Silence.
Not the kind that followed peace—but the kind that crawled out of the corpse of a world that had screamed itself hoarse. A silence too heavy to breathe beneath, too sacred to shatter without consequence.
What remained of the sky resembled a shroud pulled over a dying giant—fractured constellations bled amber across a firmament torn open like flesh. Far beyond, floating landmasses drifted like the broken teeth of a devoured realm, suspended in a haze of dying stars. Where the Nine Realms once spun in ordained order, only ruin now lingered, cracked and drifting on cosmic fault lines Ragnar himself had carved with his conquest.
He sat at the epicenter of that aftermath—upon a throne forged of fused godbone and scorched worldroot, its form half-skeletal, half-organic, sculpted from the bodies of gods who once believed themselves eternal. The dais beneath him was fractured, as though the very stone trembled beneath his presence, struggling to decide whether to worship or collapse. Behind him rose the remnants of an ancient palace, not of mortal craftsmanship, but divine—collapsed pillars like ribcages imprisoned in obsidian, runes once bright with celestial authority now blackened and cracked. Yet parts of its high archways still reached skyward, screaming silently toward a heaven that no longer answered.
Ragnar did not move. Still as a tomb effigy, yet impossibly alive.
He appeared thirty-six—flesh still within its prime, sculpted by a lifetime of war and a godhood of carnage. But the illusion died in his left eye. That molten amber orb smoldered like captured sunset and wrathful divinity, swirling with fragments of a god-beast's soul he had devoured at the twilight of the final war. Within its glow lay the reflection of an All-Father long vanished, perhaps watching through him, or perhaps forever silenced within him.
His right eye was gone—not replaced, not healed. It remained a hollow testament to mortality, to cost. The socket was bound in a faint scar that descended jaggedly toward his cheek, left unadorned, as though he refused the vanity of restoration.
His bare chest rose and fell with calm precision, though beneath the flesh whispered spiritual storms bound in sinew. Scars, both mortal and divine, mapped him like a chronicle of victory carved in pain. Some were white with age, others shimmered faintly with runic energy, refusing to fade despite ascension. His veins pulsed not with mere blood, but with something thicker—something older.
This was the High Wolf—God-Slayer, Realm-Devourer, King of Ashes.
And still… beneath the divine quiet of his body, there lingered a ghost of the man he once was. Shackled, buried, but not yet erased.
Before him knelt his daughters. Twenty-four in total, two born—or forged—from each Queen. They appeared between fourteen and twenty, their faces a war between reverence and terror. They bore echoes of their mothers—eyes like storms, hair like midnight flame, frost-kissed skin, feral grace—but all carried fragments of his presence: an intensity too heavy for youth, a quiet darkness in their pupils that suggested hunger or destiny. They knelt in uniform formation, spines straight, knees pressed to cracked stone, heads bowed not in meek worship but controlled obedience, as though unsure whether they were heirs or survivors of apocalypse.
They did not speak. They called him High Wolf, but not now. Now they only breathed, and even their breaths seemed subdued beneath his aura.
Behind them stood his sons—twelve in total, each one from a different Queen. They ranged in physical appearance from eighteen to twenty-five, battle-forged and scarred by divine war. Where the daughters carried stillness and structure, the sons radiated tightly chained violence. Their bodies were corded with power, their eyes alight with burning wolfish ferocity barely contained. They did not kneel. They stood as warriors, yet their fists were clenched as though restraining instinct—to roar, to challenge, or to break.
They called him Mad Wolf. They did not say it with scorn. They said it with equal parts worship and dread, as if the title were both a badge and a warning of what they might one day become.
And then, the Queens.
Twelve thrones—lesser, but still monumental—circled Ragnar's dais in a crescent of silent sovereignty. Upon each sat a Queen, youthful in face but ageless in soul, appearing in their late twenties to early thirties. Though crowned by distinct divinities, they were united in one truth: they were the Twelve Wolf-Mothers.
One bore frost coiling in her veins, every breath misting the air like winter's curse. Another's skin shimmered faintly with embered scars, heat radiating beneath flesh as though she forever stood in the heart of a forge. A third wore ritual markings like bleeding runes across her arms, eyes veiled as though she saw further into souls than mortals dared dream. A blade-dancer's poise haunted another, movements so balanced she seemed carved from wind and steel. One carried stormlight in her hair, static dancing with every shift. Another wore wolfbone jewelry and whispered to unseen spirits. One's armor was iron-valkyrie blackened and unbreakable.
