(Eivor's 21st → Ragnar's 22nd year)
Saga Opening:
"In the third year, the wolf no longer searched for strength—
he measured how much of the world he would burn when he returned.
Beside him walked the raven, no longer fledgling,
her wings black as night and edged in storm."
---
The turning of seasons brought change so subtle that it was hard to place the exact day when Ragnar stopped being a man recovering — and became a force waiting.
The pack had moved deeper into the wild northern territories, carving a home of hardened routine and silent loyalty. They no longer needed words to communicate. Ragnar could tilt his head slightly, and Hakon would already know how to shift flanks. Brynja could taste blood on the air before an ambush was even sprung, laughing as she tore through it. Eivor matched Ragnar strike for strike, never falling behind, her movements clean and ferocious.
She no longer wore Ragnar's old armor.
She wore one newly forged — shaped to her body, light yet brutal-looking, made from leather layered with plate taken from fallen enemies. Ragnar had personally carved a raven sigil across her chest, positioned so it seemed perched above her heart.
He, too, bore new armor — forged with thicker plating where old wounds had once ended him. Across his back, Brynja had painted a pale white wolf's head in blood charcoal, its single eye glaring.
They had become stories now more than people to those who saw them.
And stories could not be reasoned with.
Sigrun guided them less as mother, more as one who had walked alongside prophecy before and felt echoes of something rising again. She led them in rituals at the turning of each season — not prayer, but preparation. Firelit nights saw her mixing herbs and blood while chanting ancient words. Sometimes Ragnar's eye glowed faintly when the flames flared blue… sometimes Eivor's breath came out in frost when it should not.
They were being forged not just in war — but in fate.
As Eivor's 21st name-day approached, the pack hunted not for food or practice, but for silence — to feel the calm before change. That night, beneath a sky ripped open by moonlight and drifting mist, Sigrun called them to a circle of stones they had unknowingly camped near, ancient and marked by runes eroded by time.
There, she performed a rite older than the clans — not wedding, not swearing of loyalty, but something primal.
She slit her palm with her knife, pressed her blood to Ragnar's chest, then to Eivor's.
"Wolf and Raven," she intoned, her voice carrying low across the wind, "bound now not by clan or chance — but by the storm they will unleash together."
Hakon and Brynja each touched their own palms to Ragnar's shoulders, then to Eivor's back, acknowledging them as Alpha and Mate, leaders of their pack.
Ragnar did not smile — but his gaze lingered on Eivor in a rare, quiet moment as the firelight flickered over her. Something passed between them — silent, electric, final.
At dawn, as frost clung to the earth like glass, Hakon returned from a scouting mission, kneeling in front of Ragnar and Eivor.
"The Holmgang demand still stands," he said. "The Earl did not dismiss it. Eirik Sigvaldsson has risen in name and power… but they still await your return for judgment."
Ragnar lifted his head toward the horizon.
He looked at Eivor.
She nodded once.
So did Brynja.
Hakon rose.
Sigrun watched with the quiet resignation of a mother who knew that love meant not holding back a god-touched child from their path.
Ragnar spoke only one word:
"Home."
And they began to walk.
---
Saga Closing:
"And so, on the dawn of the Raven's twenty-first winter,
the One-Eyed Wolf led his pack from the wild.
Not as exile.
Not as fugitive.
But as storm, oath, and judgment walking on two legs."