Kaedlaw Burdun

Prince Kaedlaw Burdun was the son of Queen Brianna Burdun of Hartsvale.

Description
In his natural form, Kaedlaw was a rather normal-looking child, although he was extremely large for his age. He had gray eyes, a cleft chin, straight nose, and curly, black hair.

However, due to the strange circumstances of his conception, when he was first born, he appeared to different people as they expected to see him&mdash;either as an extremely handsome child with the features of Tavis Burdun or an extremely ugly, even hideous or monstrous child.

Relationships
Kaedlaw's mother was Brianna, a descendant of Brun, son of Hartkiller, which made both her and her son descendants of Annam All-Father. As a child of prophecy and carrying the blood of Annam All-Father, Kaedlaw had a unique and miraculous parentage&mdash;he literally had two fathers, the ettin Arno and Julian and the firbolg hero Tavis Burdun. In this way, he had three different lines of giants in his ancestry.

History
In 1366 DR, his mother, Brianna was magically drugged and raped by Arno and Julian in disguise as an attractive human prince and under orders from the Twilight Spirit. Shortly thereafter, the ettin was defeated and Brianna was freed of the enchantment. She then married her rescuer, Tavis Burdun. By some unknown magic, the seed of both her rapist and her husband somehow combined with hers within her womb.

During her pregnancy, the firbolg seer Galgadayle prophesied that she would give birth to twins, one handsome and one unattractive. She was told that unless the ugly one were killed, he would grow up to bring war and devastation to both humans and giant-kin. Brianna, however, would have nothing to do with the idea of killing her child. Moreover, the queen's own priest, Simon of Stronmaus, had used magic to determine that she was only pregnant with a single child.

Brianna's pregnancy lasted for three years. This was far longer than even a typical firbolg pregnancy, which was two years long. A war with giants took place during the length of her pregnancy. Toward the end of it, the firbolg clans allied with the verbeegs and even the fomorians of the valley. They assisted the people of Hartsvale against the giants, but then demanded that Brianna hand over her ugly son to them to kill.

Brianna escaped, with the help of Tavis and a young man named Avner, who was like a son to them, but she was soon separated from Tavis. While taking shelter in a silver mine, Brianna determined with magic that the baby could not possibly fit through her birth canal, so she ordered Avner to perform surgery and cut the child, who was the size of a typical human two-year-old, from her womb. He reluctantly did so and was horrified to discover that the boy looked more like an ettin than a human or firbolg, yet when Brianna first saw her newborn son, she saw a baby that looked just like her husband and named him "Kaedlaw", which was a firbolg word for "handsome".

After Avner stitched her womb and stomach back together, and she had used healing magic on herself, her and her entourage continued to escape and were reunited with Tavis. When Tavis met his son for the first time, he only saw him as ugly, but he did not tell his wife this. They successfully retreated to Wynn Castle, but when Brianna learned that Tavis saw their son as ugly, she forbade him to come near him any longer, fearing that his oaths as a firbolg would require him to kill his own son to prevent Galgadayle's prophecy from coming true.

While Wynn Castle was under siege from the giant-kin armies who were demanding the death of the prophesied ugly child, the Twilight Spirit, Lanaxis himself, arrived by magic, and kidnapped Brianna and Kaedlaw, ripping the tower of Wynn Keep from its foundations and carrying it with him.

Once the giant-kin understood what had happened, the humans and giant-kin united against their common enemy and pursued Lanaxis. Lanaxis took Kaedlaw and Brianna all the way north to the edge of the country and imprisoned them in the Bleak Palace within Twilight Vale. There, Lanaxis planned to raise his "nephew" to be the emperor of Ostoria.

Tavis, with the help of Galgadayle and the runecaster Basil of Lyndusfarne, recovered Annam's lost axe, the Sky Cleaver. Using its power, Tavis defeated Lanaxis. Rather than killing Brianna's son, he used its power to "cleave" the truth of the matter from the falsehood, and the enchantment on Kaedlaw was broken. He was at last revealed to look like a normal child, neither overly handsome nor hideously ugly. Basil saw this as a sign that his destiny would depend on how he was raised.

Appearances

 * The Titan of Twilight