Each was a reflection of Ragnar's conquest—born of war, devotion, or chosen ascendance, their divinity echoing his—but none matched him. They were fragments of his myth, not equals. They were not his shadows, but his hymns.
They did not speak. Not yet.
Ragnar remained still.
Something in the silence waited for him to say something—perhaps an end, perhaps a decree. The air around him was heavy, dense with the burden of finality. His divinity weighed on the realm like a final judgment never voiced. He could speak now, name a new order, command life to kneel forever or will the remnant cosmos to rebuild.
But he did not.
Instead, there was a long, cold stillness. As though he were listening for an echo that no longer existed. As though searching for the heartbeat of the boy he once was—a farmer's son who had never dreamt of sitting on a throne made of gods. That heartbeat no longer answered. Or perhaps it screamed beneath the silence, unheard.
Something broke the stillness—not sound, but motion.
A figure approached from the shattered archway at the far end of the ruin. He walked with certainty, though reverence weighted his stride. His hair was frost-touched, scars etched deep into his weathered face. He bore the marks of countless battles, but no divinity clung to him—only an unyielding force of will carved from cold and loyalty. His presence was not powerful enough to threaten Ragnar, yet not weak enough to be pitied.
This was Hakon Coldbjörn.
He was not a god. He was a mortal who had walked alongside gods and not shattered. He had bled beneath Ragnar's banner, won wars in Ragnar's name, and ascended past mortality's peak by Ragnar's will alone. Not divine—but elevated. Not equal, but acknowledged.
He stopped before the High Wolf's throne and lowered himself—not fully to his knees, but into a warrior's bow, fist over heart. Not subservience. Bond.
When he spoke, his voice broke the silence like a crack through ice.
"Brother…"
Hakon's word did not echo. It settled—heavy, precise—as if the ruin itself had been waiting to receive it.
Brother.
The title moved through the hall like a soft tremor. A single syllable that no Queen had dared to speak, no child had presumed to claim. It crossed the floor of cracked stone, the fractured ribs of the god-palace, and climbed the throne as though it knew the path.
Ragnar did not answer. He did not breathe louder or shift his weight. But the air remembered a winter long before this room existed, and a wind that tasted of pine and iron. The memory passed across his skin like a shadow.
To the left of the dais, the frost-blooded Queen's breath misted and thinned. She did not look away from Ragnar, and yet her gaze found Hakon and measured him with a soldier's accounting: no divinity, no halo, no awful glare of power—only a man carrying the endurance of many endings. She adjusted one finger along the arm of her throne, a motion so minimal it could have been a twitch. It was not. It was respect. Or fear of what this word had just unlocked.
The blade-dancer's chin lifted a fraction. The storm-breather's hair stilled. The seeress's veiled eyes turned slightly inward, reading threads no one else could see. The iron-valkyrie's jaw tightened, as if a hinge had caught. Twelve women, twelve engines of will and myth, and all of them waited to learn which version of the High Wolf stood before them: the king of extinction, or the boy who once learned to swing an axe that was too heavy for him.
The daughters did not dare look up. Discipline held them in a perfect geometry—the pack's quiet lattice—but the word brother dug under their posture like a question. Each girl had been reared on titles that were edges, not bridges. High Wolf. Lord of the Last. God-Eater. Each title defined a distance. This one sought a crossing.
The sons, standing behind Them, stiffened as one. Shoulders rose, jaws set. One's fingers twitched toward a weapon that was not permitted in this chamber. Another's scar—running from ear to collar—paled with the change of his blood. They were not jealous; they were alert. Brotherhood risked reducing the gap that kept them safe from the thought of challenging him.
Ragnar did not move. It was not indecision. It was the final, careful pause of a warrior who had not needed to parry in a very long time, and who now measured an incoming strike not of steel but of memory.
Hakon remained bowed in the warrior's salute, fist over heart. The posture spoke of wars that had not made it into the songs—narrow bridges in whiteout storms, rope crossings over black rivers, an avalanche of bone in a valley far to the north where divine blood made the snow burn. He had been there. He had done what Ragnar asked when Ragnar did not command.
At last, Hakon straightened. His eyes lifted to the one-eyed face on the throne, and in that gaze lived a truth few had survived to keep: he had known Ragnar before the throne, before the title, before the weight of an entire sky had settled into his spine.
