All The Windwracked Stars - Chapter 1
Cover art by Jean-Sebastian Rossbach
1: Isa (ice)
On the Last Day:
He was born white, before she burned him.
But that wasn't what happened first. Not in the beginning.
In the beginning was the end of the world.
There was snow at the end of the world, and Kasimir was dying in it. Broken wings dragged from his shoulders like defeated banners, disordered feathers hauling crimson streaks through the snow that would not stop falling. The wings were the worst pain, each step grinding bone-shards through savaged muscle and lacing his withers with acid ribbons.
The worst pain, but not the only. One foreleg wouldn't bear his weight. His harness dragged askew, girth snapped, stirrups banging his ribs as he hobbled in circles, right head hanging, antlers scraping ice and frozen earth and fouling his remaining foreleg.
But still he walked, limping in tightening circles, bellying through drifts that rose to his chest, blood freezing bright as hawthorn berries on feathers and hide that faded into the mounting snow.
It was cold, and he was dying alone. But somewhere under the snow was Herfjotur, who had been his before she was torn from the saddle. Kasimir was a valraven, the war-steed of a waelcyrge, and they were dead, all dead, every one of them, the waelcyrge and the einherjar, the Choosers of the slain and their immortal warriors.
They were dead. Herfjotur was dead. It was snowing.
And Kasimir would not lie down until he found her.
They had sworn to die singing, and they had done it, every one of them. Ten thousand taken all together, einherjar and waelcyrge and the tarnished, the children of the Light and those fallen to the shadow, together again under the falling snow.
Every one of them, except for Muire.
Now she slogged through thigh-deep snow, returning to the field of battle. She was not dead, though she should have been. She lived because she had fled, because she had broken and run and left her brothers and sisters to fall without her. To fall like stars, and die singing, here on this high place with their backs to the ocean and the snow drifting over their corpses. She stumbled past the great slumped shapes of valraven, the smaller hillocks of her brothers and sisters lying tangled in their silver chainmail and their ice-colored swords and the cloaks of midnight blue, spangled with embroidered stars.
In death they were anonymous. She could not tell the tarnished from the Bright, and she did not pause to uncover their faces. She tried not to see the gaunt black shapes of the sdadown sprawled among them, red tongues lolling in the snow, poison-green eyes sunken and lightless.
And over all of it the blood, and the ice over that.
Muire did not feel the cold. She was a child of the Light, of the North, of the ice and the winter, and no cold could touch her. It could not make the bones in her hands ache, or numb and gall her feet. It could not crack her lips and pull the moisture from her skin.
She was a child of the Light, one of the wardens of Valdyrgard. But now she reached out to that Light and touched nothing. No song, and no singing, and no power of the massed will of her brothers and sisters. They were gone, and she was the last, limping through snow on a leg scored by the teeth of a sdada that had charged past her, to join the pack pulling the war-leader apart.
Strifbjorn had died there, eaten alive, borne down under a black wave of sdadown. And Muire had lived, because she ran.
Now she returned. She'd lost her helm somewhere, and her crystal sword Nathr was dark as a splinter of glacier in her hand. Ash-colored plaits hung down her back like a pair of rope ladders, snow snagging on stray hairs. She saw other braids vanishing under the snow, smooth golden or flaxen ones without the split ends and sprung bits that always seemed to come of Muire's impatience with the brush.
Snow had drifted over most of the blood, but her boots broke through the crust to ink a red trail behind her. She trudged, head down, and when the brief winter light was failing she found the place that she had fled from. She sheathed her blade and dropped to her knees in the snow, fresh blood oozing from her ragged wound, and there with bare hands she began to dig.
She found Arngeir first, Bergdis lying half over him, as if their mutual slaughter had been the consummation of an embrace. Menglad Brightwing was cold and quiet beside them, her hand cast over her mouth, palm outward, as if expressing surprise. She lay unmarked, except for the blood of her enemies, victim of a tarnished kiss.
And then Muire uncovered Strifbjorn. She hunkered, knees drawn up before her, and bit her fingers and stared and tried to find the courage to lie down in the snow beside him.
He had died bravely, but he hadn't died well. The sdadown had had their way with him, so she would not have known him from his face. But his stature and his silver-white plait told her whose body this was, as did the blade called Alvitr lying unbroken by the remains of his hand.
