~Prologue~

The world had gone to Hel in a burst of screams, heavy losses and dusting of agony. Perhaps, it had been coming to this since its beginning, a long, drawn out death of wailing and bloodshed. It was all ironic in a way, one entered this dismal world crying, bloody and red-faced and many a man and woman left it in the exact same state. Everyone was someone's soldier in some war, of their own making or someone else's. Be the battlefield metaphorical, with morals, loves, dreams and hopes the zooming arrows piercing hearts and lungs, or a real mud clogged field in a foreign land with alien gods as your sole witness.

Mercia against Wessex, Northumbria against Sussex, Sussex against Wessex, Mercia against Northumbria, Scotland against the Anglian kingdoms... Everyone against the invading Danes. It was never ending, eternal, once you picked up a weapon, it seemed like you would die with one in your hand. Maybe that was why Ingrid would not be as shocked by her own imminent death. Blood splattered, sloothing through the fallen bodies, friends, enemies, just a jellied mass now, hatchet clinking and clanging against the broadsword currently trying to slit her from naval to Adam's apple. It could have all been so very different, her life, if only she never picked up that hatchet in the first place, years ago.

She could have still been Lachina, nothing but an orphan slave girl, washed up on the coast of Scotland in a boat filled with the dead, bustling and cringing away from the hits and insults of her masters. She could have lived a safe, all be it, unpleasant life. She, perhaps, could have ended up on the imposing forces she was currently trying to cut through. Yet, she would have never met him.

Everyone knew how hard war was, anyone with eyes could see the product of it. Kingdom against kingdom, brother against brother, loss, grief, pain, physical and mental, but no one ever told you what the hardest war was, the war you would have to face alone. The war between your mind and heart. Ingrid had followed her heart and while faced with death, bloody painful oblivion that would either end with her at the shining gates of Valhalla or the cold ruins of Hel, she did not for one moment regret that decision, even as the men around her closed in, swords glinting, her white knuckles tightening around the leather strap of her shield, breathing growing steady and really, there was only one word that she wanted to be her last to flutter past her lips. One name.

"Ivar!"


PART ONE

~What's in a name?~


Chapter I

The Forgotten

~Eighteen years ago~

Her life had not started on the best of first pottering steps, in fact, the beginning of her life played out more like a stumble and head first crash into a stone wall. Like a bad omen, she had come on the tail end of a raging storm that had nearly decimated the small village laying on the outskirts of Linne Foirthe, Scotland. The storm had been brutal, the great river, the very same she had drifted down upon, swelling and swallowing all those who had housed too close, rough winds tearing down merchant tents and hearths, leaving naught but chaos, water clogged harvesting fields and destruction in its wake. It had also claimed many deaths, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, cousins. Nature, it seemed, when in the mood to kill and slay in a god-like anger, did not discriminate. Take that as either condolences or a bitter truth to choke down, it is what it is, the truth.

Two days later, while the bruised and grim-faced survivors tried to collect the fallen, piling the mass dead in a sloppy pit one by one ready for burial, rebuild from the scraps mother nature had left them and return to life before, a ship unlike many had seen rolled in down the shrinking river, outwardly devoid of all life, peculiar circular discs strapped to its side. Miraculously, it had not sunk during the storm it had surely sailed through, not even a scratch on the stem mast that ended in a horrid beast face the natives had never seen before. When it finally crunched and careened onto the pebbled dock, it took another day for the inhabitants of Linne Foirthe to gain enough courage to board and search the strange vessel that had come to their home like a phantom. The rolling fog had not helped calm their suspicions either, leaving the elders, the ones left after the greatest storm of living memory, to whisper over the camp fires with dire mouths and hooded eyes.

What they found had not been what they had hoped. No gold, gemstones or shiny things to scavenge, just littered dead, some propped and rolled over others in awkward angles and twists, some faces still open in silent screams, one even tangled up in the ropes, as if swept to one side of the ship by an almighty wind. Many men had left after that, forgetting altogether about the ship as they trudged back home to carry on the much-needed work of making their village what it once was. The ship would merely become a boisterous tale they would tell their grandchildren, said grandchildren smiling indulgently at their forefathers as they gawked through their words with extravagant hand gestures and more than enough exaggeration.

Although, fortunately, one man had stayed, or their would be no story to tell. He was nothing special, a fisherman by trade with an appetite for greed, always looking for an easy coin or two, slightly hunched backed from years of huddling over the river retrieving his nets, leaning over buckets gutting fish, bent over and picking through the beach. He was plain-faced, adorned in drab clothes that had seen better days passed and had nothing notable at all. He had been stripping the dead bodies of their strange leathers and metals, mind calculating the cost he could earn down at the market, mentally spinning exotic tales he could tell the buyers to pull on the strings of their purses when the hushed squawk reached his ears.

He had originally ignored it, even when the noise repeated, only gruffly coming to a stand and searching when the indignant huff became an obnoxious wail. He found the cause at the very back of the long boat, tapered and covered by thick wool pinned to the sides of the boat, forming a makeshift tent. Peeking under, his first sight was that of a dead body, a woman. She was laying on her back, skin sunken and blue, hallow, fingers frigidly clasping at a tightly wrapped bundle in her arms, head lolled to the side even as her legs were splayed, shift of linen pooling up her thighs, stained crimson along with the trails leading down her thighs and legs, a congealed puddle around her.

