Chapter 150: Deaths Without Songs
(CHARACTERS DIE WHEN I SAY SO!!!!) (YOU FOLLOW THE PROMPT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HAKON DOES NOT DIE YET!)
Hakon’s face contorted, a mixture of agony from his knee and impotent rage. “I am Jarl here,” he gasped, spittle flying. “Everything here is mine by right!”
Nick’s grip on Hakon’s wrist tightened like a iron band, forcing a pained grunt from the man. He drove his forehead forward in a brutal, short headbutt. The crack of Hakon’s nose breaking was a wet, final sound in the smoky hall. Hakon’s one good eye rolled back, his body going slack as consciousness fled.
Nick let him drop, a heap of furs and broken pride on the trampled earth. He didn’t watch him fall. He turned, seax in hand, and strode back toward the doorway, toward the chaos outside. The spiral was a silent scream in his veins.
The scene outside had metastasized. The initial shock was over. Now it was butchery. The Svear were methodical, experienced. They fought in tight pairs, one shielding, one killing, advancing through the yards and between the burning huts. The defenders, those who hadn’t died in the first moments, fought with the desperate, disorganized fury of cornered animals.
Nick’s gaze swept the fray, looking for the shapes he knew. He saw Bjorn, still shirtless and painted in other men’s blood, roaring as he fought two Svear warriors at once. He saw Ulf, cold and precise, directing his men like a woodsman felling trees.
Then he saw Leif.
The boy had found another weapon, a seax dropped by a dead man. His face was a ruin of blood from his broken nose, his eyes wide with a fervent, unhinged light. He was screaming something, a word lost in the din, and he charged. Not at a logical target, not to support a kinsman. He charged alone, directly at the Svear captain, Ulf Storm-Brow, who was turning from finishing a gut-struck farmer.
(NO SEX) LEIF CHARGES TOO FAR AHEAD.
It was a suicide run. A boy’s idea of glorious death. Ulf saw him coming, dismissed him as no threat, and raised his shield almost casually to deflect the wild stab.
The axe came from Leif’s blind side. A Svear warrior, focused on the charging boy, swung his long-hafted Dane axe in a flat, sweeping arc. The blade was meant to bite into his side, to disable. In his frenzied charge, Leif stumbled forward a half-step, directly into its path.
AN AXE CATCHES HIM IN THE CHEST.
The iron bit deep with a terrible, chopping thud. It cleaved through leather and wool, shattered ribs, and buried itself in the wet, dark matter within. Leif’s charge became a forward collapse. All the air and fury left him in a single, wet sigh.
HE FALLS, EYES WIDE—NOT AFRAID, ONLY SURPRISED.
He hit the churned, bloody snow, his hands twitching once at the axe haft protruding from his chest. He looked down at it, his expression one of profound, simple confusion. His lips moved, forming no word. Then the light in his eager, hero-worshiping eyes simply guttered out, like a candle pinched between wet fingers. The North had taken its due.
AROUND HIM, MEN DIE UNNAMED, UNSUNG.
A thrall with a cooking knife was run through from behind. An old warrior, too stiff to raise his shield in time, took a spearpoint in the throat and sank to his knees, drowning quietly. A Svear took a misplaced step on icy cobbles, his ankle turned, and a Bergener’s hatchet found the gap between his helm and mail. They died without songs, without last words, their stories ending in gurgles and slipped feet.
THE NORTH TAKES WITHOUT CEREMONY.
Nick watched it all from the doorway. The spiral on his chest was ice and fire, a paradox searing into his soul. He felt each extinguished life not as a pang of grief, but as a subtle, geological shift. The ground beneath him felt less solid. The screams seemed more distant, the blood less real. He was a statue watching a tide of ants drown in crimson.
NICK FEELS EACH LOSS LIKE A WEIGHT PRESSING HIM FASTER TOWARD THE EDGE OF THIS WORLD.
A hand clamped on his shoulder. He didn’t startle. He turned his head slowly. It was Alarik, his fine sword dripping, his face flushed with exertion and triumph. “The hall is yours, oracle!” the young jarl shouted, his voice buzzing in Nick’s ears. “Hakon?”
“Alive,” Nick said, his own voice flat, a stone dropped into a well. “For now.”
“Good.” Alarik’s eyes shone. “We’ll make a spectacle of it. Bind him. Round up the rest.” He looked past Nick, at the dying resistance. “This is a clean victory. Your path was true.”
