The firelight flickered against the cave walls, carried in dancing ripples across Ragnar's skin like shifting runes only fate understood. The silence after Hakon's words had not fully broken; instead, it had settled — dense, thinking, heavy with truths too sharp to touch carelessly.
Sigrun said nothing at first.
She simply looked at her son.
When she had last seen him, he had been barely fourteen — taller than most boys his age, yes, but still soft around the face, still bright-eyed, still uncertain of how broad his shoulders would grow. His voice had only just begun to deepen. He had walked with a restless eagerness, trying to fill a space in the world he had not yet shaped.
Now… now he sat before her at eighteen — and the world seemed to bend differently around him.
His body bore the story of every season she had missed.
His shoulders were broader, no longer uncertain but hardened with the kind of tension that lived in men who had lifted more than spears — men who had carried their own dead hopes and still kept walking. His chest, though bandaged, showed the traces of muscle built through necessity, not vanity. His arms were haunted by pale scars at elbow and wrist — training wounds, survival wounds.
His jaw was sharper now, edged like a blade that had been honed too many times. A short, unruly beard framed it — uneven, wild, left to grow through pain and neglect, not pride.
His hair — once kept short and brushed aside by youthful habit — now fell longer around his shoulders, tangled, heavy with dried blood and sweat, like a mane matted by battle. Had she not known his face, she might have mistaken him at a glance for a younger berserker just returned from a night of slaughter.
But that was not the greatest transformation.
Where once two eyes had shone with the reckless defiance of youth, now only one remained.
A golden wolf-embroidered patch covered the right side of his face — the empty place where her son once saw the world with softness. His remaining left eye had always been a pale northern blue — but now it looked like ice floes cracked beneath thunderclouds. There was steel in it. Storm. Something that had stared at death and refused to bow.
Sigrun's fingers curled faintly around the spear across her lap.
He had grown older than eighteen in spirit. Too fast. Too painfully.
Her son had become a man — and then something more, or something less, but not something untouched.
He was breathing. He was alive. But some part of the boy she had left four years ago had died on some battlefield she had never seen.
It did not break her.
It hardened her resolve like a whetstone dragged across a blade.
She exhaled silently — not in relief, not in sorrow.
In acknowledgment.
"You have changed," she said at last, her voice level, neither warm nor cold — but full of meaning that needed no softening.
Ragnar did not look away.
He simply blinked once — calm, accepting, neither humble nor proud.
He knew it was true.
The fire crackled.
Outside, the wind howled faintly — distant, like a wolf calling to another.
And Sigrun, the mother who had returned to find her child carved into a warrior, lowered her spear gently to the floor beside her.
Not in surrender.
But in recognition that she was no longer just speaking to a son.
She was standing in the presence of something becoming.
Sigrun's gaze lingered on him a long moment after speaking, as though reading scars the way others read runes. Then slowly, her eyes lowered—not to the bandages that still marked fresh wounds, but to the golden wolf embroidered over the patch that covered Ragnar's right eye.
Her voice, when it came, was controlled and quiet—but heavy, like a stone dropped into deep water.
"How did you lose it?"
There was no tremor. No softness. Just truth requested.
Ragnar did not answer. His jaw shifted slightly, but his expression remained unreadable. The silence was not refusal—it was something colder. He would not speak of it himself.
The tension in the cave thickened.
Brynja's eyes narrowed. Her fingers clenched around the bone she still held until it cracked sharply in her grip. She exhaled slowly, gaze turning toward Sigrun with something like barely contained fury.
"He lost it long before this night," Brynja said, voice sharp as a drawn blade. "Long before Eirik spun his lies."
Sigrun's eyes shifted to her, still calm. Permission given.
Brynja stood, tossing the broken bone into the fire. "We were in final training before the raid," she began. "A month of hardening. Testing. Breaking and reforging."
She paced slowly across the firelight.
"There was sabotage. Rations spoiled. Ropes cut. Blades dulled in the night. Someone wanted our spirits weak before we crossed the sea." Her gaze flicked toward Ragnar briefly. "They failed."
She continued. "Then, an ambush. Midnight. Six against us. They thought we were unguarded. They were wrong." A savage grin. "Ragnar slit the first man's throat before he could scream."
Sigrun's fingers flexed faintly—a mother noting how her child had already bled for survival.
"After that," Brynja went on, "came the last shield wall drill. Full contact. No blunted weapons. Prove your strength—or be deemed unfit for the raid."
She stared hard now, anger simmering. "Eirik Sigvaldsson led the opposing line. He struck Ragnar with intent—not to test him, but to blind him. He drove his spear tip into Ragnar's right eye."
Eivor closed her eyes briefly, jaw tight as she relived it.
Brynja's voice lowered, dark with memory. "He should have fallen. Most men would have. But Ragnar…"
She lifted her chin, looking straight at Sigrun.
"…Ragnar screamed."
But it wasn't fear or pain she described.
"It wasn't human," Brynja said, stepping closer to the fire, the flames lighting her fierce expression. "It was a wolf's howl. Long. Terrible. So loud it made every warrior freeze." She glanced at Hakon, who gave one slow nod of quiet agreement.
"Even Eirik stumbled backward," Brynja continued, "like he'd just seen a draugr rise. Ragnar tore off his bandage mid-fight—blood pouring down his face like war paint—and he charged."
She smiled viciously.
"He broke through their wall alone."
The cave fell silent except for the crackle of fire.
Brynja's final words cut through the quiet like an axe.
"He lost his eye that day. But Eirik lost his courage. He has feared the One-Eyed Wolf ever since."
Sigrun listened wordlessly.
Her expression did not shatter or soften—but her eyes hardened, and the faint rise of her chest betrayed a mother's quiet, abiding rage.
The last time she had seen Ragnar, he had stared at the world with both eyes wide open.
Now only one remained.
And that one held storms.
She did not weep.
She only said, voice colder than steel in winter—
"He was already bleeding before the sea ever tasted his blood."
Ragnar did not speak—but his gaze shifted slightly toward his mother in silent acknowledgment.
Outside, wind clawed softly at the cave mouth like something waiting to be unleashed.
Inside, the truth now lay bare between mother, son, and pack.
And the next question lingered heavy in the air.
Was the girl beside him a shield—or a weakness?