They moved in controlled formation, as Eivor commanded—crescented across the forest floor. Röta on the left flank, Eydìs on the right, Jöra simmering just forward of center, Frëyä behind Thyrä to guard her back, Ingä trembling in the space between them like a taut bowstring ready to snap.
Eivor walked point.
The cold thickened. The forest did not whisper anymore—it listened.
Eivor raised her hand.
They froze.
Ahead, partially hidden beneath a black pine, lay a half-devoured stag carcass. Fresh. Steam still rose from the gore.
Then they heard it.
A slow, crunching sound—wet, deliberate—behind them.
Jöra turned first.
Too late.
Something the size of a wagon burst through the trees.
HëlBjörn.
Its fur was blackened and tangled, clotted with grave-mist and old wounds that should have crippled it—but instead pulsed with something cold and unreal. Its eyes glowed a drowned coal-red, like embers choked by ash but still burning hellishly. Each movement shook the ground like the tread of some war-beast from Helheim's forges.
It had circled them completely.
Just as Thyrä warned.
Röta took the hit first.
HëlBjörn's paw crashed into her shield with such force she was launched across the clearing like a discarded doll, smashing into a tree trunk hard enough to crack bark. She dropped to her knees, gasping, left arm limp from the impact.
"Hold formation!" Eivor yelled, already lunging forward as shieldmaiden.
She put herself between the beast and her hunters, seax out and shield raised, bracing for the next strike.
HëlBjörn came again.
Its claws scraped sparks from her shield. Eivor grunted, boots digging furrows in the soil as the sheer weight behind the blow tried to drive her to her knees.
"Flank it!" she barked.
Jöra roared with savage joy and rushed forward, axe swinging in a downward arc—only to be knocked sideways by a backhand sweep from HëlBjörn's massive forelimb. She slammed into ground, blood in her teeth, laughing through pain as though the world had just awakened for her.
Ingä screamed.
Frëyä yanked her back as the beast lunged again, jaws snapping with enough force to shatter bone like glass.
Eydìs loosed a thrown spear into its shoulder—it sank halfway, but HëlBjörn barely reacted, turning its burning gaze toward her with a malignant awareness that froze her momentarily in place.
Thyrä tried to move into a better angle, but nearly stumbled over Ingä, who had fallen backward in terror. She drew her sword and tried to circle, but Eivor flung out a hand sharply—
"Stay behind me!"
Thyrä bit back the impulse to protest as the bear turned once more toward Röta—who was barely rising to her feet, shield arm hanging uselessly.
Eivor lunged, intercepting, slamming her shield into HëlBjörn's flank with a crack of force that would have knocked a lesser beast off-balance.
It barely shifted.
Instead, it turned its massive head and swung it like a battering ram.
Eivor was thrown aside, crashing into Thyrä.
The impact drove the air from both their lungs.
Thyrä's hand slammed into Eivor's forearm—skin to skin.
And the world vanished.
---
She was standing in a forest soaked in blood.
Not earth-brown, not crimson—but blackened, congealed, thick as tar.
Jöra lay half-eaten, laughter frozen in death.
Eydìs's spine lay twisted at an angle no human body could endure.
Frëyä's shield was split in two as she bled from a throat wound.
Röta's body was pinned beneath a tree, eyes glassy.
Ingä screamed as she died last, begging for someone to save her.
Even Brynja, who had arrived too late but fought like a demon, fell with her throat crushed in HëlBjörn's jaws—her final grin twisted in a mix of defiance and despair.
Eivor stood alone, battered, armor shattered, covered in blood that was not all her own. She drove her spear through HëlBjörn's skull in a final, defiant strike, roaring Ragnar's name as thunder echoed… but there was no one left to hear her. Her victory was hollow. She lived. But all others had died.
Then Thyrä saw herself.
Face-down in the dirt, her sword lying useless at her side.
Dead.
A forgotten serpent among wolf corpses.
A fate she could not accept.
Not for herself.
Not for her shieldmaidens.
Not for the hall she would claim a place in.
Not for Ragnar.
---
The vision shattered.
She was back in the forest—the real one.
Breathing hard. Eyes burning. Eivor's weight still thrown partly against her side as the bear charged again.
Frëyä was screaming for Röta.
Jöra was staggering up, laughing blood.
Ingä was frozen, tears on her face, whispering, "It's too big… it's too big…"
HëlBjörn threw its massive body toward Eivor—this time prepared to crush her entirely.
Thyrä didn't think.
She acted.