He said, quietly, as if not to disturb the dead world, "You did not send for me, and still I came."
A few of the Queens tensed at the plainness of it. The sons pressed their heels harder into the floor. The daughters' hands, folded properly upon their thighs, curled by a hair's breadth.
Ragnar's left eye burned. The amber light within it deepened, then steadied. The light was not anger. It was concentration—like a forge remembering the shape of a blade it had made once and would make again if given the right ore.
Hakon took one step forward. No more. He knew this ground. "Do you remember," he asked, voice low, "the first winter we survived together without a roof?"
Silence held. The question had not been asked for an answer. It had been asked to knock against the door of a memory that would not open easily.
The hall thinned. The ruin tilted. Not in truth—but in the shared sensation of those who felt the air change. A scent slipped in: cold bark, wet wool, broken kindling. The sound of a river under ice. He had been young then. Younger than the number assigned to that body's appearance. His right eye still lived. His hands were raw, and the wolf within him, unnamed.
He had sat by a fire that did not want to burn and had said—quietly, stubbornly—that the world could not end until he had, at least, seen the spring from the south ridge. Hakon had laughed then, for the first time in days, the sound brittle and honest. They had slept in shifts while snow tried to kill them without malice, as snow always does.
The dais returned; the ruined arch, the cracked stars. Ragnar's hand flexed once on the throne's arm—tendon shifting under scarred skin—then stilled. No one commented. To note that movement aloud would have been to threaten a bridge with a blade.
Hakon did not smile. He would not make the moment kind. "We lost men no songs remember. We saved many who have since forgotten. We held a pass for three days against a thing that did not bleed. I have come to say the names, if you will have them."
Names. He had so many now—gods devoured, cities broken, realms unspooled—that a list of mortals seemed a small weight. The list was not small. Ragnar's jaw closed with the faintest click.
The seeress's fingers twitched and then re-set in prayer that was not to any god. The flame-scarred Queen exhaled like a bellows settling. The frost-blood's breath drifted as a thinner ribbon. The storm-breather's hair moved, just once, as if brushed by a hand that wasn't there. None spoke.
Hakon's voice softened. "I will begin with the man I killed for you when you still thought yourself a good man. Because that is where the line begins."
A murmur of pressure moved over the chamber—the way a storm announces itself without thunder. The sons leaned forward, pupils narrowing. The daughters, motionless, strained not to listen and failed.
Ragnar's left eye dimmed. Not its power. Its brightness. The glow folded inward, as if to make room for a picture that could only be seen in low light.
He remembered.
A field of reeds on the edge of a village. A man with a hunter's bow and a fear of change. Ragnar had wanted to spare him. Ragnar had said, "We will take his oath; we will not take his blood." The man had aimed at Ragnar's back—fear is a poor shot but a quick one—and Hakon had crossed the space between breaths and broken the man's neck with his forearm. It had been clean, efficient, irreversible. Ragnar had not thanked him. He had not condemned him. He had stood above the body and understood, very quietly, that the path he thought he walked was already gone.
Where the howl began.
Pain did not show on Ragnar's face. He had learned long ago to pay the cost in private. But something shifted behind the eye, and the Queens saw it; the sons sensed it; the daughters felt it and did not know the name.
Hakon bowed his head for one heartbeat. When he lifted it, his voice carried the steadiness of winter roads: treacherous if you move too fast, survivable if you choose each step. "You are what the world needed you to become. No one can speak against that and live honestly. But a reign without a root is a storm that forgets the mountain it wraps around. I am here to name the mountain."
The word "root" brushed the iron-valkyrie's cheek like a blade. The storm-breather's eyes hardened—not against Hakon, but against the implication that there was something beneath Ragnar's divinity that anyone could touch without burning. The frost-blooded Queen watched the High Wolf with a cold prayer running under her ribs: Choose. Choose which part of you lives here.
The sons glanced between Hakon and their father with a soldier's curiosity edged in envy. Each of them muscle-bound to destiny, each of them a reflection of Ragnar's fire without his gravity, they recognized instinctively that Hakon had walked nearer to the core than they had ever been allowed. It unsettled them. It taught them. If there was a way to approach the throne without being devoured, it wore the shape of loyalty and grief.
