Eirik woke with a raven standing on his chest.

Its claws pressed through the torn rings of his mail, each black talon finding meat beneath iron. The bird tilted its head and studied him with one bright bead of an eye, as if deciding whether he was carrion yet. He tried to breathe. Pain opened inside him like a red flower. The raven croaked.

Not yet, said a voice.

Another answered from somewhere behind his teeth.

Not yet, not yet, not yet.

The sky above him was the color of old bone. Snow fell through smoke. It came down soft and patient over the field, covering hacked hands, split shields, spilled guts steaming in the cold. Men lay everywhere, folded into the mud like broken offerings. Some wore the blue wool of his people. Some wore faces he almost knew.

Almost.

Eirik’s tongue moved in his mouth. It found blood, grit, and the cracked stump of a tooth. He turned his head. To his left lay a man face-down with his braid spread in the mud, his sword arm thrown wide. To his right, two bodies folded over each other like sleeping brothers. He knew neither of them.

He pushed himself up on one elbow and looked out across the field as far as he could see.

“Gunnarr!” he cried.

Crows lifted from a mound of dead and settled again.

“Hrafn! Ivarr, answer me!”

His voice went out into the cold and came back with nothing. The raven had not gone far. It worked at the face of a dead man an arm’s length away, unhurried, pulling.

Gone, said a small voice, barely above a breath.

Taken, the woman said, drawing the word out like something she was still grieving.

Hiding, said the wolf, the way a hunter names the burrow.

Dead, said the old man, as one names a thing that was always going to end this way.

Eirik rolled onto his side. The world cracked. Through the crack: a white that was not snow, a light with no fire in it, and figures leaning over him with mouths making shapes that almost meant something.

Hold him.

He drove his fist into the mud and held on until the cold found him again.

A spear shaft jutted from the mud near his hand. Beyond it lay his shield, cracked down the middle, painted with the black serpent of his house. He crawled to it on one elbow, dragging his useless leg behind him. Something wet followed him. He did not look back to see whether it belonged inside him.

Stand, son of iron, said the old man, each word a blow.

Crawl, little worm, taunted the wolf.

Sleep, my love, the woman said, soft as snowfall. The snow is warm if you let it be.

Eirik reached the shield and pressed his forehead against it. The wood smelled of rain, smoke, and old sweat. Home smells. Human smells. His tribe had carried those smells with them over black water and through pine forests and into every killing field the gods had placed beneath their feet.

His tribe.

By the hearth, a small fist would curl in his beard while he slept, and he would wake to find it still there; not a daughter’s fist, he told himself. Daughters were for farmers and dead men. He had a clan. A circle of oath-bound souls who would not leave him to rot beneath birds.

Had they? The thought slid in cold as a knife, and he had no answer for it.

Across the field, he saw something moving between the bodies. At first he thought it was mist. Then the mist gathered legs. Long ones. Too many. A pale thing unfolded itself from behind a mound of dead horses and stood crooked against the snow. Its head brushed the low clouds. Antlers crowned it, each tine strung with strips of flesh that fluttered like prayer-rags.

It had a face, pale and smooth, the features placed just wrong enough that nothing in it could be met.

The voices went silent. Eirik stopped breathing. The thing turned toward him.

Then the child’s voice whispered:

Father?

The battlefield tilted. Eirik gripped the broken shield until splinters entered his palm.

“I am coming,” he said.

The pale thing began to walk. And so did he.

The first step took him to his knees.

The second opened the wound in his side, and warmth ran beneath his tunic, down over his hip, into the frozen mud.

The third was not a step at all but a fall.

Eirik struck the earth with his shoulder and lay there with his face in the trampled grass, breathing in dirt, blood, and snow. He could not rise. His legs had given up. What he could see, he saw in pieces: churned mud, a dead man’s open hand, and at the far edge of vision, the pale shape moving through the fallen.

It had a task and was determined to finish it. At each body it crouched, long limbs folding at angles that joints should not permit, and worked in close. He could hear it from where he lay; sounds that were careful and wet and unhurried. It moved with precision and intent as if it had done this many times before and saw no reason to rush. When it rose and moved to the next body it left something behind, or took something, he could not tell which.

He counted nine men between them.

Then eight.

It was closer each time it stood.

Closer.

Closer.

Closer.

Run, cried the child.

Hide, said the woman, pulling at him.

BITE said the wolf, and the word came wet.

