Skau Vanja

Infobox

Species	Human
Age	19–20
Born	Y198
Height	5’5”
Gender	Female
Origin	Linjor, Isendel
Appeared	Season 12 - Inquisition

Season 12

At a Glance

Vanja Skau is a human girl of 19 winters. She was born in Isendel, but she and her family are of the north. Of Jorung. She is of medium height, and a strong, robust build. Her skin is fair, but heavily freckled from a life often spent out of doors. Her light eyes are rimmed in black to fight the glare of sun off of snow. Her hair is reddish, and plaited in a series of braids, away from her face. Her hide boots, her leather armor, the knit pattern of her woolen shirt are all of the Jorungun fashion, but the quilted padding underneath is Isendelian. Her axes are custom-made, balanced specially for her. It is prudent to be ready to fight on a moment’s notice, especially in the north.

Vanja moves with purpose, with a goal in mind. She walks with her weight slightly forward, over her toes, as someone who is used to walking on ice, expecting it to give way. Vanja does not have much social experience, but in her manner, she is straightforward and genuine. Guileless. She is quick to smile, and cannot easily hide her facial expressions. She says what she means, but she is not unkind. She makes connections easily. More than anything, she wants to help others, and she is willing to risk herself to do so. Vanja firmly believes in dunjasånd - the Jorungun tradition of working together, for the good of the collective group. One is never greater than the whole. She does what needs to be done. And so Vanja is both a fighter, and a healer.

History

Vanja Skau has seen 19 winters, and in the north, the winters are long. Vanja’s parents are of Jorung. Vanja is too, by that tradition. But her parents had abandoned that nomadic, wide-ranging life when her mother found herself pregnant. Not with Vanja, but with her brother—grown now, with his own sons. Better, her father had said, those thirty winters past, to be unmoving now. It would be easier for children. Jorung was hard for humans. Harder alone. And so Vanja’s parents had crossed the nebulous border between Jorung and Isendel. Given up the independence of Jorung, where they and theirs could sometimes be the only humans for leagues. Settled here. Built a home of turf and pine log, with grass across its roof. They had more children. Four had won their first winter, and so they named them. Vanja was the third.

by Kate QuimbyAfter that first winter, Sigruid gave each of her children a talisman. Carved from the bone of a sabercat, for the boys. For Vanja, that of a bear. A Jorungun woman must have a bear’s patience and a bear’s strength. Into the talisman she carved the runes of protection. Of healing. Strength. And a new one, connection. Dunjasånd. Togetherness. In this way, Vanja’s talisman was different from her mother’s. Sigruid taught her children the prayers that accompanied each rune. The intention behind them more important than the words themselves, borrowed, as many of their traditions, from the dwarves. Vanja learns to focus. To trace the rune with her finger. To clear her mind. To think of the natural balance of the world. Of warmth within cold. The thick layers of snow insulating the fall planting. The heat of the earth within the deepest of caves, springing up to clear water. Vanja learns the rituals. The songs. She speaks Dwarven as well as her parents, and common as well as any Isendelian, without her father’s thick Jorung accent. At home they speak a mix of both. Some things don’t translate. Vanja likes to say what she means.

From her brothers, Vanja learned to fight. When they were children, it was play. As they grew, so did the fights. Vanja learned to fight in heavy, borrowed armor, sized large for her eldest brother. She learned to fight in just sheepskin leggings. She learned to fight with her bare feet flat and sticking to the frozen earth. She learned to fight with her fists. A staff. A greataxe, which her father had carried from Jorung. A longsword. A shield as big as she was tall. She learned to shoot a bow. She learned to throw an axe. At a tree. A cart. At her brothers, padded with layers of straw and sheepskin. She trained with her brothers, and they all grew strong. Sometimes they were joined by some of the other young men in the village, but not often. It was blisterkere. It was not an Isendelian tradition. Now that she is grown, Vanja works. Vanja hunts, but she is not a hunter. She fells trees, with her father at first, with her brothers now. She carves the runes for strength into each board, to protect the homes. Yet she is not a woodsman the way her father was. In the spring, when it comes, she helps mend roofs. Digs trenches for the snow runoff. Plants the new growth trees, and the roots and bulbs from the fall, kept warm and dry by the hearth. Everyone does this. That is jantevøn. Community. .

