Tolan Driftmark - The Tribal Warrior

Role in Its Society:

Tolan is the blue-pennant runner of Hrokan’s Jötun warband—the light infantry who marks lanes, tests ice, and calls the beat that orog crews and climbers follow. Tribal warriors like her are the warband’s pulse: they scout glare ice by sound, wedge ladder feet, ferry ropes, and set blue pennants that tell trolls where to climb and giants where to shove. To defenders she is the first shape they see in a storm—small compared to the titans behind her, but the one who decides where the wall will fail.

Appearance Description:

A hard-muscled human in her late twenties, wind-burned with a thin scar over one brow and blue ash war-paint across her nose and cheeks. Dark hair braided short beneath a fur-lined hood. She wears black-lacquer lamellar over layered seal-furs, ice-cleat crampons strapped to her boots, and a climbing harness loaded with bone wedges, pitons, blue rope, and a pennant staff capped by a frozen strip of dyed hide. Gear: a short spear, round shield painted with a blue handprint, two javelins, a signal horn, and a clay sleet gourd at her belt.

Backstory:

Born to a coast caravan that traded between keeps, Tolan learned to read ice by ear—tap and listen for the hollow under the hardpack. A winter raid stole her family; Hrokan’s ologunner spared her when Tolan’s quick wedge saved a ladder from skidding into the river. Since then she has run countless storm nights, painting lanes with chalk and flag, taking pride in craft over carnage. She counts her dead by the banners she didn’t set, and sleeps with her crampons on.