow-Fog about a peculiar dream she had the day before. In the dream she explains to her friend how she saw Maiden's Rest withered and aged and how two figures stood by a lake and pointed to the waters. As Myling stared into its depths she found her own reflection staring back, looking pale and lifeless. Two shadowy hands appears from beneath the water's surface and pulls her down with them. The two friends debate over the dream and then Myling runs off to tell her father that the man, whom she met in Morthal just a couple weeks ago, proposed to her and that the two will elope. She does not however notice how a dark and shadowy presence hounds her every footstep.

Myling awakes crying over the horrible dreams and memories. The pair later makes their way through a thick mist towards Maiden's Rest, being located to the west of Morthal. Myling is somewhat distracted by all the disturbing facts and memories slowly returning to her and fears what she will find at her hometown, if anything. During the journey she eventually recovers some of her memories the closer they get and learns that her full name is Myling Frost-Song, that her parents name are Gunvar and Ingrid and that she lived in Pond Cottage in Maiden's Rest.

When they eventually reach Maiden's Rest higher up in the mountains, it is not quite the way she remembers it. It is worn and looks as if it hasn't been maintained for years, with the nature slowly making its way back into the settlement. She barely recognises the house of the Snow-Fog family and decides to pay a quick visit to Grita, her childhood friend. But it is not Grita who answers by the door. Instead there is some old woman named Vilda Snow-Fog whom Myling doesn't recognise. When asked about Grita's whereabouts the old woman says that she has only had one woman by that name in her family line, but that that woman lived hundreds of years ago.

Myling is shocked by the news and concludes that the old woman must be delusional. She walks further up the road and eventually reaches her home, Pond Cottage. Time has made the cottage unrecognisable and several animals have made it their home. She doesn't understand what's been going on and eventually feels that there is something calling out to here from the nearby lake. In the water she discovers the skeletal remains of a human being. Terrified by all her impressions of her former home she falls to the ground in fear. Rowan runs up to her. Riamide then appears, seemingly unamused by the turn of events.

She admits to Myling that the remains at the bottom of the lake belongs to her and that Myling's father accidentally drowned her. However Myling's feelings caused a strain on her soul during her passing and split her consciousness in two pieces. One part being dead and the other one being alive, therefore making Myling into a ghost with partial memory of her former self.

"I was to be a bride... but my dreams were shattered right here in Maiden's Rest. In truth I never left this place. Five hundred years have passed since then. Grita is dead. My parents are dead. Even the man I loved as much as I love Rowan is dead. And yet I am still here... when there is nothing for me here... nothing except for the love I hold for Rowan. But if that dream cannot be fullfilled, then I do not want to remain here any longer. I want peace..."

- Myling

Myling refuses to acknowledge these facts even though they make sense. Riamide explains to the pair about the case that Myling has been dead for the past 500 years as a lost spirit. Myling then remembers how everything happened and tells Rowan and Riamide that everything she knew and loved has beend dead since five centuries back and that there is nothing keeping her to the world except for the love she has found in Rowan. But if that love cannot come true, she does not want to linger in the mortal world. Rowan tells Myling that he is sorry and even though Myling makes herself ready for Riamide to give her the gift of peace, the witch refuses. Touched by the girl's speech she reveals herself as Meridia, the Daedric Prince of Infinite Energies.

Her true intentions had been to destroy Myling, seeing her unlife as an abomination, but she took pity on the poor girl when she realised that not only didn't Myling know that she was dead, but that something had also "latched itself onto her". Meridia explains to them that the Shadow haunting Myling is an Umbramancer, the evil spirit of a long since dead mage who selfishly feasts upon the souls of the dying in order to one day be brought back to life. It was the Umbramancer who was there when Myling was drowned and who partially devoured a piece of her soul, however it didn't manage to devour her completely when Myling came back as a ghost.

Meridia also tells them that once the Umbramancer has had a taste for a fragment of a victim's soul it will not stop until it has devoured its mark completely. She also warns Rowan that due to his interference the Umbramancer might have found a particular interest in him as well and as soon as it has devoured Myling, it will come for him next.

She tells Myling that the reason she provided her with Gastbane in the first place was so that the lost soul would be able to defend herself against the Umbramancer coming for her and perhaps eventually even manage to kill it. Being a creature aligned with the Void itself, not even Meridia is powerful enough to permanently destroy the being. She acknowledges though that there have been successful attempts as well as failures in the past with lost souls being hunted by Umbramancers.

She also reveals to Myling that there might be a possibility for her to regain her life by slaying the Umbramancer permanently, that way all the devoured fragments of her soul would be restored to her and Myling would come back to life in her true corporeal and mortal form.

Abilities
Myling is both fast and nimble and able to handle her wooden sword quite well. She has also proved to be an extraordinary acrobat.

"I... I... No! You... you were dead! You both saw me, boys! I swear! I swear that fuckin' girl was dead! How the hell can she be standing here?!"

- Cermorius

Myling has also showed to be seemingly immune to normal weapons. Whenever she is "killed" by any materialistic means, she is shortly afterwards resurrected by forces unknown. However it has been proven that any magical methods, as well as silver weapons, can permantly do damage to her, and even possibly kill her.

Personality
Myling is a very anxious young woman. She is both shy and nervous and is often prone to blame herself whenever things go wrong. She constantly worries about too many things for her own good. But she is as quick to laughter as she is to tears. She has a soft heart that often gets her into trouble, as she refuses to kill any foes she encounters.

Appearances

 * Brave New World I
 * Brave New World II
 * Brave New World III
 * Brave New World IV
 * Brave New World V
 * Brave New World VI
 * Brave New World VII - Active


 * The Myling Saga - TBA

Trivia

 * A myling, in Scandinavian folklore, is the apparition of that of a drowned or murdered, unbaptized child.

Author's notes
"The Myling character is actually a part of my own fictional fantasy world. The Myling is a timeless spirit that constantly reincarnates into a new body in order to battle the Evil of its current age. Myling can therefore be a boy in one age and a girl in another and have different personalities for each reincarnation."

- Lazarus Grimm