The man liked to believe he had a strong stomach, gutting fish day in day out would do that to you, but even he, greeted with this grotesque tableau had to turn away and gag, the smell stinging his nostrils, a smell he was sure he would never be able to fully shake or scrub from his memory. Who were these people? To bring a pregnant lady on board a ship? Poor woman likely died in the throes of childbirth, the vicious storm her wet-nurse.

His fingers, thick and as wrinkled as tree bark, jagged nails grimy and blackened, nearly let go of the flap when he noticed the noise had not stopped, neither was it imaginary or the haunting wail of a wraith sent to earth to word of intruders. Covering his nose with the cuff of his scruffy tunic, he ducked and scuttled in, edging around the body to the bundle in the corpse's arms. His hands shook as he pulled the thick blue cloth back, eyes growing wide when a pair of eyes flickered and locked onto his.

He had never seen eyes as green as those nestled in the skull of a chubby babe, a shade lighter than the highlands when the rare sunshine glinted off glades of grass and just as vibrant as the evergreens in the mists of autumn, surrounded by orange foliage of dying trees, the sharpness likely coming from the startling ring of star burst yellow around the babes pupils. From the lone tuft of a curl jutting out from the wrap, the babe would have a head of blazing copper many Scots would be proud to boast and bejewel with clasps and beads. The babe could have been pale, he thought, under all the blood still crusting to its skin, flaking in places.

Then the little tyrant screwed up its face and began to wail and scream in earnest, nearly making his ears bleed with the tempo and pitch. Cringing away from it, hand snapping back to his chest, the man looked towards the end of the boat, back to the real world, his world with no dead, no babe, no strange boats. Could he... Just leave it here? No one would likely know, the babe had been alone for three days now, death was surely hovering close to it, waiting, salivating. No one from his village would know...

But he would. He was a lot of things, thief, liar, spinner of tails, a poor fisherman with an ageing and breaking body, but a child killer? Even inadvertently, he could never allow himself to become such, leaving the child behind would be equal to using a dagger upon it. Yet, he hardly had enough coin and food to feed himself, clothe himself, keep his hearth alight, let alone a growing child who would need a woman's teet to quell its bottomless stomach.

Growling underneath his breath, the man pried the dead woman's hands away from the babe, wincing when her stiff fingers crunched and snapped under his own unforgiving hands. Scooping the babe out and away from the corpse, slithering back into the quickly dimming daylight, the man held the babe out, inspecting it, waiting as if it would suddenly grow wolfs teeth and lunge for his throat.

When nothing of the sort happened, he finally pulled it closer to his chest, gingerly finding the opening fold in the blanket, peeling it back to catch a glimpse of the babe. "A little lassie then, aye?"

The babe did not answer him but her little fists did clench and shake as if readying to hit him, he had to give it to her, the girl had spirit to last so long, to glower at him so, a spirit that could not go to waste. That was when he saw the object held in her tiny hand. It took a while to wrestle it from her, and the noise she made, more a shout than a babe's cry when he finally did pluck it from her grasp was equal parts startling as it was painful to hear. Covering the girl back up in the tattered blanket, trying his best to ignore the indignant shouting coming from the girl's little mouth, he inspected the object.

It wasn't big, nor gold. It was hardly longer than his pinky, squarish and flat, amber in shade, opaque with strange, familiar etchings upon its smooth face. He had heard about that writing, seen it once when he was naught but a boy himself... Knew where it came from.

The Danes.

"Ah, a Lachina then. Now, what to do wi' ye?" The girls shouting grew until he gave in, handing back the little trinket, watching as the babe shoved a corner into her gummy mouth, suckling on the stone with plops and lip smacks. The little thing was hungry.

"Ye may be young now, but ye'll grow... Grow with a good set of hands. Hands we'll surely need, a good set of hands worth a bit o' coin. Aye, servants are better when wrought from youngin's, obey more they do. Not a pretty life, I'll give ye that, but it's about time them Danes gave something back, better that then leaving ye to die here, don't you say so?" The girl simply sucked harder on the trinket, blinking at him with her doe eyes. He didn't know whether he was trying to convince the babe or himself.

He could try and raise the girl himself, like a good Christian, like a good man, but they would both starve when winter hit. Furthermore, he had never claimed to be a good man. He knew what he was and he would do what he must to survive.

Swaddling the girl tighter in her blanket, setting the girl in the nook of his arm, the man set off the boat and towards the village. Three years later, he would finally sell the girl off to a dye maker from another village for three silver coins, coins that he would never get to spend. For the very same day a rivalling clan invading their village, scouring the land in blood and flesh, his face just one of the many left to rot on the open clearing, his name never to be thought of or spoken again.

Forgotten.


Should I continue?

About this fic: This will be a Ivar/Oc, and while there will be romance, it won't always be centre focus, and it wont be Disney-esque at all. It will take a while to get there because I want my OC to seem realistic, Ivar too, and not come off as they simply meet, get together and then ride off (Or should I say sail?) into the sunset happily ever after. This will also feature heavy doses of Floki, Helga, Aslaug and the Ragnarssons.

Expect swearing, bloodiness, mentions/mild depictions of abuse, smut (Eventually) This fic is a strong M people, take this as warning and turn back if you don't like any of the above mentioned.

A.N: Hello, this is my first ever fanfic and I was debating whether to post it or not when I just thought to hell with it and here we are XD. I have a basic outline for this and I'm quite excited about it, I hope you are too. All spelling mistakes are mine as I don't have a Beta, all though I do try and find them all. Well, I hoped you liked it, please leave a review!

~carelessdodger.