Name— Halfdan Hard-Hand, The Hard-Hand, Father Halfdan
Age - 50
– “If you want a wind, boy, I’ll blow ye’s a gale.” – Halfdan the Hard-Hand to an insubordinate crewmember, shortly after putting him under the care of the ship’s doctor.
Halfdan is a good man now. As far as his past is concerned, he’s now a saint, and he’s good a sailor as any to have on your ship and a damned fine Quartermaster. Halfdan is a rough man, never one to tolerate the crewmember that shirks his duties or disobeys orders. In addition to this, he’s a good man to come to for your problems, and this is one of two reasons they call him Father Halfdan on the ship. The other reason is that Halfdan has become religious the past twenty years that he’s served on the Wandering Blade. Despite this, he’s one of the best killers on the ship, but he leaves the testimony to the crew and those he’s sent down to the darkness of death. With his killer’s mind, the act of killing does not wear on him, it is only the moments after the battle that you will find him lamenting the dead.
Over his years, he’s become a hard man, but not so hard as to push those away from him who he should keep close. He’s the hard-handed uncle who is stern but fair to the crew, which he loves as brothers, and a bit of a mentor to Sindbad, who he would follow to the ends of the world and back, and is the closest thing he’s come to having a son. He wouldn’t tell you, though, but if you catch him on the right night on shore-leave in a tavern, you won’t catch him singing bawdy songs with the crew, but you might catch a glint of happiness in his eye and hear a small humming with the song when he watches them all revel. Every man deserves a family, and Halfdan has found his.
– Halfdan was born in Vecca to an ailing mother, a dead father, three brothers and two sisters. Life was hard, and there was no one there to help him in the times to come, as his brothers and sisters were as helpless as he. As he grew, he fell in with a gang of thieves at the age of eight, making his way in life stealing from those less vigilant than himself and his gang. It was around this time that his family was starting to die off due to sickness or starvation, starting with his mother as the first to go. No matter how much food he stole, he could make the hunger go away but the sickness was still there, and in the end, he was the last of his siblings to survive.
He grew cold out of this, and spent his time absent-mindedly stealing. By the age of ten, he was quite the experienced thief and his steps no more made sound. His whole body was honed by the time he was ten; like the other boys, his body was devoted solely to climbing and stepping quietly. Muscles were brought on by constantly hauling himself over walls and scaling up to the high windows of the buildings outside of the port district. The farther he got away from the port district, the darker things became for him. By age ten, he’d left the docks completely, as the last of his family was finally dead. With nothing to keep him there, he found a way to keep him away.
He’d found himself a group of older boys in the tenement district of Vaarskeg Alleys. His body was already honed at climbing and moving quietly, so he was easily brought in among the local boys, who would take money to make men disappear. It was the gold that attracted him most, in the beginning, at least. By age ten, the day before his Candle’d Day, he took his first life. It was not quick like the stories of heroes who would vanquish men with one swipe of the blade, it was not clean like expected and it was anything but honourable, as he had brought death on quiet feet. He would learn to accept this in the years to come, learn to accept that this was what he was made for- what he had made himself into. By the age of thirteen, he’d taken twelve lives and not once had been caught by the guardsmen, earning himself the name of Halfdan the Quiet.
He’d become good at killing, taught himself the places you could hit a man with only half your strength but stun them as if a bear had hit him. He knew where to stab to give the man a shock before he died slowly, knew where to cut to send a man to darkness in seconds. He’d made his mind that of a killer, and the other boys learned to fear him. It was the age of fifteen that he decided to go back to the port district to sell his skill to the highest bidder. It was one night where he learned that there were meaner men than he, and he was pressganged into service on a ship by the name of the Laughing Hangman, come into port from the Isles, crewed by men that had earned their names by killing men they could look in the eye.
To them, he was a simple cutthroat, not the silent harbinger of death he had been in the city, but a simple coward, too scared to face a man face-to-face. Over the next five years on the ship, he learned to be like them, though. It was easy, he already knew how to kill quickly, but now he could do it in the open, no more skulking, no more games- and he appreciated that. He grew into a man, a hard man, like those on the ship. He didn’t become one of their brothers but he became a good killer by their hand. These pirates he had fallen in with took him on many raids and he had earned his keep on every one. Ten years had passed, and the day had come where Halfdan would once again find men that were meaner than he.
The Laughing Hangman met the Wandering Blade on the Atularis. With nowhere to run to, no land to swim to, both ships knew that only one of them would make it out of this. For hours they fought, firing arrows and crossbow bolts at a distance from one another. Halfdan watched men that could lay him low in seconds die in less time and he almost shared their fate a few times, missing death by a single arrow at times. It was a while before Halfdan could have his way and when they finally boarded eachother, Halfdan went to work with his handaxe, doing what he did best. He’d managed to take five down before being opened up. As he lay there dying, he heard the voices of his brothers and sisters, his mother too, to wake up, to change his ways before all went black.
He’d awoken after the battle, the doctor of the Wandering Blade telling him that he’d lost the fight. He was given a choice, along with seven of the captured crew of the Laughing Hangman, to either sign on to service with the captain or be thrown to the sharks. Halfdan, always the practical, chose to stay with the captain. He didn’t owe any of the Laughing Hangman a thing, and he spit into the sea as he watched the only survivors of the Laughing Hangman get thrown to the watery depths. For the next countless voyages, Halfdan served on the ship as Quartermaster, where he was treated as a brother instead of a peon. This stuck with him for all his years, and he pledged himself to the religion of his ancestors, if only to honor the memory of his late family. Over the years though, the feeling had grown stronger, and the crew had taken to calling him Father Halfdan in light of this.
When Sindbad rose up to be Captain years later, well…
The rest is history…
Notes – Is religious and will sometimes be caught praying before battle for the protection of his flesh and after battle for the forgiveness of his soul.