The daughters' reverence trembled once—so slight the tremor might have been a breath. They had craved a father who could be understood, not merely obeyed. They had been given a god. Hakon's presence made a dangerous promise: the god had once been a man, and might still know what it meant.
Hakon took another half-step, stopped at the edge of the invisible perimeter that only he understood perfectly. He said, "Say nothing, if you choose. Command, if you must. I will still speak the names."
He did not raise his voice to fill the hall; he lowered it, as if the names would refuse volume. "Sigrun, who held the narrow for one hour and made it a day. Alvar, who burned on the ice so the rest could see. Dotta, who carried the child whose name we never learned. Jofan, who broke his spear and used his teeth. Kori, who made the last joke, and then made none. Brynjar, who asked me to tell you he had no regrets, and I knew he lied, and I let him."
The names were ordinary. That was the point. Ragnar's hand closed on the throne's arm until the creak of bone-metal could be heard; then he released. The hall did not dare call it a flinch.
Hakon's eyes did not leave Ragnar's face. "You swore to end a world that could not be mended. You did it. But before you were the one who ends, you were the one who stayed. When the roof fell. When the food ran thin. When the snow asked questions your body could not answer and you answered anyway. Brother, the line between those two men is not a cliff. It is a road. I am here to say: I walked it with you."
The Queens were very still. Some of them hated this. Some of them feared this. A few, though, let a different breath into their lungs, as if—if the High Wolf remembered how to be a man—then their crowns would feel less like collars.
A faint sound rose from the far reaches of the broken colonnade: the slow crumble of debris loosening. No one looked toward it. Their attention was trained upon the smallest movement on earth—the lowering of Ragnar's chin by the breadth of a finger.
In the quiet, a young daughter near the center of the formation blinked too quickly. She had her mother's storm-temper braided under discipline. She did not weep. She breathed in a way that was almost a sob and then became only air again.
A son with the scar from ear to collar glanced at her, then back to his father, and found that the sight of Ragnar unmoving terrified him more than any scream could. Let him speak, the son thought—though he would never admit it even to himself.
Hakon's voice softened again, but it did not tremble. "I know what you will make of this ruin. I do not ask for gentleness. Only that the part of you that stayed in the snow not be buried under the palace you build from bone."
It was not a plea. It was a measurement. It weighed what remained against what must be done.
The light inside Ragnar's left eye steadied, then banked as a fire does when it has accepted the night's length. His shoulders did not slump; gods do not allow the posture of burden to be seen. Yet an older rhythm moved through him—no less powerful, but nearly human in its cadence. A heartbeat that remembered roofs and small fires and the way a friend's sleep sounds when guarded.
Far beyond the hall, across the you-should-not-look distances of the sundered realms, a pale glow climbed the edge of a shattered horizon as if the dead sky were trying to rehearse dawn. It failed. The light held and thinned, and the ruin remained itself.
Ragnar lowered his chin the rest of the way—another finger's breadth. The change moved through the assembly like a ripple across a frozen lake.
When he spoke, the words were not loud. They did not need to be. They carried because everyone had been waiting to hear if the language of men still lived in him.
"You came, Hakon."
There was no warmth. There was no cruelty. There was recognition that landed with the weight of a hand placed on a shoulder once, long ago, by a fire that had been difficult to keep.
Hakon closed his eyes for a heartbeat. When he opened them, the man who had walked through a thousand impossible nights nodded once. "Always," he said.
The frost-blooded Queen exhaled a fog she had not known she was holding. The storm-breather's hair lifted with a soft static whisper, then fell. The seeress's veils fluttered as if a breath moved under them that did not belong to her. The iron-valkyrie's jaw unlocked.
The sons stepped back a measure in their minds from the thought of challenging him. The daughters lifted their gazes, fractionally, to a point just
Dusk found the ruin like a hunter that knew every path. Its light came on soft paws, edging along cracked ribs of obsidian, tasting the ash, fingering the seams Ragnar had ordered to bear weight. The sky beyond the broken arches did not redden like ordinary evenings—it bled a colder hue, amber washed thin, as if reluctant to admit that night could still exist after gods had died.
Ragnar stood at the hall's far margin where stone gave way to a balcony of fractured worldroot. Below, the void held shards of land like teeth, the nearest of which had shifted, obeying the day's new geometry. Wind moved across the gap, smelling faintly of old pine and distant iron. He listened without moving. He had rung the world; the world had answered; now it waited to hear what the ring meant.