Behind the storm, night was falling. The long sweet howl of a sdada lifted the hair on her neck, as perfect and mournful as the call of the wolf the monster had once been. Muire pulled her cloak tight to her shoulders and rubbed at icy tears.
She could not stay here. She did not have the strength to bury them. They were frozen in the snow, and there were too many. She dared not even sing them to sleep; a raised voice would lead the hunting sdadown to her.
It would be a fitting way to die, but she looked on what remained of Strifbjorn, and she feared it. And so instead, she reached down, deep, to where the Light should have filled her. Where there should have been an answer, the knowledge of what it willed, a swanning. But the Light had no counsel. The brilliance that should have blazed from her hands and eyes and open mouth was nothing but a flicker, the last blue flame crawling over spent fuel before the wind unravels it.
It was only the ghost of strength dying in Muire's breast. The Light did not answer.
Kasimir could not find Herfjotur. There were so many, under the snow, and the stench of blood and the dead musk of sdada was everywhere. He nosed aside the vile-wolf corpses, swept snow from bodies with his horned head because the antlered one hung dripping blood from chill nostrils. The wind gusted this way and that, twisting his feathers. The night came on, and he, who had never known the cold, felt it leaching into his bones, pooling in his muscles, puddling in the bottoms of his lungs. It was heavy, that cold. Heavy, and it clawed at him with sharper talons than the sdadown.
Worlds had ended before: he had heard of the fall of Midgard, beyond a sea of space and time, from whence the very oldest of creatures had journeyed: the Grey Wolf, his demon sibling, and the World Serpent, who was called the Dweller Within, and also the Bearer of Burdens. There were many tales, and Kasimir had heard them by firesides with his rider, when the Grey Wolf had deigned to speak. Before the Wolf had done what he had done.
Kasimir pushed through another drift, breast-deep, hooves scrabbling as he floundered. Sometimes his feet struck frozen flesh under the snow, and each time he stopped and uncovered what he found, cold scents as good as names and faces in the gathering dark. As the sun fell it grew more difficult to tell the texture of flesh from that of stone, but he found Hrolf and Horsa, and Brynhild who had been Zacharij's rider, and the valravens Zacharij and Hryhoriy, more torn than Kasimir. Their feathers fluttered like tattered cloth when he swept the snow from their wings.
Then he found Olrun who had been Herfjotur's spear-sister, Olrun who had gone to the tarnished and whom Kasimir had shattered under his flailing hooves, there at the end of the world. Wings dragging, he paused to remember who she had been, before she had fallen.
But only for a moment. Night was falling, and he would find Herfjotur. He would lie down beside Herfjotur, and that would be good. But first he would rest here, only for a moment, he told himself, as his foreleg failed him and he went to his knees, ice and blood crunching under his settling weight.
Or maybe he would just lie down here. Beside Olrun. He had missed her, after she had tarnished. And surely Herfjotur would not wish her left alone. Surely she would forgive him. It was, in the end, only one more tiny failure.
He let his muzzle rest in the snow. He let his ears sag forward. He would only rest a little.
A sdada howled.
Kasimir, struggling to lift his head, saw a torn light flicker through the snow, and neighed with renewed desperation.
Muire found her feet, pushing against the unaccustomed pain of stiffened joints and the insulted, frozen muscle of her thigh. She grunted and staggered and caught herself with a wince.
The night seemed darker than it should, so Muire knew her waelcyrge's eyesight was also deserting her. But the cry was repeated, a frail, frantic neigh, and she unslung Nathr from her shoulders and used the scabbarded blade as a crutch.
Undignified, and the sword deserved better, but Muire's only other choice was to cast her aside, and she had not yet fallen so low. She comforted herself that even the tarnished had kept their blades, though the act profaned them.
He called again before she found him. Herfjotur's stallion waited with a sagging head, wings draggled like a dying falcon's, the other neck broken and twisted sideways, on his knees in the snow. He snorted, whuffling like a stabled horse when she came into sight, and even through the darkness, Muire could see enough to be cruelly glad she'd kept her sword. He would need its mercy.
"Bright one," she breathed, not daring to reach out and touch his neck. He made the connection for her, nosing her chest hard enough to nearly knock her off her feet. She gasped when her weight rocked onto her injured leg and caught one spiraled horn to steady herself.
He froze, as white and still as the white drifts around him, and let her cling. And then, in a deep and sonorous voice that would have resonated through her chest if it had been spoken aloud, he said, Alive? Alive how?