The village is small. Ten families, maybe, or close to it. They intermixed. Two of Vanja’s brothers married local girls, themselves cousins. Sometimes people left for Northgate, or further south, grown weary of the cold. Sometimes people went out onto the tundra, or to the edge of the wood, and they didn’t return. The town grows smaller, but each winter is still much the same as the last. Every now and then, people died. Accident or illness or old age. Five years past, it was her own father. He had seen nearly sixty winters. Three nights after his death, the sky exploded with new light - bright pinpricks shining like small tears in the night’s fabric, piercing through the glow of the aurora. Vanja finds peace in this. It is a sign. Her father has crossed the aurora, The River, and he has found something new and wondrous. He has lifted a veil for his family to see this new light, to know he is well. That he is strong again. Often, Vanja helps her mother, who has healer’s hands. Sigruid is the physician. The surgeon. The midwife. Fortune teller. Runecaster. She had brought with her the mysticism of the north, and the wisdom and learning of a traveller’s life. The townspeople said that Sigruid’s eyes were far-seeing, but Vanja’s mother said it was all learned things. The human body, like nature itself, had energy that flowed within it. If a bone were straightened, and bound, often it could heal itself. Vanja takes well to this. She knows that, when her mother has her final winter, and fords The River—still far off, gods willing—Vanja will take her place as healer. So Vanja listens to her mother. She learns everything she can.

In the spring of Vanja’s 18th year, Vanja went to check the new growth trees. Usually one of her brothers went with her, but that day she was alone. It was not a difficult chore. In checking the bark, Vanja’s knife had slipped, and she had cut herself badly across the palm. Vanja sat, and pressed her wound with two fingers of the other hand. The cold of her fingers against the warmth of the blood sent steam into the air. Vanja imagined she saw the rune for healing, in the mist. She thought the words her mother had put into her mind, and the words came out with her breath. After a moment, the bleeding stopped, and there was a line of tight, fresh pink skin under her fingers. That summer, Vanja’s sister-by-law lay in childbed. It was always a dangerous thing for a woman. It was not the right time. Eventually, the babe came, small and red and screaming. The mother bled for a day, and burned with fever. Vanja had visited her brother and his family, had seen the new baby, too small for the winter, and her sister-by-law soaking the bedsheets with sweat and blood. Vanja patted the girl’s face with a wet cloth, and mumbled calming, gentle words—the sort of thing her mother had taught her. She didn’t know what else to do. Steam rose from the cloth—Vanja could see it in the still air of the room. Heat seeped from the girl’s forehead into the cloth, and up into Vanja’s hand. The girl—and she was just a girl, only Vanja’s age—the girl had taken Vanja’s hand. Vanja had traced the shape of healing runes into the burning palm of the new mother. As she did, Vanja thought of the cool of the fall air. Of heat and light pouring through an open door into a cold street. She thought of the baby. Of the warmth of her own mother’s embrace. Under her hands, the girl’s fever had broken, and she had opened her eyes. She had lived. The babe, too, surprising them all. After that first winter, Vanja’s brother named the baby Ivan—for Vanja.