Footfalls approached—barely sound at all, more the memory of footfalls, perfectly placed.
Eivor stopped at his right shoulder. She did not take the space of a supplicant or a lover. She took the space of a shield, angled to catch what would come. Even in stillness she was discipline bound in flesh—frost in her breath, shoulders square, jaw set with a soldier's patience. The wind combed her braids and found no purchase.
On his left, laughter lived in the quiet a moment before its owner did. Brynja arrived like heat held beneath mail—smile in the eyes first, then the mouth, wolf-warm and battle-ready. She wore her joy like a scar that refused to close. A thin crack of light along her cheek might have been fire remembered.
They did not speak at once. The three of them looked out where the world had ended and begun again, and the silence changed shape: not the hush of funerals now, but the breath before a charge.
"You always choose the edge," Eivor said at last, voice level, winter-clean. "Even as a boy with no roof—you slept against the doorframe to feel the draft."
Ragnar's amber eye drew in the last of the light. "Doors teach a man which way the wind intends to kill him."
A grin leaked out of Brynja before she let it fully live. "And we taught the wind how to limp."
Eivor's mouth almost softened at that, but not quite. "Dusk names the first trial. They are ready to believe. They are not yet ready to know."
"That is what trials are for," Ragnar answered. "Belief that survives knowledge."
Brynja's gaze slid over him, fond and merciless. "And if they hate you for it?"
"If," he said, and the word held no more weight than a blade's width. "They will."
A soft shuffle—the careful weight of feet old enough to understand reverence and young enough to be hungry—came from the arch behind them. The children had not been summoned. But instinct had called them more cleanly than any horn.
Astrid Winterfang reached the threshold first and did not cross it until she had measured the ground. She took in the distance, the drop, the angle of the wind. Her eyes were pale enough to read as ice even in failing light. When she stepped forward, it was with the confidence of someone who had already counted her exits and found them unnecessary.
She knelt, not low—precisely. "High Wolf," she said, voice quiet as a blade unsheathed only to the first inch. "I am set."
Ragnar looked at her and saw Eivor's discipline drawn like a bowstring across his own severity. He gave no praise. He let silence become her proof.
Kaela Bloodsmile came next, walking as if dusk were a song she liked. She stopped beside Astrid without kneeling, because she did not yet understand that stillness could be a weapon. Her grin flashed—quick and bright, unashamed.
"Dusk tastes right," she murmured, eyes on the void. "Like the world's mouth about to open."
Brynja's chin tipped; that small approval was thunder for those who knew her. "Save some teeth to bring back," she said. "You're not meant to swallow every night whole."
Kaela's grin sharpened. "What if it tries to swallow me first?"
"Bite deeper," Brynja answered, and Kaela's laugh was quiet and too happy for the hour.
Hrólf Frostmaw stepped into the dim not long after—the largest of the three so far, quiet as snowfall that buries a camp by morning. He did not lower his head so much as align it with duty. His presence changed the air's math; distances shortened around his shoulders.
"I will hold," he said to Ragnar. Not a boast. A logistical report fate could sign.
Ragnar did not nod. He let the boy's words stand upright beside him and did not knock them down. Hrólf's jaw set harder, relieved by the weight of not being thanked.
Skjorn Flamesurge drifted in like a drumbeat half-remembered from last winter's raid. He had Brynja's warmth and a little of Ragnar's stillness braided badly together. He bowed with a flourish that would have been arrogance in anyone else and became, in him, the courtesy of war.
"High Wolf," he said, and his voice carried a human music dangerous to those who followed it. "If you point, I will make the pointing a road."
"You will make it a road others can walk back on," Ragnar said.
Skjorn absorbed the correction into his spine. "Then I will leave markers."
Liora Stormcry stopped at the arch and did not enter. The light preferred her face for a moment, as if to test whether it would catch; it did, and she flinched at being seen. She stepped forward anyway. Knew where to put her feet. Knew where to stop.
Her voice was almost steady. "If we fail…" She swallowed and forced herself to look at Ragnar's face, not the stone at his boot. "If we fail, will you remember us as we were—or as what we should have been?"
The wind thought about listening. Brynja's smile faded. Eivor turned her head two degrees, granting the girl the courtesy of being weighed like steel, not consoled like a child.
Ragnar did not make her wait long. "I will remember you as you chose to be when it cost the most."