Nick didn’t answer. He was looking past Alarik, past the fighting, to the tree line at the edge of the settlement. A figure stood there, wrapped in wolf-gray wool, seeming untouched by the storm or the slaughter. Sigrun. The blind völva’s empty sockets were aimed directly at him. He could feel her stare like a physical pressure.
Alarik followed his gaze and his smile faltered. “The seeress. What does she want?”
“To witness the unraveling,” Nick murmured. He finally stepped fully out of the hall, leaving Hakon groaning on the floor. The battle was sputtering out, the last pockets of Bergener resistance being choked off by sheer numbers. He walked toward Sigrun, the sounds of the dying settlement fading into a muffled haze.
He stopped before her. The smell of smoke and blood didn’t seem to cling to her. She smelled of dry herbs and cold stone.
“The thread is cut, spiral-walker,” she said, her voice the rasp of pages turning in a forgotten tomb. “The boy who believed your lie. The warrior who sought your test. The jarl who held your leash. All gone or broken.”
“You told me to follow the spiral,” Nick said.
“I did,” she acknowledged, a faint, crooked smile on her wrinkled lips. “It did not lead you home. It led you to an edge. You look over it now. Do you see the mist below?”
Nick felt it. The profound detachment. The faces of Leif, of Torvald, even of Hakon, seemed like paintings on a fraying curtain. “What’s in the mist?”
“Nothing,” Sigrun said. “Everything. The place between the threads. Where you have always been.” She tilted her head, as if listening to a distant music only she could hear from the burning village. “Your wife waits in the new jarl’s tent. The gentle one. She is a thread they have tied to you, to anchor you here.”
Svala. The thought of her, quiet and observant in the Svear camp, was a faint, tugging sensation, like a string on a finger.
“An anchor can hold you fast,” Sigrun whispered, taking a step closer, her breath cold on his face. “Or it can be the weight that drags you under. The spiral is silent now, yes? It has finished its work here. What you do next is merely choice. Flesh. Noise.”
From behind him, Alarik’s voice called, bolstered by victory. “Nick! To me! We divide the spoils!”
Sigrun’s smile didn’t change. “Go. Make your choice, man who is not a man. Choose the anchor of flesh. Or choose the mist.”
She turned and walked away, disappearing into the swirling snow and the gathering dark under the trees as if she had never been there at all. Nick stood alone between the burning world he had helped destroy and the silent forest. The anchor or the mist. The weight of a promised wife, or the unbearable lightness of nothing at all.
He turned and walked back toward the hall, toward Alarik’s voice, toward the waiting tent in the conquered camp. Each step felt heavier than the last.
=====
Each step felt heavier than the last.
He returned to the hall to find it a scene of swift, ruthless conversion. Svear warriors were dragging out Bergener corpses by their ankles, leaving smeared trails on the packed earth. Others were righting benches, tossing Hakon’s men’s belongings into a pile in the center. Hakon himself was propped against a pillar, his head lolling, his ruined nose a pulp of blood and cartilage. Two Svear stood over him, bored, their axes resting on their shoulders.
Alarik stood on the dais, surveying his new hall. He saw Nick and beckoned him over, his young face alight with a conqueror’s vigor. “We’ll feast here tonight,” he declared, his voice echoing in the smoky space. “On their food, with their ale. We’ll make the survivors serve it. Let them understand the new order with their hands and their bellies.”
“Where are the others?” Nick asked, his voice dull. “The survivors.”
“Being gathered at the smithy. The unwounded thralls, the children, the women who didn’t pick up a sword.” Alarik’s eyes gleamed. “Your wife is among them, of course. Svala. Unharmed. I kept my word.”
Ulf approached, wiping his axe-blade clean on a strip of wool torn from a cloak. His expression was matter-of-fact, a craftsman finished with a job. “Resistance is crushed. We lost eight. They lost thirty, maybe forty. The rest will be slave-fodder or ransom.”
“Any of note?” Alarik asked.
Ulf shrugged a shoulder. “The berserker.Bjorn. He killed Torvald. He killed three more of ours after that. Finally went down when six men pinned him with spears. He’s alive. Barely. Chained outside like a mad dog.”
“And the healer?” Nick’s question cut through the administrative tally. “Astrid.”
Ulf and Alarik exchanged a glance. A slight, knowing smile touched Alarik’s lips. “Ah, yes. The shieldmaiden. She put up a fight. Took a man’s ear off with her seax before we overwhelmed her.” He gestured vaguely toward the door. “She’s with the others.Why? Did you want her as well? A man can have two wives, I suppose.”