After this, people came to Sigruid for their healing, and their soothsaying, yes, but they asked for Vanja, too. Sigruid could set a broken limb, but the injured, or their families, would ask for Vanja’s touch. For luck, they said. In case, they said. And Vanja would make her marks on the bandage, or press the familiar shapes of healing runes into the splint. No one would say what it was, not here in Isendel. But the bleeding nearly always stopped. The bones mended. Sometimes in a day’s-span. It wasn’t just breaks and bleeds, either. Over the season, Vanja’s skill grew, and what seemed before as clouds of steam now glowed with the green red of the aurora. Life’s River. Vanja felt the power of it, of that curtain between life and death. She could channel The River through her, and sometime—more often now—pull the dying back across. She used this. With The River’s light flowing from her hands, and her mother’s prayers on her lips, she could pull a sickness from someone’s blood, pull rot from a wound. She could stop a swelling without cutting the skin. Soon, she could force a heart to beat. Lungs to fill. Open wounds knit together, repairing themselves under her hand. Soon, everyone in the village knew this was something more, something other. The Jorunguns in the village said Vanja was blessed by The River, but no one ever said the word that would define it. To speak something would make it true or untrue. Better to say nothing. And yet, they all knew what it was. And that wasn’t done here. Not in Isendel. Still. Word spread. And one day, early, still so dark she could see The River, flowing across the sky, someone new came to Vanja’s village. The man wore a fur-lined cloak, in the Isendelian style. The clasp of the cloak golden, and in the shape of a swan. He said he was looking for a healer.

Doings

Jorungun healer and fighter who grew up in Linjor, a Jorungun immigrant town just south of the border in Isendel territory. Naive at first, until she began to be hunted for her magic that she draws from the aurora, The River; she joined the conspiracy after fleeing her village to Northgate, after meeting Bax, who in turn introduced her to Ethan.
Daring Deren wins the girl (by Kate)
When Roux fell in battle against the Frost-Forged Dragon, Vanja attempted to Revive him; instead of immediately reviving, they were taken to a colorless land, where Bax traded his soul to the Raven Queen in exchange for Roux’s. When they returned, Roux was alive (debatably well), and Bax’s body remained, but nothing of him did.

After the group found Kelwin had ambushed the rearguard team and spirited Danica away, then killing the Wolf and the Grand Inquisitor, Vanja brought them back to Northgate via the River, though it went a little awry and sent Lumotu off to parts unknown. Back in Northgate, she found two of her brothers, Sasha and Mikael, hanging on the scaffold for rebellion against the Swans, with runes carved with their youngest brother Aric’s name and a direction (south).

During this time she had fallen for a Swan, Deren Lake, but was captured by Swans visibly performing magic. After a brief solo attempt at rescue by Ethan, she was left for dead in Northgate, supposedly executed for witchcraft.

She was rediscovered doubled up in a box on the Beauty after Inquisitor Sylas was killed, being shipped in secret to make use of her magic in Galoring, as was Tyr Isendel’s modus operandi. Traumatized by her torture, she was approached by the Suffering (in the forms of first Talith, then Vivian) and granted some promissory powers. After she warned the Swans (via Deren Lake) of the witches’ coming and helped an ambush, even though she rejected the Suffering’s offer to restore life to all those she had lost, she was attacked and eventually exiled from the Tide’s Song, made to promise to find Lumotu Musket and help him.

Season 13

The Inquisitor Verdict Vathedrian mentioned a red-haired necromancer accompanied by a blond priest that he was attempting to track down, which is what had brought him to Myrwood just before it got bodied by undead and he fled on the ill-fated train to Shepherd’s End. Later a one-eyed man was also mentioned/seen in visions. Only rumored, never seen.

Stories

Where the River Flows | Summer 207

• Vanja’s father and the River’s fated flow.

The Sons of Linjor | Spring 217

• The Painted Swans come to Linjør, but Sigruid the healer has only sons for them to find.
  by Kate
  I’m Skau Vanja | 68 Summer
• In a small village, two witches meet. (Bax and Vanja)

The Northern Woods | Summer

• Keeping watch at night.

Vanja, Meet Ethan | 1 Autumn

• Bax brings Vanja to Ethan in Northgate, who finds her a place to stay. Things quickly go wrong. (Bax, Ethan, Vanja)

Giant King of Jorung | 1 Autumn

• A small interlude where Vanja tells a story her father used to tell, within the above scene.

Vanja in Shock | 2 Autumn

• A girl cleans herself up.

The Death of Ethan Fairchild | 19 Autumn

• Vanja hears her benefactor is dead.

