At the age of six a child was torn from his Aesir family in a slave raid on their mountain village. Enslaved at such a young age, it did not take long for all thoughts and significant memories of his people and family to be wiped out by his enslavers.

Even at such a young age the child displayed shocking ferocity. After seriously maiming a fellow prisoner at a slave auction it seemed that his slave master would flog him to death in a fit of rage on the street itself, regardless of the fact that this would compound his lost revenue with another lost slave. However, a hyperborean gladus looking for an interesting diversion for the upcoming fights was present, and made an offer for the slave. By all accounts a trifling sum compared to the normal prices an Aesir slave would get, the slaver was irregardless glad to be rid of the mad-child.

Bought to be a mere diversion at the games, pitting child against wild beast, the boy shockingly survived, killing the wild boar set against him. Almost more out of a morbid sense of curiosity the Gladus arranged for the boy to be trained as a pit-fighter, a gladiator. Just exactly what kind of beast, he wondered, could he turn the boy into with training?

The following years were harsh and brutal for the nameless child, a pitiless regime of training and fighting. Years passed, the wheel turned, and then ten years later the gladus introduced a new fighter from his stable.

“Honoured Men and Ladies of Hyperborea, I present a special gift to you tonight. While I always present the highest quality of gladiator and entertainment to you, as a humble gladus, I always strive to out-perform my previous successes. After ten years, I present to you my magnum opus, and my heart is filled with joy because of it. However, I also weep, for as surely as the sword-smith who has finished sharpening his masterpiece knows, I now know that I will never surpass this creation. My fellow Hyperborean’s, I present to you…THE KURGAN!”

Tales have been told of the Kurgans first appearance, by far more people than could possibly have been in the audience of barely six hundred. But amongst all the fantastical tales of butchery and slaughter, two things have remained constant. The first is that every tale tells of the Kurgans mad laughter booming throughout the stadium, even as he slaughtered his foes and was pierced by their weapons. The second is how a nameless noble described the scene at the end: “With insane laughter roiling around the pit, a blood soaked visage, face hidden behind a mask of bone white, denying us even the simple reassurance that the thing before us was indeed human, all I could think was that this thing was well named Kurgan, for it stood above the corpses of it’s foes as surely as any hill of earth or dirt, and with even more certainty they would stay strewn beneath it.”

Through the following years the Kurgan rose ever higher in prominence, until he won his final tournament where in a pique of perceived benevolence the master of the games awarded him his freedom.

Set free, the Kurgan was beset with offers all of which he refused, uninterested in the offered rewards. That is until the Kurgan was approached by a man named Kulgas, mercenary leader of the Red Knightmare, who apparently offered “A new battlefield every day and a new campfire every night, with all the looting, wine and women you can manage, and all in the company of the most hardened and ruthless killers and bastards this side of Stygia”.

They left immediately.