Nick ignored the prod. The spiral was silent, a cold, dead brand. He felt nothing but the immense, hollow weight of the steps he had to take. “I’ll go to the smithy,” he said.
“By all means,” Alarik said, his smile widening. “Claim what’s yours. We begin the division at sundown.”
Nick turned and left the hall. The air outside was thick with the smell of wet ash, blood, and spilled bowels. He walked past Bjorn, a massive, fettered shape bleeding into the snow, his chest rising and falling in ragged, animal hitches. The berserker’s eyes were open, staring at the low sky, empty of everything now.
The smithy was a large, soot-blackened building, its doors torn off. Inside, it was a cave of misery and terrified silence. Perhaps sixty people huddled on the filthy floor, surrounded by Svear guards who leaned on their weapons, talking in low voices. They were the remnants: grizzled old men too slow to fight, wide-eyed children clenched to their mothers’ skirts, young women with blank, shock-numbed faces.
NICK SEES ASTRID DRAGGED THROUGH THE SMOKE, BOUND BUT UNBROKEN.
Two Svear warriors hauled her in from a side door. Her hands were tied behind her back with coarse rope. A cut on her brow seeped blood down the side of her face, matting in her braided, smoke-stained hair. Her leather tunic was torn at the shoulder. They shoved her forward and she stumbled, but kept her feet, her balance rooted in a fierce, unyielding pride.
Her pale eyes scanned the huddled crowd, then found him, standing just inside the main doorway.
THEIR EYES MEET—NO WORDS.
There was no plea in her gaze. No accusation, even. It was a look of stark, exhausted recognition. She saw the Svear guards not glancing his way, saw his clean weapons, his unchallenged presence. She saw the truth of it. He had brought the wolf to the fold, and now he stood among the wolves. Her expression didn’t crumple. It hardened, like clay fired in a kiln, becoming something brittle and permanent.
HAKON STANDS BEHIND HER, AXE RED, SMILING.
The deposed jarl was shoved in next, his hands also bound. One of the Svear must have doused his face with snow, shocking him awake. His good eye blazed with pure, undiluted hate, fixing on Nick. His smile was a red grimace through broken teeth and caked blood.
“YOU CAME BACK,” HE CALLS, HIS VOICE A RAZORED CACKLE THAT SNAGS THE ATTENTION OF EVERYONE IN THE SMITHY.
The huddled Bergeners stared. Nick saw Skarde among them, the skald’s sharp eyes missing nothing, his wax tablet doubtless already filled. He saw faces he’d healed, children he’d smiled at. Their confusion was a physical pressure.
NICK STEPS FORWARD SLOWLY.
The packed-earth floor seemed to suck at his boots. The stink of fear-sweat and cold iron filled his nostrils. He walked toward the cleared space where Astrid and Hakon stood, the guards parting for him without a word.
“I TOLD YOU THE WORLD BREAKS BEFORE IT REMEMBERS ORDER,” Nick said, stopping a few paces from them. He wasn’t speaking to Hakon. He was speaking to the room, to the memory of Eirik, to the ghost of Leif’s belief.
It was a justification that tasted of ash in his mouth.
HAKON SPAT A GOB OF BLOODY PHLEGM INTO THE DIRT BETWEEN THEM. “Fuck your order. You’re just a traitor with a pretty scar. You think these Swedes are your friends? You’re a tool. They’ll use you until you’re blunt, then melt you down for scrap.”
Alarik’s voice rang out from the doorway. “The jarl speaks from experience, it seems!” The young Svear leader strode in, Rurik a half-step behind him, wearing that polished, merciless smile. The crowd shrunk back further.
Alarik stopped beside Nick, placing a comradely, possessive hand on his shoulder. “But he is wrong. Nick is not a tool. He is our oracle. Our pathfinder. His wisdom delivered this hall, this town, into our hands. And so, he shall have first choice of the spoils.” He swept his arm toward the huddled masses. “What is your desire, Nick? Land?Gold? Slaves?”
Nick looked past Alarik’s triumphant face. He looked at Astrid. Her gaze was locked on the far wall, her jaw a rigid line. She was refusing to look at him now, retreating behind a wall of ice.
ASTRID’S JAW TIGHTENS.
He saw the pulse hammering in her throat. He saw the subtle tension in her bound shoulders, the readiness for a blow that would not come from a warrior, but from him.