Spoiling for a Fight | 19 Autumn

• Vanja finds the fighting pit and Roux. (Roux, Vanja)

The New Client | 26 Autumn

• Talith visits an interesting new brothel and makes a poor choice. (Talith, Vanja, Vivian)

Vanja's costume for the Autumn Turn Festival (by Kate)Ethan’s Checklist | 38 Autumn

• Ethan tracks down likeminded conspirators. (Bax, Ethan, Roux, Talith, Vanja)

Beer, and a Little Conversation | 68 Autumn

• Vanja talks at Astarael. (Astarael and Vanja)

A Lesson of Scars | 69 Autumn

• Ethan delivers more warnings, this time to Vanja about laying low and bouncing back too quickly. (Ethan and Vanja)

Authentic Jorungun Woodworking | 71 Autumn

• Sav checks in with Vanja. (Sav and Vanja)

Always Up for a Fight | 72 Autumn

• Bax calls on Vanja to test her fighting capabilities, but pushes too far and things go awry. (Bax and Vanja)

Vanja Lays Low | 78 Autumn

• Vanja does not fight.

S12 E03: I’ll Fix Anything | 80-83 Autumn

• Vanja, Ethan, Roux, Lumotu and Astarael travel south of Northgate to steal a wagon of items from some Silverun guards. (Sep 18, 2020)

Whatever Keeps Them Alive | 83 Autumn

• The capturing team discuss what to do with the captive guards. (Astarael, Vanja, Ethan, Lumotu)

Daring Deren Gets the Girl | 3 Winter

• Vanja meets trouble in the form of a handsome Swan.

Vanja and Astarael disagree (by Kate) Girl, Look At Yourself | 7 Winter

• Astarael and Vanja have words. (Astarael and Vanja)

Vanja Goes North | 8 Winter

• Vanja reflects on finding her brothers alive and well, heads over the mountains to Jorung to look for Bax and also maybe the Yeti…?

A Pleasant Reminiscence | 20 Winter

• Vanja stays warm remembering hot dates.

Of a Giantess and a Questionable Ally | Some evening early 20s Winter

• Ethan tells a tale of a tall woman, and Talith defends the reputation of a small one. (Astarael, Bax, Ethan, Talith, Vanja)

Testing the River | 29 Winter

• The girls chat about magic. (Astarael, Sav, Vanja)

Alright, Bax? | 34 Winter

• The two forest friends talk about the dream they shared and the transformation. (Bax and Vanja)

Vanja Follows the River | 34 Winter

• Vanja gains some control over sailing the River.
  The crew rests underground near Rog Hodun (by Kate)
  Forming a Plan for the Digsmen | 41 Winter
• The team plans an approach to the ruins. (Astarael, Bax, Ethan, Sav, Vanja)
  A Plan to Help Samsel | 51 Winter
• Discussions on how to approach Rog Hodun with Samsel. (Astarael, Bax, Ethan, Samsel, Vanja)

S12 E15: The Frost-Forged Dragon | 54 Winter

• The group goes to try to find the remaining Harvey’s Digsmen, but find and fight the Frost Forged Dragon instead. Roux dies. Vanja casts a spell to try and revive him, but Bax ends up trading his own mind for Roux to be returned. They return to find that the main camp has been raided, and Paloma, Danica, Talith and Sav are missing, presumed captured. (Dec 11, 2020)

Despair and Porridge | 54-55 Winter

• Astarael has a nightmare. Astarael and Vanja argue. Vanja discovers she can use magic to make food. Vanja offers some to the boy who was Bax. (Astarael and Vanja)

Vanja Thinks of Death | 64 Winter

• Vanja reflects on death in general.

Love, Loss, and Laundry | 64 Winter

• Shared reflection on the loss of Talith. Both do some laundry. Vanja gifts Astarael with a replica of Talith’s necklace. (Astarael and Vanja)

Daring Deren Wins the Day | 73 Winter

• Vanja has another date with Deren the Swan after their reunion and learns of his role in the death of her brothers. (Vanja)

Calculated Risks | 76 Winter

• A conversation to decompress from the previous night’s events. (Ethan and Vanja)

The Fall of Vanja | 79 Winter

• The Majestic is burned and Vanja is captured and executed in Northgate after Ethan’s failed rescue attempt, which resulted in the wounding of Deren.