Eirik pushed himself up. His hand sank into something soft. He looked down and saw fingers without a hand, still curled as if around the hilt of a sword. He laughed then, a dry, cracked thing. “Lend me your grip, brother.” The fingers did not answer. He took the sword beside them instead.

The blade was nicked and black to the fuller. Not his blade. His blade had been taken by the river, or by an enemy, or by one of the pale women who came singing with silver bowls.

Silver bowls?

No.

Cauldrons, he thought. The enemy had cauldrons. Witch-cauldrons. They boiled the courage out of men and fed them the broth.

Swallow the moon, the many voices whispered, running together at the edges. Swallow the little white moon.

He spat red into the snow.

The pale thing was nearer now. Its antlers rattled with scraps of armor, teeth, rings, bones. It wore a cloak made of stitched hides, white and shapeless, stained at the sleeves.

A giant, the old man said, filing it away.

A corpse-herder, said the woman, her voice dropping in sorrow.

A LIAR, the wolf spat.

The thing lifted one long arm. In its pale hand was a horn.

No, not a horn.

A small shell with a single round seed resting inside it.

Eirik raised the nicked blade between them and settled his weight. He had heard of things like this. His grandmother had named them, once, by firelight, in a voice she did not use for other stories: do not meet the eyes, do not take what is offered, do not speak its name unless you know it true.

He did not know its name. He did not meet its eyes. He kept his face still.

The creature’s mouth opened, not as a mouth opens, not with breath before the word or the small shift of a jaw finding its place, but all at once, the pale features rearranging briefly around the sound the way skin moves over bone. What came out was not one voice. Many voices, layered close, each a different age, each arriving at the same word at the same moment:

“Take..”

The battlefield shuddered. For a heartbeat the snow became a floor, the corpses became shadows under sheets, the giant became a man with tired eyes and a white cup in his hand. Then the world snapped back.

Eirik swung the sword. The blade passed through falling snow and struck nothing. The giant had vanished.

Only the ravens remained, hopping between the dead.

Coward, the wolf muttered.

Poor thing, said the woman, and the pity in it was worse than contempt.

Eirik staggered away from the field before the creature could return. He did not know which way his people had gone, but he knew how to read the old signs. The tribe left pieces of itself behind. Bent grass. Ash. Bootprints. A torn sleeve. A bead fallen from a child’s braid. He would find them. He would follow. He would come home with his shield or on it.

The land beyond the battlefield sloped into a dark pine wood. The trees stood close together, thin and tall, their branches hooked like fingers. Snow gathered on them in white clots. As Eirik entered, the wind died behind him.

The forest listened.

Do not go in, the child said, thin with fright, as if she knew the trees.

He stopped. “Where are you?” No answer. Only the drip of melting snow from branch to branch.

“Little flame,” he whispered. He did not know why he called her that. The name hurt him more than the wound.

Little flame.

The girl was standing barefoot on a wooden chair, hair wild from sleep, holding a wooden spoon like a queen’s scepter. She had something red on her cheek; red as a battle cut. She was laughing.

The wolf growled low in his skull. They are trying to trick you..

Eirik pressed the heel of his hand to his eye until sparks burst in the dark. When he lowered it, he saw lights moving between the trees.

The warm red glow of torches. His people. He lurched toward them.

Branches tore at his face. Roots caught his feet. The wound in his side pulsed with each step, hot, wet, accusing. The lights drifted ahead, always just beyond reach. “Wait!” he called. His voice went nowhere. The trees swallowed it. The lights stopped.

There, in a clearing, stood a longhouse. It had not been there a moment before. Its roof sagged beneath snow. Smoke rose from the smoke-hole in a thin gray rope. Warm gold light leaked between the door-planks. He could hear voices inside: cups knocking, benches scraping, someone singing off-key, someone else laughing from deep in the belly.

Home.

Eirik’s knees weakened. He crossed the clearing with one hand held over the hole in his side and the borrowed sword hanging from the other.

At the door, he heard the woman’s voice.

Do not enter hungry.

“I have eaten nothing but snow and blood.”

Then enter as you are.

He pushed the door.

Inside the longhouse, the dead were feasting.

They sat shoulder to shoulder at the tables, gray-faced and slit-open, their beards clotted, their eyes milk-white. Men whose skulls he had seen broken on the field now raised horns in greeting. Women with blue lips smiled at him. Children with mud in their hair gnawed strips of raw meat.