She let his horn go as if scorched. His great brown eyes were soft and living, but she could see the broken bones jagged through the flesh of his wings, the twisted, back-bent leg. "Cowardice," she said, and leaned on her sword-crutch a moment before she could force the next words out. "I ran."
He turned his head to center her in one eye's vision. The Light?
"No more," she answered. She braced herself on her one good leg and raised her sword, her hand clutching the scabbard below the crosspiece. "Bright one" --she did not know his name; none but a valraven's rider knew his name-- "I cannot heal you."
She could not even heal herself. Only hours ago, it would have been no more than the matter of a thought. Only hours--
Live, the stallion said, unflinching, and Muire stopped with her blade half-skinned from the scabbard.
"We can't," she said, as an edgy, grieving howl drifted to her. She swallowed, and it felt as if the crunching ice cut her tender throat from the inside. She finished sliding Nathr's dark blade into her hand.
Ingrained habit made her work the sheath back through her baldric, where it banged her spine when her cloak lifted on the wind. The blood on her tongue when she bit her cheek brought some measure of courage. Somewhere out in the darkness, the sdadown hunted, and Muire jerked her chin. "I will be quicker than they."
The stallion surged up in the snow. Live, he demanded, his wings flopping with the sickening violence of landed fishes. Muire fell back, waving her blade well-clear, and sprawled on her back in the snow. It crushed down her collar and under her mailshirt, chilling her flesh--another unpleasant, unfamiliar sensation. Live, he said again, more softly, as she held the sword foolishly up out of the snow, struggling on her wounded leg. She floundered until the stallion extended his head again, offering his mane for a handle, and then she managed to haul herself up. She leaned against him, gasping, his warmth transmitted through her tunic and chain.
Live. One more time, and this time, no more than a meditative murmur. She stroked his blood-iced forelock from his eyes in time to feel him flinch from another howl, an answering one. She sighed. If only she'd had the sense to stand and die earlier, this would have been over now.
But the stallion, she thought. The stallion would be alone. Perhaps she could make some sort of amends by standing with him.
"As well now, here with you as later, otherwise."
She whipped her blade on long twinned curves and put her back to the stallion's worse-injured shoulder. He whickered again, ears up, half-braced on a leg that would not hold him, and mantled her with shattered wings so her flank was covered.
No such courage in all the world, she thought, and the sdadown came upon them.
It was a small pack, only four, and not the dozen it had taken to pull down Strifbjorn. When they ventured close enough, she saw how their ribcages protruded, how their backbones and tails were knobby and spined. Great splayed paws held them lightly on the snow, and their red maws dripped slaver.
Once, she would have met them singing. Now, it was grim fury, ice and blood and her own silence, and the silence of the beasts. The sdadown hunted like the wolves they had once been--feints and distractions--but they were dead already, and the only way to destroy them was to destroy their hearts.
At first, they circled. Wise monsters, they knew that the valraven and waelcyrge were wounded, that the snow and the cold collected a toll that could not be replenished. Two feinted at the crippled stallion's haunches, and Muire surprised herself, half scrambling and half sliding over the broken wing to meet them, her sword outreached as she lunged.
She pricked one through the throat, but it dragged itself off the blade and retreated. Through what will she did not know, the valraven found the strength to kick out, sending the other sdada tumbling. A living wolf would have yelped, rolled to its feet, and circled, limping. The sdada rose and circled, certainly, but it did it in bitter silence, head sunk between jutting shoulders.
Muire prayed, and went unanswered. And as if they slipped over greased ice, the sdada struck again.
She stepped into it, thrusting, and staggered with the shock as the sdada impaled itself on her blade. The second one, the one she had earlier wounded, hurled itself out of darkness at her throat. She shied back, clinging to Nathr's hilt, and got her arm up as she whipsawed sideways. The first sdada's ribcage offered grating resistance to the blade, the vile-wolf thrashing until it slumped, suddenly, its heart bisected.
Through the hot sting of teeth meeting in the muscle of her off-side arm, she barely noticed. The weight struck her shoulder and chest and she staggered, thumping solidly into the stallion's haunches. Her blade, knocked free of the broken sdada, swung wildly, the ridged brass and iron hilt twisted unready in her hand.
The stallion snorted and stood firm, supporting her, while the sdada gnawed and thrashed. It felt hideous, not hide and hair but warm soft slickness, shadows wrinkled and slippery over the skinned flesh beneath. It had no breath.
