Welcome to Jekyll!

Penden was just Penden. He did not have a family name, nor a title of any kind. And now that his Master was dead, it was hopeless to think he would ever gain the surname Sull, as he hoped to most of his life.

But it was not Penden’s fate to die with only one name.

The story of how he received his second name began before he was born, in the middle of the great wilderness of Myria. There, in a village called Zephyrthorn, lived a little girl named Den.

She shared a tiny hovel with her mother and no-one else. Theirs was a life of misery.

In the winter, when cold wind tore the great trees of all their leaves, Den and her mother nearly froze to death. They could afford charcoal only one or two nights per week. Every other night, all they had for warmth was each other.

And that spring, though the nights were warm and pleasant, there wasn’t enough food to go around in the village. Mom stole food whenever she could get away with it, but the stress of needing to do so weighed heavily on her nerves. Den was still very hungry, and she cried often. The hunger pangs of that spring were the worst pain she could imagine.

The people of the village got angry with the man in charge. Den didn’t know what a “Pact Knight” was, but she did know Mom was more scared of him than anything else in the world.

One day that spring, many people from the village gathered outdoors, demanding food and brandishing makeshift weapons. Den peeked out the window at them for a little while, but then Mom closed the window and she and Den hid under the bed for the rest of the day.

Den heard scary sounds outside all day long, but Mom told her stories to keep her mind occupied.

The next day, there were a lot less people in the village. Den asked her mother what happened to them, and Mom said never to talk about it again.

At first Den was confused and a little worried. But from then on, there was plenty of food to go around, so she forgot about it.