At the far end, in the high seat, sat a woman made of ash. She was very still, stiller than the dead at the tables, stiller than the cold, the way a fire rests when the last ember has finally gone. Her skin was the gray of hearth-dust, dry and fine at the surface. Her hair hung heavy around her in dark braids, each one laid over her shoulder with a precision that did not feel accidental. Her hands were folded in her lap, the knuckles pale, creased with gray at the joints. She wore dark wool, fine and clean, entirely unburned. Where her eyes should have been, two coals burned, not flickering, not casting light, but burning, steady and patient and very old.

Eirik knew her.

His wife, the woman said softly, naming something lost.

Your judge, the old man said, with the tone of a verdict already written.

It’s not her, the child said, urgent, pulling at him.

The ash-woman smiled. “You took a long road.” Eirik stepped inside. The door shut behind him. The feast went silent.

“I am looking for my tribe,” he said. The dead began to chew again. The ash-woman tilted her head.

“You left them.”

“No.”

“You frightened them.”

“No.”

“You raised your voice until the walls shook.”

The longhouse darkened. The smoke thickened. The tables stretched away from him. Eirik tightened his grip on the sword. “I fought for them.”. The dead laughed. Not loudly. Not cruelly. Worse than that. Knowingly. The ash-woman lifted one blackened hand. In her palm lay a strip of blue cloth.

A child’s ribbon.

“Then why do they hide when they hear your footsteps?”

Eirik’s breath came ragged.

The wolf snarled: Kill her.

She is not wrong the old man said with a cackle.

The child’s voice began to cry softly.

Eirik raised the sword. The ash-woman did not move. Her coal eyes burned softer now.

“My love,” she said, “you are bleeding on the floor again.”

The sword fell from his hand.

Again. That word had teeth. The longhouse tilted. The feast blurred. For a moment he heard a sharp sound, regular and far away.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

No. Not a sound. A smith’s hammer. A dwarf-forge below the roots of the world.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

The dead leaned toward him. Their mouths opened. All of them spoke at once.

Take the seed.

Lie down.

Hands where I can see them.

The gods are watching.

You scared her.

You scared her.

You scared her.

Eirik clapped his hands over his ears and screamed until the longhouse split apart. The roof tore away. The walls blew outward into snow. The dead became trees. The ash-woman became smoke. And Eirik was alone in the black wood, kneeling in the white, with no sword in his hand and no door behind him. Only the blue ribbon remained, curled in the snow before him, bright as a vein. He picked it up with shaking fingers and tied it around his wrist.

“For the tribe,” he whispered.

The child voice, very near now, answered:

For me.

Eirik did not sleep. Sleep was a hole. Men fell into it and woke changed, or did not wake at all. His father had told him that when he was small and afraid of winter nights, when the roof creaked and the wind dragged nails across the shutters. But his father had also told him that brave men dreamed with one eye open. So Eirik walked.

The blue ribbon chafed against his wrist. It was damp from snowmelt and blood, and every time he looked at it, something inside him twisted like a hooked fish. For me, the child had said. He tried to remember her face. The harder he tried, the more the forest filled with others. Faces hung among the trees, like pale ovals in the bark, open mouths, eyes pressed shut as if in prayer. Men he had killed. Men he had loved. Men he had mistaken for one another when the red veil had come down.

The wolf walked beside him now. It was not a true wolf. It had no body unless he turned his head quickly, and then he saw it only in pieces: yellow teeth under branches, a wet black nose between stones, ribs moving beneath a hide too tight for its frame. It spoke in his brother’s voice.

They know where the tribe is, it said, certain, leaning close.

“Who?”

The pale ones.

Eirik limped between the pines. “They serve the corpse-herder.”

They serve the locked house, the wolf said, and it recognized the place.

He stopped. A wind moved through the trees, though no branches stirred.

Locked house. The words made the inside of his skull itch.

He saw it then, far ahead through the trunks: a building of white stone, square and ugly, crouched on the hill like a dead god’s tooth. No smoke rose from it. No banners hung from its walls. Its narrow windows shone with cold yellow light.

A fortress, the old man said, already losing interest.

A tomb, the woman said, very quietly.

Home, said the child, and she meant it.

Eirik flinched. “No.”

Home, she said again, softer.

The wolf laughed.

It keeps them from you, it said, beginning to circle. Break it open.

Eirik looked down. His hands were empty. He had lost the sword in the longhouse, if he had ever held it at all. His shield was broken. His axe was gone. Even his knife had vanished from his belt.