It pressed her forearm against her throat, teeth grinding into bone, the pain eye-watering. But the warm hide against her shoulders heaved and surged over living muscle, and she heard the stallion's labored breathing, the sick kitchen sound of ripping flesh. Her own blood wet her face, her feet slipping as she floundered in deep snow. Kasimir surged and snorted, something crunching under his teeth and hooves.
She let the sdada shove her back against the stallion and struggled to right her sword. No blade for a mighty-thewed warrior, Nathr, but a light, quick sword, still long enough that little Muire had to wear it slung between her shoulders rather than at her hip. She was the least of her sisters, small and quiet, a sparrow among falcons.
She still could wield her sword.
Her fingers tightened, the blade's weight pushing her arm down. The sdada scrabbled against her, smelling faintly of loam and rotten meat, dead green eyes glowing behind clouded corneas like a sun behind mist. Its silence offended her.
She grunted as its skull slammed into her face, and hammered its head with her pommel. The teeth loosened incrementally.
A dam burst. Muire shouted, slammed the beast again, let the stallion support her weight as she leaned back and kicked the vile-wolf in the ribs. Her flesh tore under its teeth, nauseating bursts of agony with every blow she delivered. She hit it again, gasping names, prayers--All-Father, Bright Mother--and knocked it back, struck it free. She found a breath as it rolled in the snow, tumbled to its feet, crouched and snarled silently.
Fine, she thought. Die in silence.
Not me.
She found another breath, and her defiance, and she sang.
Let it bring down every sdada left on the battlefield. Let them come. She had the stallion at her back, and blood trickling from her split lip and broken nose, blood flowing from her savaged forearm. She had death in her right hand and death in her heart. Let them come.
She would welcome them.
She waded forward, the snow numbing her wounded thigh, and swung her ink-black blade, singing between ragged breaths, gasping the words over a broken melody. And Nathr flared blue-white in her hand, bright as a full moon on snow, streaking the drifts with hard-edged deceptive shadows you could fall into, you could cut yourself on.
Muire flinched from the light.
She raised her right hand as if to shield her eyes, angling the blade down. The sdada leaped, thinking her dazzled, and she cut it from the air. Nathr went through it, scattering flesh and shadows and bits of bone, leaving Muire staring at her hand and the undimmed blade as if they were a stranger's.
Muire heard the stallion grunt, felt him lunge forward, uncoiling off powerful haunches. She turned in time to see him catch a third vile-wolf by the throat and shake it like a ratting dog shakes vermin. Bones snapped but it still moved, sickly, brokenly. He dropped it to the ground and began tearing out chunks with his teeth.
She stepped forward, around the dragging wing, and finished it with a thrust.
Like a clockwork unwound, she paused there, her blade still transfixing the sdada, her head bowed, plaits and cloak whipping forward as the wind veered behind her. Something stroked her cheek--a tear, already freezing. Her cold fingers numbed on Nathr's hilt.
The stallion nudged her hard with his muzzle and fell back into the snow with a thump. Muire turned, startled, but there was nothing behind her but the wind. She stood for a moment, tottering, her blade gleaming as bright in her hand as if all her brothers and sisters stood beside her. For a brief, cleansing moment she felt the snow in her hair, the presence of the children beside her.
And then there was nothing. She opened her eyes on emptiness, on blowing snow, on the already-drifted corpses of the sdadown that she and the dying stallion had killed--two for her, one for him, that last one together--and shook her head.
Wait with me, the stallion said.
It was not so much words as a terrible ache in her breast. She turned, plowed three steps toward him, and propped her sword against her hip while she fought with the bosses of his harness. The cold of the metal went right to the bone, aching, but she struggled frozen leather through stiff buckles and shoved the ruined saddle off his back. There was a corpse in the snow a few steps away--Olrun, tarnished, who had loved swans and the Hall's lean brindled wolfhounds, dead and neither an ally nor an enemy any longer. She had fallen half-wrapped in a tattered banner. Muire dragged the saddle over beside her, covering her with the blood-stained leather and the blanket, a crude sort of crypt.
And then Muire sat down in the crimsoned snow beside the stallion. She leaned against his shoulder and laid her shining, naked blade across her knees. And he in return draped his unbroken neck over her shoulder, his muzzle pressed to her armored chest. She hooked her arm up and reached around, under his throttle, to scratch behind his opposite ear. Frozen blood flaked from his mane.