SHE ALREADY KNOWS HOW THIS ENDS.
So did he. Sigrun’s words echoed. The anchor of flesh. He could feel Svear expectation tightening around him like a new kind of chain. They had given him power. Now they demanded a performance to solidify it, to make him one of them in a way blood oaths and battle had not.
He turned his head slowly, his gray eyes scanning the cowed survivors. He saw Svala then, near the back, her face pale but composed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. His promised wife. The gentle thread. She watched him, her expression unreadable.
His voice, when it came, was clear and carried in the silent smithy, devoid of any emotion at all. “I will have her,” he said.
He did not point at Svala.
He pointed at Astrid.
A collective, faint inhale passed through the Bergeners. Hakon snarled, surging against his bonds until a guard slammed a fist into his wounded ribs, driving the air from him in a pained whoosh. Astrid’s eyes snapped to Nick’s, the ice shattering into a blaze of raw, incredulous betrayal.
“Her?” Alarik asked, surprised, then amused. “The fiery little healer? A fine choice. She has spirit.” He nodded to the guards. “Cut her bonds. She belongs to the oracle.”
A Svear stepped forward, his knife slicing through the rope around Astrid’s wrists. She brought her hands in front of her, rubbing the raw marks, but didn’t move. Her eyes never left Nick’s face, searching for some hint, some explanation in his expressionless mask. She found nothing.
“And the jarl?” Rurik inquired, his tone light, conversational. “A spoil of war as well. What would you have us do with him?”
Nick finally looked at Hakon, who was gasping on his knees, his hatred a radiant heat. “He lives,” Nick said. “For now. Keep him chained. Let him watch.”
Hakon’s laughter was a broken, wheezing thing. “Watch what? You rutting on the bitch you stole? I’ve already had her, you know. When you were off playing prophet. She fights, but she’s just a hole in the end.”
Astrid flinched as if struck. Nick’s hand shot out, not to hit Hakon, but to grasp Astrid’s upper arm. His grip was firm, unyielding. “Come,” he said, his voice low, for her alone.
She resisted for a second, a reflex of pure defiance. Then her shoulders slumped, not in submission, but in a tactical retreat. She let him pull her away from the crowd, toward the smithy’s small side room—a storeroom for charcoal and iron ingots, dark and airless.
The guards chuckled. Alarik called out, “We shall await your report, oracle!” Laughter followed them.
Nick pushed her inside the windowless room and let the heavy hide curtain fall closed behind them, plunging them into near-total darkness. The only light seeped in around the edges of the curtain, faint and orange from the forge outside. The air was choked with the smell of charcoal dust and metal.
He released her arm. They stood a foot apart, breathing in the dark.
“Why?” Her voice was a scrape of stone on stone, devoid of all the warmth he’d once, impossibly, heard there.
“It was the only choice that kept you breathing,” he said, his own voice flat.
“Breathing for what?” she shot back, a tremor of fury in it now.“For this? For you to claim me like a prize goat in front of them? In front of him?” She took a step back, her shape a darker shadow in the dark. “I’d rather have died with my seax in my hand.”
“I know.” He didn’t move. “But your death wouldn’t have served anything. Mine might.”
This gave her pause. He heard her breath catch. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m leaving, Astrid.Soon. When I go, the Svear’s interest here wanes. Alarik’s superstition is their only bond to this place. Without me, he’s just another raider in a hard-won hall. He’ll need local loyalty. He’ll need a healer.”
“So this is your mercy?” she hissed. “You degrade me to save me? You think I want a life serving the fucks who slaughtered my people?”
“I think you want to live,” Nick said, and finally, emotion cracked the flatness of his voice—a weary, infinite resignation. “And I need to know that someone here… remembers me as something other than a curse.”
She was silent for a long moment. He could barely see her, but he felt her scrutiny in the dark. “The gentle girl. Svala. She is your wife. Why not take her?”
“Because she is a thread they gave me,” he said. “You… you are a thread I found. And I’m about to cut them all.”
He heard her move then, not away, but closer. Her hand found his chest in the darkness, her fingers spreading over the cold, spiral scar through his tunic. “It’s silent,” she whispered, healer’s instinct overriding fury.
“Yes.”
Her other hand came up, touched his face, his jaw. Her fingers were calloused, strong. They traced the line of his cheekbone, as if reading his fate in the bones. The gesture was so unexpectedly tender in the brutal dark that it shattered something inside him.