The gods had stripped him to meat. Still, meat had fists. Meat had teeth.

He climbed the hill.

The snow became deeper there. It swallowed his boots to the ankle, then the calf. Each step dragged strength from him. The wound in his side had gone numb, which meant either healing or death, and he trusted neither.

As he neared the white fortress, he saw shapes moving behind the windows.

His tribe.

They passed like shadows beyond something clear as ice. A woman’s profile. A man’s arm. The quick turn of a child’s head.

“Wait!” he shouted. A face appeared at the nearest window.

Small. Round. Frightened. A girl.

Her palm touched the clear cold barrier between them.

Little flame.

Eirik staggered toward her.

The girl’s mouth moved. He could not hear her. The clear cold surface fogged with her breath. He pressed his hand to the other side. For one impossible moment, their palms matched.

Then the wolf began to growl.

Behind her, in the yellow room, a pale woman approached.

Not old. Not young. Hair bound tight. White cloak. Blue eyes tired of mercy.

A valkyrie.

In her hand she carried a silver tray. On it rested the moon-seeds.

“No,” Eirik whispered.

The girl turned away from the window. The valkyrie touched her shoulder.

No.

The valkyrie bent to speak.

No.

The girl vanished into the room’s deeper light.

Eirik’s breath stopped.

The wolf’s voice filled him.

They are feeding her the spell, it said, low and building.

Eirik struck the window with his fist. Pain cracked through his knuckles. He struck again. The barrier shook but did not break.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Blood smeared over his reflection. For a heartbeat he saw not a warrior but an old, hollow-eyed man in a gray tunic, his hair cropped close, his mouth slack with panic.

He screamed and hit the wall with both hands.

Inside the fortress, bells began to ring. Not bells. A shrill iron bird. Not bird. Alarm.

The door opened. Two giants came out.

They were broad and faceless beneath smooth white masks, their arms thick as beams. One carried a net woven of serpent-skin. The other held a black staff that sparked at the tip with blue fire.

Eirik backed away.

The wolf leapt in front of him, hackles raised.

Bite first, it said, already at his shoulder.

The woman wept: Please, no more, and the sound of it was very old.

The child screamed: Father, stop!

The giants rushed him.

Eirik met the first with his shoulder, driving into its belly. They fell together into the snow. The giant was warm. Human-warm. It grunted as his fingers found its throat.

“Where is my tribe?” Eirik roared.

The giant’s mask slipped. Under it was a young man’s face, red with fear.

“Erik, please—”

The name split the sky.

Erik.

Not Eirik.

Erik.

The world flashed white.

Hands seized him from behind. The serpent-net wrapped around his arms. He thrashed, kicked, howled. The wolf was inside his mouth now, snapping with his teeth.

A sharp sting entered his neck.

A wasp, the old man’s voice said, indifferent.

Close your eyes, surrender the woman said, almost gently.

The snow rose to meet him. He fell through it.

Down and down.

Past roots.

Past bones.

Past black water.

The voices followed him into the dark, but they changed as they fell. The wolf became a whimper. The old man became static. The woman became breath against his ear.

The child remained.

Father?

He tried to answer. His mouth filled with snow.

When he woke again, he was on a shore.

The sea stretched before him, flat and white beneath a blind sky. Not water. Ice. A frozen ocean running to the edge of the world.

Behind him, the forest was gone. Before him, far across the ice, fires burned.

Many fires. A village. A longhouse. His tribe.

He could see them moving there, small and warm and golden.

He tried to stand. Could not. His arms were bound across his chest with leather straps. His legs too. He lay on a narrow sled beneath a bearskin that smelled bitter and clean.

Medicine smell.

No.

Herbs.

Witch-herbs.

Above him, ravens circled silently.

Beside the sled sat an old woman with no eyes. The sockets were sewn shut with black thread. She worked at a spindle, turning wool into a long white cord that ran from her lap into the horizon. A Norn. She did not look at him.

“You keep walking the wrong way,” she said.

Eirik pulled against the straps. They held.

“Loose me.”

“No.”

“My people are there.”

“Your people come to you.”

He bared his teeth. “Lies.”

The Norn’s fingers twisted the spindle.

“Always the same road. Always the same snow. Always the same blood on your hands. Does it never tire you?”

“I am a warrior.”

“You are tired.”

“I am a father..” he cried softly.

The spindle stopped. The frozen sea cracked. Eirik lay very still. The word had come from him before he could kill it.

Father.

Fires burned across the ice. One burned close.