Liora exhaled—pain first, then relief. She nodded once, as if that sentence were a coat she could wear in winter.
Freyda Emberheart came last, as young as dusk allows without becoming full night. She halted with her toes still on the safe side of the threshold. Her hands had balled without her permission, and she forced them open finger by finger. Fire wanted to live under her skin and did not yet know its name.
She said nothing.
Brynja watched her and felt something inside her chest go bright. Eivor watched her and took note of how the girl placed her weight—forward, foolish, fearless. Ragnar watched her and saw hunger trying to become shape.
He turned, at last, to Eivor and Brynja. The dusk had laid a faint crown along each of their brows. He could still see them as they had been: Eivor with blood on her sleeve and snow in her hair, Brynja laughing because she was alive and therefore obliged to enjoy it. He did not soften. He let the memory be a whetstone.
"Speak," he said. "Not to them. To me."
Eivor did not bow. She stood as she had always stood beside him—at the edge of whatever would kill lesser people. "You choose trials that cut close to the bone," she said. "Good. Let bone be shaped to carry weight. But remember, Ragnar: edges are not crowns. The thing that endures is the thing that holds."
He received the sentence as law, not advice. "Root. Edge. Return," he said back, naming the trials like doors in a corridor. "I have not forgotten the first door."
Brynja stepped nearer, her warmth a living thing even in the falling chill. "They will bleed," she said—with delight, not cruelty, like a truth finally permitted the air. "If they bleed for nothing, they'll hate you. If they bleed for everything, they'll worship you. Neither is useful. Teach them to bleed for what stands."
Ragnar's eye burned low. "That is why you are here."
Brynja's smile came back, smaller and real. "No. We're here because once you were a boy with an axe too big for your hands, and you refused to let it shame you. We followed the refusal."
Eivor's breath fogged, then thinned. "We follow now."
Silence and wind held their line. The six children waited—each in the shape of a first truth.
Astrid spoke again, economical. "Command."
Kaela's grin slackened into seriousness, a rarity anyone who loved her would respect. "Only say where."
Hrólf: "I will anchor."
Skjorn: "I will carry."
Liora forced her fear to heel. "I will return with something that makes the rest want to."
Freyda managed words at last, small and steady. "I will not be last."
Eivor's hand moved—no more than two fingers lifting, an old signal from old nights. Ragnar's shoulders accepted it the way a glacier accepts the slope: as fact.
He faced them fully, turning his back to the void and the dying light. The amber in his left eye gathered dusk like a hearth gathers the room. There was no speech in him. There was law, and law spoken too often becomes story. He wanted steel.
"At first star," he said. "Root."
He looked to Eivor. "You will lay the field."
He looked to Brynja. "You will heat it."
He looked to the six. "You will be honest."
Astrid's nod was a blade set back into sheath. Kaela's breath caught—a laugh almost born and strangled for once. Hrólf squared, becoming wall. Skjorn rocked onto the balls of his feet and stopped, obedience mastering joy. Liora's eyes shone and the shine did not spill. Freyda's chin rose, a tiny defiance that made Brynja's heart ache in a way battle never had.
"High Wolf," Eivor said, the title carrying ten winters and ten thousand miles. "Walk."
He did.
Not into the hall and the comfort of thrones, but along the balcony's narrow lip where worldroot met the broken edge of everything. The wind lifted his hair and found a map of scars it would never know. Eivor fell in a half-step behind, the frost of her discipline settling over the path; Brynja took the other side, heat pooling where her shadow touched stone.
Behind them, the children held their places a heartbeat longer. Hrólf claimed the threshold with his body and let no panic cross it. Skjorn counted breaths and built a chant he would not yet sing. Astrid shifted her stance to accommodate the angle of the coming dark. Kaela pressed a kiss to her knuckles, a ritual with no god and therefore honest. Liora closed her eyes and saw three doors, and chose the first. Freyda stared into the place Ragnar had gone and memorized the shape of his walk.
When they finally moved, the day surrendered its last sliver to night. A star needled itself through the torn sky, then another. The trial grounds waited in the ravine beyond the ruined palace, where stone remembered being mountain and oath remembered being fire.
Ragnar did not look back. He had given them names to grow into and doors to open. The rest would be cut from what they chose.
The wind stiffened. The first star held.
And the High Wolf stepped into the dusk that would test everything he intended to keep.