"I've nowhere else to be," she answered, and tilted her temple against his silken velvet cheek.
Sometime in the night, the snow stopped falling.
Kasimir was not dead by morning, and neither was the waelcyrge. Her oozing wounds sealed, then stopped, the blood freezing or scabbing over them. She breathed against his cheek, her eyes closed, her heart slowing. Was this sleep? Kasimir knew mortals slept, but the children of the Light did not, not unless they were more gravely wounded than his new waelcyrge.
He considered that thought. His.
He did not have to take her. There was no law or rule that demanded he do so. He was valraven, and the choice was his.
He knew this one. Her name was Muire. She was the littlest of all Light's children, a poet and a historian and a metalworker rather than a warrior. She had loved Strifbjorn, the war-leader, and the war-leader had been gentle with her but he had not returned her love. Strifbjorn's heart--as Kasimir knew, as all the valraven knew, and never mentioned--had already been given.
She had been very brave, his waelcyrge. He nudged her with his muzzle to wake her, and she blinked and raised her head. Kasimir, he whispered.
At first she didn't understand. She scrambled to her feet, limping a little less--not healing like a waelcyrge, but healing. Her sword in her hand, she scanned the brightening horizon for some threat.
There was nothing. The sky arched enamel-blue, the edge of the cliff where the children of the Light had turned at bay visible as a ragged line of white against the steelier blue of the sea, far below. Kasimir, he said, again, insistently.
Slowly, she turned, and stared at him. She panted, pain etching shadows under gray eyes that gleamed dimly with starlight for a moment before flickering dark. He stared back, until she lowered the blade and straightened, pressing the flat across her thighs. "You don't have to do that. I will stay with you."
He let his muzzle drop into the snow. Live, he said. He felt the raw desire in her as well, chafing at her resignation, her cold certainty that she had betrayed the Light as surely as the tarnished and deserved nothing.
"I cannot--" she said. And then she looked down at the sword in her hands, the sword that still blazed blue-white, dimmer now in daylight, but unmistakable. "Maybe I can."
The Dweller Within never came to our aid, Kasimir said, lifting his head as if he could see more of the ocean. The Serpent is not dead, but lies dying. That is why there is no Light for you to call on. No Light but your own.
"Oh," his waelcyrge said, without looking up from her sword. And then she stared at him, her irises transparent pewter, the glow of the rising sun refracted through them behind ash-pale lashes, and he saw her throat work above the collar of her mail. She rustled softly, rings chiming on iron rings as she squared her shoulders. "I could ask for a miracle. I don't even know if it will work, if the Serpent is dying. But I could ask."
Kasimir paused. There was no promise such a call would be answered. No reason to believe that the outcome would be an improvement, if it was. Miracles happened, or they did not, and were wonderful or awful--or both--without logic or rhythm. He could find himself healed, remade, destroyed--or ignored, as they had been ignored as they fell to the tarnished and the sdadown.
Ask, he said.
The waelcyrge turned her face aside, her knuckles pale on the hilt of her sword, and closed her dark gray eyes.
The earth heaved under the snowdrifts. The waelcyrge lost her footing and pitched backwards into the snow a second time, her flailing arms carving angel wings in the white drift behind her. All around Kasimir, the surface cracked like the crust of an over-risen loaf; the frozen ground softened beneath him. He thrashed--whinnying, dragging himself to his feet, tossing his antelope-horned head, dragging the antlered one--but the earth bucked again and heaved him to his knees.
He could not stay down. Even a winged horse is terrified of unstable ground, and Kasimir's wings were shredded hobbles.
His waelcyrge scrambled backward, regaining her feet none-too-nimbly, and the earth split wide as the snow around Kasimir's hooves vanished in rushing hiss. Steam billowed around him, searing, bellying from deep below.
Stand, Kasimir.
It might have been Herfjotur's voice. He couldn't know over the roaring and the hiss, but he was sure it was not Muire's.
What mattered was that it was a voice he trusted. He locked his three good legs and his broken one, bone grinding, rasping under his weight. He lifted his head and stood his ground, and did not shy as metal oozed glowing from the steaming cracks.
He did not shy. But he screamed, and kept on screaming.
Muire could not go to him. She had been waelcyrge, and fire no more a threat to her than ice. She had been a smith, able to scoop metal from the crucible with her bare hand and pour it palm to palm like mercury. And when the earth yawned open and the white-hot iron smoked through the snow, she could not walk through the fire to Kasimir.