A girl stood near it. She was older now. Not a child with jam on her cheek. A woman, almost. Her hair was tied back. Her face was drawn with worry. She held something in both hands.

A blue ribbon.

No.

A scarf.

No.

A folded coat.

Her mouth moved. The ice carried no sound.

“What is she saying?” Eirik asked.

The Norn resumed spinning. “You know..”

“I do not.”

The wolf stirred weakly in his chest.

Deception.. Do not listen, it said, but there was no weight behind it now.

The old man said nothing. The woman said nothing. Only the child, who was not a child, whispered:

I came all this way, and beneath the words the long road showed.

Eirik strained against the straps. The leather cut his wrists.

“I am here!” he shouted across the ice. “Little flame, I am here!”

The girl did not hear. Or she did, and had heard too many times.

The fires blurred. The ice became a polished floor. The shore became a room. The sled became a bed with raised sides. The bearskin became a thin blanket tucked too tightly around him. The Norn became a chair.

Empty.

A strip of blue cloth was tied around his wrist, soft and clean, knotted by careful hands.

Eirik turned his head.

The white fortress surrounded him. Walls without smoke. A ceiling made of dead winter light. A door with a small square window. Somewhere beyond it, footsteps passed. Voices murmured.

Real voices.

Not gods.

Not wolves.

Not ravens.

People.

He opened his mouth. A sound came out, small and scraped raw. The door opened. The valkyrie entered. No armor. No wings. A nurse in pale blue scrubs.

She stopped when she saw his eyes open. “Erik?”

The name no longer split the sky. It settled over him like snow. The nurse stepped closer, careful, gentle in the way one approaches a wounded animal.

“Your daughter is here.”

The wolf lifted its head.

Don’t listen to her, more lies it said, sharp and certain.

But it was old now. Mangy. Far away.

The nurse moved aside.

And the woman from across the ice entered the room.

She stood just inside the doorway with her coat folded over one arm. She was not a girl. Not quite the child from the chair, not quite the figure by the fire. She had lines around her mouth that the years had made without him. Her hair was darker than the ribbon, threaded with the first pale signs of winter.

She smiled as if it hurt.

“Hi, Dad.”

Dad.

Not Jarl.

Not oath-father.

Not son of iron.

Dad.

Erik stared at her. The room hummed. Somewhere, a machine counted time.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

His daughter came to the chair beside the bed and sat. She placed the folded coat on her lap and reached for his hand, but stopped before touching him.

“They said you had a rough morning.”

The words floated above him, meaningless and intimate.

Rough morning.

Battlefield.

Snow.

Glass.

Blood.

He looked at her hands. No rings of oath. No warrior scars. A small crescent scar near her thumb from when she had been nine and broken a cup in the sink.

Sink.

Not cauldron.

Cup.

Not horn.

She followed his gaze and gave a tiny laugh. “You remember that?”

He did not answer.

He did.

He did not.

The voices gathered at the edge of the room like hungry birds.

Ask her where the tribe is, said the old man, already looking for the lie.

She abandoned you, said the wolf, flat as fact.

She came back to him, said the woman, quietly, as if answering the wolf rather than Eirik.

His daughter leaned closer. “I brought the blue scarf. The one you liked. Mom’s scarf.”

Mom.

The ash-woman.

The longhouse.

The dead feasting.

Erik’s eyes moved to the window.

Outside, the hospital lawn lay under a thin skin of frost. Beyond the fence, traffic slid along a gray road. No sea. No pines. No battlefield. Just winter light on wet pavement.

His daughter talked. She told him about the train ride. About the bad coffee downstairs. About her son, who had lost a tooth and refused to put it under the pillow because he wanted to keep part of himself. She laughed at that. Then she cried without making much noise.

Erik watched the window.

In the glass, he saw them reflected together: the woman in the chair and the wasted man in the bed. His beard was patchy. His lips were dry. His eyes looked beyond the room, beyond her, beyond everything that had stayed when the gods left.

His daughter took his hand at last. Her fingers were warm. The wolf snarled once, weakly, and was quiet.

“Dad,” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Erik’s fingers twitched.

Maybe from the medication. Maybe from memory. Maybe because somewhere, across a white and endless field, a warrior had seen a fire and knew it was home.

His daughter bowed her head over his hand.

Outside the glass, the winter sun burned pale over the hospital lawn.

And Eirik, last son of a vanished tribe, listened to the voices fade into the surf of a sea that was not there.