Anik

Name: Anik Race: Half Snow Elf, half *vaguely Northern European* Class: Healer/Mage

Anik continued to trudge through the ice, sending flurries of snow flying up around her boots. * Surely this place can’t be too much further away*, she thought to herself. *The ice formations look familiar to what I saw.* Anik approached the top of the mountain she’d been climbing and turned her head to look at the horizon and back. Ah! A faint glimmer, to the north…there it was. Her molar bear, Pakiksuk ("Paws") sniffed the air and let out a whine. He’d seen it too. Pakiksuk had been with her ever since she was a child. Anik had been out in the woods one morning, picking flowers, when she’d lost her footing and tumbled into the icy river next to where the flowers grew best. She remembered emitting a high shriek – and there he was. He’d pulled her out of the river and let her ride him on the way back to her village. He’d been with her ever since.

Anik pulled her sled off her back and sat down on it with a tired flump. Seconds later she was zipping down the other side of the mountain, making her way to the place her mother had called home for so long. Frostfall.

Her father hadn’t been too impressed with her leaving. He and her mother had never spoken of Frostfall – Anik had only found out about Frostfall by accident, when she’d overheard a conversation between her mother and father when she was small. “It’s her heritage! No matter what happened to me, she has to know about them!” “They turned you out! You were an outsider, and Anik will be treated the same!” “But she is a Mindsinger! You’ve seen it too! She needs to know the ways of her people!” “I can’t deny that…but it’s too dangerous for her. She can’t go there”.

Anik grimaced. Look at me now, Dad! Sliding to my fate on my Sled of Destiny. Her mother had been of course more supportive, but cautious. “Don’t make the same mistakes I did,” she’d said. “Keep your head out of the clouds, forge strong connections with people”.

As a child, Anik didn’t have many friends. She preferred the fictional ones in her books. Brave, good, and much more black and white. It was this that made her turn to studying people and how to fix them. People were better understood as…things, requiring mending broken bits of them or helping them fix themselves. Anik liked that. The helping. What she didn’t like was trying to relate to people. It was pretty difficult to relate to people when you saw visions of their death inside your head.

Maybe that’s why she’d never made any friends. Even those that didn’t know about her divining skills treated her as if she was a little…off. It had come in handy though. She’d now saved the lives of 10 townspeople simply by being in the right place at the right time – at least, that was what she’d told them. The townsfolk, although a little wary of her, were also thankful for her healing powers. She was a good healer – she knew all the right spells, the right poultices, herb-teas and the right kind of fruit to eat if you had a cough. Anik liked to hum absentmindedly to herself as she healed – she had felt the quiet music made the wounds heal faster. Of course, she now knew that they did make the wounds heal faster – the qualities of a Mindsinger had surfaced in her, just like her mother before her. It was this power that had also brought her Pakiksuk, when she’d shrieked and fallen. She’d literally sung him into existence. Anik remembered telling her mother in a whispered secret and her mother babbling on about shards and ice-forms and something else, but Anik had only been small, she didn't remember much of the conversation. Her mother didn’t use her skills any more, however.

No one else she knew had visions as strong as hers. Her father, and his mother before him, had prescient leanings too – but theirs could only be truly understood using scrying spells, whereas Anik could see visions appear just like pictures in her mind. Annoyingly, everything she saw was made from ice. Anik suspected this, and the clarity of her visions, was something to do with her mother’s lineage, but didn’t know for sure.

For some time, Anik had felt a niggling desire to discover who or what she really was. This feeling had surfaced as many heated…discussions…with her parents, with the end result being that Anik was going to Frostfall and there was nothing her parents could do about it. So there. All good. Done.

Anik knew something was very wrong with Frostfall. She’d seen it, again and again. The visions helped her identify where she needed to go – but she’d neglected telling her parents the feeling of unease she’d developed. Maybe the visions were a kind of “I must go, my people need me” calling. And Anik was a pretty skilled Healer to boot. They must need one of those at least.

Anik arrived at the bottom of the mountain, Pakiksuk coming to an unwieldy stop beside her. Stowing the sled, she walked along the icy path to the castle keep and swallowed. "My name is Anik. I wish to meet the Priestess”.