(Ages 18->19)
Saga Opening:
"In the first year after the death that did not hold him,
the wolf was forced to remember he was still made of flesh.
Bone knit slow and bitter beneath winter's eye,
and every breath was a promise not yet spoken."
---
Ragnar did not rise easily after the Holmgang was declared.
His body, though saved from death, remained carved open by steel. Every dawn began with fire in his ribs and ended with the weight of exhaustion pulling him down like iron into cold water. Yet he stood. Then he walked. Then he lifted a blade again — first with Eivor steadying his arm, then alone, sweat freezing to his skin as he forced movement into meaning.
He trained not for glory, but to earn the right to one day stand beneath the sky and kill the man who tried to bury him in lies.
Eivor never left him.
She rose with him at dawn, stood opposite him in drills even when his muscles screamed, and took every hit he delivered when he overreached and collapsed under the pain that still clung to his core. There were nights she held him through tremors, when his body would remember the spear in his gut and try to shut down again. Her voice grounded him — quiet, firm, unwavering.
Brynja hunted far beyond the cave, bringing down elk and boar with bone-deep laughter, returning soaked in blood as though she feared forgetting the scent of kill. She fought raiders in the woods, leaving some alive only long enough to spread rumors that the One-Eyed Wolf was still breathing somewhere in the cold depths of the frontier.
Hakon became their eyes and ears. He walked between settlements masked in quiet competence, never naming Ragnar, never speaking of Eivor or Brynja — just listening. Collecting whispers. Learning which clans feared Eirik's rising political shadow and which despised him in silence.
Sigrun watched her son's transformation with eyes neither mournful nor proud. She brought him poultices and herbs in silence. Sometimes, late at night, she spoke to him of omens — of a spear that strikes thunder, of two ravens with lightning in their eyes, of Havi watching from roots beneath the earth.
Ragnar did not reject her words.
But he did not accept them yet.
He was not a god.
He was still healing as a man.
But during one cold morning, when snowflakes drifted through the cave mouth and Ragnar completed his first full combat routine without collapsing, Sigrun murmured:
"The wolf walks again."
Ragnar said nothing.
But Eivor's breath stilled beside him, as if she had felt the earth shift beneath her feet.
---
Saga Closing:
"And so the year of blood and bone ended,
not with triumph,
but with breath that no longer broke under weight.
For the wolf had remembered how to stand—
and soon, he would remember how to hunt."