He grabbed her wrist, gently, and brought her palm to his lips, pressing a kiss into the center of it. A low sound escaped her, a muffled sob of anger and grief and something else.
Then her mouth found his in the blackness.
It was not a kiss of love. It was a collision. A furious, desperate exchange of all the words they could not say. Her teeth grazed his lip. Her tongue speared into his mouth, tasting of blood and salt and rage. He kissed her back with equal ferocity, his hands coming up to tangle in her braids, pulling her head back to deepen the angle.
He walked her backwards until her back thudded against the cool, rough log wall of the storeroom. She grunted, but didn’t pull away. She yanked at the fastenings of his trousers with a frantic, clumsy urgency, her healed hands tearing at leather and wool.
He shoved her torn leggings down over her hips, the sound coarse in the quiet room. The cold air hit her skin, and she gasped against his mouth. He didn’t wait. He didn’t gentle her. There was no gentleness left in this world.
He lifted her, his hands gripping the firm, strong muscles of her ass, and she locked her legs around his waist, her ankles crossing at the small of his back. She was heavy, solid, real. He ground his cock against the thatch of rough hair between her legs, finding her wet—not with desire, but with the brutal, involuntary chemistry of fear and adrenaline and a treacherous, undeniable connection.
He didn’t ask. She didn’t guide him. He just pushed.
The head of his cock pierced her, a tight, burning invasion in the dark. She cried out, a short, sharp sound swallowed by his shoulder, her body going rigid. He was thick, and she was tight, unready. He held there for a second, feeling her inner muscles clench and flutter around just that first inch. Her breath was ragged, hot against his neck.
“Do it,” she snarled, her voice raw. “Just fucking do it. Be the wolf.”
He drove the rest of himself into her in one long, brutal stroke.
She gasped, her nails digging into the back of his neck hard enough to draw blood. He filled her completely, a deep, stretching ache. He began to move, setting a punishing, rhythmic pace, slamming her body against the wall with each thrust. The logs groaned faintly. Charcoal dust sifted down from the shelves.It was raw. It was filthy. It was a war of its own. Each thrust was a punishment—for his betrayal, for her survival, for the dead outside, for the silent spiral. She matched him, grinding herself down onto him on every downward stroke, taking him deeper, her body betraying her will with a slick, heated welcome.
“Is this… what you wanted?” she panted, her forehead pressed to his, her breath coming in short, hot bursts. “When you… looked at me… in the longhouse?”
“No,” he grunted, pounding into her, the slap of their flesh a wet, private rhythm. “I wanted… this.”
He shifted his angle, tilting her hips, and the next thrust struck something deep within her that made her see stars. A sharp, broken moan tore from her throat, all fury gone for a split second, replaced by pure, shocking sensation. Her cunt clenched around him like a vise.
He fucked her onto that spot again, and again. Her resistance dissolved into a writhing, animal need. She bit his shoulder to stifle her cries, her hips pumping frantically against his, meeting him thrust for thrust. The room filled with the sounds of their bodies: the wet slap of his balls against her, her choked gasps, his own ragged breathing.
“I’m… I’m coming…” she gasped, the admission ripped from her, a surrender not to him, but to her own traitorous flesh. Her body seized, her inner muscles milking his cock in intense, rhythmic pulses. She shook against him, a silent, shuddering convulsion.
Her climax triggered his. He buried himself to the hilt, a final, deep impalement, and let go. His release was hot and violent, jetting into her in thick, pulsing streams. He groaned, low and guttural, his own knees buckling slightly as he emptied himself inside her, as if trying to pour his very essence, his curse, his memory into her keeping.
He stayed there, lodged deep, panting, as the spasms subsided. She was limp against him, her legs still locked around him, her face buried in the crook of his neck. They were both slick with sweat, the smell of sex and charcoal and their struggle filling the small, dark space.
Slowly, her legs unlocked. He let her slide down the wall until her feet touched the floor. She winced as he slipped out of her, a wet, soft sound. They stood there, not touching, breathing heavily in the dark.
Outside, through the curtain, they could hear the sounds of the new regime continuing: orders being shouted, the clank of loot being sorted, a child weeping.
Astrid pulled up her leggings with stiff, deliberate movements. Finally, she spoke, her voice hoarse but clear. “So. You’re leaving. When?”
“Tonight,” Nick said, fastening his own clothes. “After the feast. When they’re all drunk on victory and Bergen’s ale.”