A roar tore from her throat—not like a serpent's hiss, but like something caught between wolf and storm.
She broke from behind Eivor, sprinted straight toward the charging HëlBjörn—
—and leaped.
Her boots struck its spine.
Her hands found purchase in its gore-matted fur.
She climbed, legs tightening around its ribs as it bucked violently, trying to dislodge the thing now clinging to its back like a hateful omen.
Her sword raised.
Destiny forked.
And she chose.
She drove the blade down, straight toward the beast's skull—
And fate screamed as it broke.
The forest tore itself apart.
HëlBjörn reared upright, flinging Thyrä halfway from its back, her sword lodged shallowly in its hide. The beast bellowed—no sound of flesh and throat, but a roar that carried through the ground like thunder through bedrock. The air shivered. Trees bent. Ravens scattered screaming from the canopy.
Thyrä's fingers slipped in blood. She clung harder, snarling like an animal, eyes wide with terror and fury. Her blade tore free, and she stabbed again—wild, unmeasured, carving open sinew and bone. Every blow drew another spurt of black, steaming blood that hissed when it hit her skin. The creature twisted and bucked, smashing itself into trunks, trying to crush her against bark.
"THYRÄ!" Eivor's voice cracked across the clearing.
But Thyrä didn't hear her.
She was gone—consumed.
Her screams rose and fell with each thrust, half sob, half incantation. The others watched helplessly as she was nearly thrown free again—then caught herself by driving her dagger-hand into the beast's wound to anchor. She screamed louder, the sound turning feral.
The bear's claws raked trenches into the earth. It spun, dragging her through branches that ripped her back open, but she would not release.
A flash of white lightning speared the sky. Thunder cracked a heartbeat later, rattling every tree. When the flash cleared, every warrior saw it—Thyrä crouched low on the beast's spine, eyes burning with an alien light, hair clotted to her face.
She bared her teeth and roared.
Not human.
Not anymore.
She drove the sword again and again into the thick bone ridge of HëlBjörn's skull. Once. Twice. A third time—the steel slipped, snapped, half the blade embedded deep. She grabbed the broken hilt and stabbed again, screaming as lightning struck the ground behind her, shaking the world itself.
Then—
a sound like the tearing of mountains.
The skull cracked.
A gout of dark vapor, not smoke but soul, vented from HëlBjörn's mouth—a spectral column twisting into the sky like black flame. The trees bowed away as if afraid to touch it. For a moment the clouds above churned unnaturally, forming the faint outline of a vast shadowed shape—a wolf's maw, enormous and watching—then vanished into the storm.
Ragnar, miles away at VargrHall, straightened where he stood. His hand clenched the edge of the unfinished table. The fire in the hearth guttered. For the briefest instant, he felt it: the death of something old. The world had shifted.
Back in the forest, HëlBjörn fell.
The ground shook. The impact threw the women off their feet. Eivor hit the dirt, rolled, and rose again, sword half-raised—but the bear did not move. Its body twitched once. Then was still.
Thyrä still clung to it, breath heaving, her arms locked around the broken sword buried to the hilt in its skull. She looked like she'd been born from the corpse—hair drenched, face smeared with blood, mouth open in a grin that trembled between madness and triumph.
Around her, the others slowly gathered their breath.
Röta, bleeding from her mouth, whispered hoarsely, "She… she did it."
Frëyä was on her knees, clutching Ingä, who sobbed silently into her chest.
Eydìs stood with her weapon low, eyes fixed not on the beast—but on Thyrä.
Calculating.
Understanding that something had just rewritten itself.
Jöra began laughing again, ragged, wild laughter that turned into coughing. "By all the gods," she rasped, "the serpent killed the storm."
The thunder answered her, rolling over them like applause from the dead.
Thyrä slid down from HëlBjörn's corpse, landing hard in the mud. Her legs buckled. She crawled forward until her hands met solid ground, then turned, staring up at Eivor as if waking from a trance.
Eivor approached slowly.
Her armor was split. Her shield arm hung heavy. But her eyes burned steady.
She looked down at Thyrä—this young, drenched serpent who had ignored her command, shattered her hunt, and saved them all by defying her.
Blood steamed between them.
Eivor's jaw flexed once. Then she spoke, quiet, so the storm almost stole the words:
"You did not save us," she said. "You changed the death order."
She turned away, leaving Thyrä on her knees beside the bear's corpse, staring at the sky where the ravens wheeled above.
In the trees, something ancient whispered back through the wind—words none of them could understand.
And the storm kept on watching.