S12 E26: Reunions (Part 2) | 54 Spring

• The boy who was Bax plays a game with the Inquisitor Sylas, shakes his hand, kills him, absorbs his memories (soul?), and starts a fight. The remaining Painted Swans are removed from the board, save one pawn. Vanja is discovered, bound and doubled-up inside a chest. (Apr 2)

Vanja recuperating from the box (by Kate)A Chest of Horrors | 54 Spring

• Ethan practices escaping from the chest Vanja was locked in. (Ethan)

S12 E27: The Remnants | 55 Spring

• Vanja reunites with her friends. The prisoner is interrogated, roughly. Sav kills him. (Apr 9)

Mending Sails | 56 Spring

• Sav and Vanja speak over chores. (Sav and Vanja)

Ship’s Healer | 56 Spring

• Vanja seeks out Athelia to offer her services as the new ship’s doctor. (Athelia and Vanja)

A New Baseline | 58 Spring

• Vanja examines Sylas, and he tells her to get over herself. (Sylas and Vanja)

I Am Myself | 77 Spring

• Talith and Vanja speak of their pasts, of right and wrong, and tell a simple truth: they are themselves, for whatever that signifies. (Talith and Vanja)

Just People | 3 Summer

• Athelia and Vanja talk about choices and Swans. (Athelia and Vanja)

What Survives | 10 Summer

• Vanja and Warbler talk about home. (Vanja and Warbler)

Afterlife | 11 Summer

• Athelia and Vanja speak of death, and beliefs of what comes after. (Athelia and Vanja)

The Temptation of Vanja by Vivian (by Sen Souvannavong)S12 E42: The Buddy System | 13–15 Summer

• Vanja tries to escape, but is thwarted by an unlucky (for her) preparation of spells. Vanja warns Deren about the party’s approach. Imago dumps a hostage crew member (Easter) into the river and the party attacks before they’re fully prepared. Roux and Athelia lie to the möther sërpënt and get her to destroy the Swan ship and, in turn, Deren Lake. Vivian offers Vanja the chance to restore him to life, as well as everyone else important in her life who has died, if she only but give herself over to the Suffering. (Jul 23)

S12 E44: Reckoning | 15 Summer

• Imago bleats, shoots and leaves. … a.k.a. he’s interrogated, reveals Vanja warned Deren of their approach, shoots Avarian, and is killed by Ethan. Avarian is saved from the poisoned bullet. Athelia gently confronts Vanja about the betrayal, and Sav attempts to kill her. Nurie’te reveals more powers in an attempt to help. (Aug 7)

S12 E45: Follow the River | 16 Summer

• Ethan finds Deren’s diary. Vanja is interrogated and exiled under an oath to find Lumotu Musket. (Aug 13)

What’s Left Behind | 16 Summer

• Vanja and Warbler make their farewells, and a bonsai is killed. (Vanja and Warbler)

Diary of Deren Lake

• Extracts from a dead, deluded Swan. (Deren Lake)

Gallery

Vanja’s costume for the Autumn Turn Festival. (by Kate)

One time, on the way to bandit camp… (by Kate)

Vanja and Deren meet (by Kate)

Luke Bastion and the casino heist crew (by Kate)

Vanja’s final moments in the cell in Northgate (by Kate)

ship’s healer (by Jessica Dru)

Vanja is taunted by Suffering!Talith (by Kate)

Suffering!Talith whispering to Vanja, before actual Talith turns up deck (by Shaun McCallum)

Talith, now cleansed, leaves the job to Vivian to tempt Vanja (by Kate)

Vanja protects Warbler from the rockfall trap Kelwin set

Roux finally gets to double-Enlarge Vanja (by Kate)

Anime HS AU Vanja (by Kate)