More cowardice. But at least she would not close her eyes.
He screamed while the metal crawled over him, fingerling rivulets broadening into a red-hot weld. It was like mercury, like a gold ring dipped in mercury, the quicksilver bonding to the surface. Yet this was no cold quicksilver, but molten metal, rising from the belly of the land in response to Muire's ill-considered prayer. All-Father, have mercy.
But mercy, in the end of things, was not what Othinn was for. Not the god who had hung on the world-tree for nine nights and nine days, who had sold his eye for power. And anyway, he had been left behind in Midgard. He had promised he would follow, that he would come to lead them in the new world. But he had not. And they had proven decisively, Muire thought, that they could not do it alone.
Somehow, through it all, the stallion stood.
And when it was done, he shone.
Impassive now, he straightened slowly. Both heads on their long necks turned to regard Muire, white rings already fading around living brown eyes in sculptured faces. His new skin cooled, his new bones hardened, and his bright steel-blue wings opened and flexed, feather-perfect.
The soft whisper of tiny interlocking barbs on the pinions was like a declaration of war. Steam hissed under pressure as he moved. He shook out his mane, and each hair of it was a single, gleaming wire. The snow sublimated under his footsteps as he came to Muire. He nosed her chain-mail covered breast, not hard, and she gasped at the startling heat. The earth smoldered under his footsteps.
She laid her hand flat against his cheek and jerked it away in a moment, scalded. "What are you?"
Kasimir, he answered. Metal and meat. Sorcery and steel.
"What are you?" she asked again.
His eyes were warm and soft. I am War.
"No," she choked, before her voice failed. The world was new and empty, changed from the world it had been at the sunset, and the valraven had changed with it.
And Muire would not change, did not wish to change. "What have you become?" She reached out, but snatched back scorched fingers. "You are the future."
I am the world, what the world will need, and what the world will be.
She turned her head, finally allowing herself to look away. "Why did you tell me your name? I am not worthy of you."
I would not choose one unworthy.
"I fled." He graced her with the steady regard of four patient eyes, and she could not lift her chin to meet it. "I fled the sdadown, and the tarnished, and I hid while our brethren died."
Heat rolled from him; the heat of the forge, the heat of a summer's day: a physical pressure. Her torn arm ached: it was bleeding again. Her thigh felt like knotted and dried rawhide.
"I am a coward. I will bring you pain."
What pain could equal the pain of creation? The antlered head ducked with a hiss of hydraulics. He folded his remade wings neatly and began to vaporize the snow about his hooves with short, sharp nudges of his muzzle--shyly, and so like any horse.
"Kasimir," she said, softly, just to taste it once, to taste the wonder of his offer. "You said it yourself. The Dweller Within is no more. The Light has failed."
The Dweller Within still lingers. We are the Light that remains.
She could not answer. He had not broken and run. "No," she said. "Oh, no..." And while she still could, she took the first step away.
His wings rattled and rustled. You will come back to me. I am Kasimir. I am the new Age of the World.
When you name me, I shall come.
With a masterful leap he was airborne and gone. The splayed feathers of his wingtips wrote a benediction on the snow, and she was blessedly, terribly, finally alone.
She lived because she fled; he lived because she did not let him die.
I would not choose one unworthy.
When he was gone, when her tears were mastered, Muire began to gather the bodies and build over them a cairn. There would be no second miracle; she asked and was not answered, as she would ask and go unanswered for centuries to come.
Her hands cracked and chapped and swelled with chilblains; her nose dripped blood and snot. She grew thin. She grew weary. She grew--as she had never before been--hungry.
There were only a few brothers and sisters missing, all tarnished, and when she had finished with the dead atop the sea-cliff, she scoured the rubble at the base for those that might have fallen. She found her brother Hafgrim there, broken on the rocks, gored by a valraven's antlers.
And there she found also the sword Svanvítr, but no sign of the Grey Wolf, its master.
One thousand years is a long time to go hungry.
The Grey Wolf wears a sun burning under his heart. A gnawed cord cuts his throat with every breath. He has devoured gods and outlasted the endless snow. He has thrown away his sword. He has eaten everything he ever loved.
He is immortal and alone. He is walking south, to a sword-age, a storm-age.
He is the wolf, until world's end.
Any day now.
Chapter 2Chapter 3