Chapter 152: The Calling
The words hung in the frozen air, a truth more solid than the wavering earth beneath Nick’s feet. Pregnant. The fissure behind Sigrun seemed to pulse in time with his suddenly racing heart, a dark maw offering forgetfulness. Svala’s hand remained pressed to her stomach, her observant eyes now fixed on him, weighing his reaction as the most critical data she would ever record.
Sigrun took a shuffling step backward, melting toward the trees. “The weaving is yours now,” she rasped, her voice already growing faint as if absorbed by the mist. “The door will not wait forever. It feeds on indecision.”
Then she was gone, a shadow dissolving into deeper shadow.
Nick and Svala were alone in the silent ring of pines. The world had not snapped back into focus. If anything, the edges were fuzzier, the sounds of the distant feast now completely absent. It was just the two of them, the dark slit in the rock, and the impossible fact of a life beginning inside her.
“You knew,” Nick said, his voice rough.
“I suspected,” Svala corrected softly. “My body… it felt different. Even before tonight. A warmth. A fullness.” She looked down at her own hand on her belly, a strange wonder touching her features. “I thought it was fear. Or the cold.”
“Why follow me?” The question was an accusation, a plea.
“To see if you would look back,” she said simply. “You didn’t.” She took a step toward him, her bare feet ghostly pale against the dark earth. “But I am here now. And so is this.”
The pull from the fissure was a nausea in his gut, a vertigo that promised release from all consequence. The anchor in Svala’s womb was a deep, gravitational ache, a tether to blood and soil and brutal, simple continuity.
“I’m not from here,” he said, the words feeling useless. “You understand that, don’t you? I’m a mistake. A crack in the world. What grows from that might be…”
“Might be what?” she challenged, her voice gaining a sliver of steel. “Monstrous? Divine?” A faint, bitter smile. “Or just a child, Nick. A boy or a girl who will need to eat, and be clothed, and be taught not to touch a hot iron. The world is full of fathers who are monsters and produce ordinary children. Perhaps an ordinary father who produces something strange is a fair trade.”
She closed the final distance between them. He could feel the slight warmth radiating from her through the cold, dissolving air. She looked up at him, and in her winter-gray eyes, he saw no romantic love, no heroic fantasy. He saw a stark, pragmatic calculation, and beneath it, a terrifying, nascent hope.
“If you go,” she said, her breath a faint cloud that seemed to linger too long, “I will tell them the child is yours. Alarik will see it as a lingering piece of the oracle’s power. He will keep it close. Control it. Use it. It will be a symbol in a story it never chose. If you stay…” She let the sentence hang. “You can give it a different story. A true one. Or at least, a lie we choose ourselves.”
THE WORLD SLOWS.
The mist between the pine trunks stops drifting. It hangs like ragged curtains.
SOUND DULLS.
The faint, ever-present whisper of the wind vanishes, leaving a pressure in his ears.
SNOW HANGS SUSPENDED.
A single, perfect crystal, dislodged from a branch above, stops its descent midway to the ground, catching a non-existent light.
NICK FEELS ANOTHER ERA TEARING AT HIM—SAND, HEAT, SOMETHING ANCIENT AND GOLDEN.
It was a desert under a blinding sun. Stone walls, not wood. The scent of incense and myrrh, not pine and blood. A language of soft consonants and round vowels forming in his mind, ready to spill from his lips. It was real. It was a place. It was a when. And it was yanking him backward through a tunnel of years.
“NOT YET,” HE WHISPERS.
He didn’t say it to the fissure. He said it to the desert sun in his mind. He forced his eyes open, anchoring them on Svala’s face, on the faint, pale freckles across the bridge of her nose, on the meticulous braid of her hair.
HE FOCUSES.
The golden sand retreated, grit scraping against the inside of his skull. The cold of the north reasserted itself, biting and immediate. The suspended snowflake began its fall again, landing silently on Svala’s shoulder.
ONE LAST ACT. ONE LAST CHOICE.
He reached out, his calloused hands framing her face. She was so real. Skin, bone, breath. The vessel of his only tangible legacy in any world.
“I stay,” he breathed, the words leaving him like a surrender. The fissure behind him let out a soundless sigh of release. He felt its pull sever, not with a snap, but with a slow, cold unthreading. The spiral on his chest flared once with an icy, final pain, then went dormant. A scar.
THE NORTH DOES NOT RELEASE ITS DEBTS EASILY.
He kissed her. This was not for show, not for a story. It was a seal. A promise written in flesh. Her lips were cold at first, then warm. She melted into it, her hands coming up to clutch the furs of his cloak, a small, desperate sound escaping her throat. This was different from before. The performance was over. This was need, stark and terrifying.
He broke the kiss, his own breath coming fast. “I need to feel it,” he said, his voice raw. “I need to feel the anchor.”
Understanding flashed in her eyes. She nodded, once.
He didn’t lead her to the ground. He turned her, gently, to face the broad, rough trunk of the oldest pine. He pushed her cloak from her shoulders. It pooled at her feet in the mist. Her thin gown was no barrier. He gathered the wool in his fists at her hips and shoved it up, baring her from the waist down. The cold air kissed the pale skin of her thighs, her buttocks. She shivered, but not from the chill.
He unfastened his own trousers, freeing his cock. It was already hard, thick and eager. The raw, earthy scent of her filled his senses. He saw the faint, dried traces of blood from their first joining on her inner thighs. His blood. His claim.
He spat into his palm, worked the saliva over his length, then pressed the slick head against her entrance. She was still tight, swollen from his earlier taking. He leaned his body against her back, his mouth near her ear. “This is the debt,” he whispered, filth and truth mingling. “This is me choosing the chain.”
He thrust inside her in one long, relentless push.
She cried out, her forehead pressing into the rough bark. He was even deeper this time, her body accommodating him with a seizing, wet grip. He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a brutal, claiming pace from the start, fucking her into the tree with hard, driving strokes. Each slam of his hips drove a muffled gasp from her lips.
“This cunt is mine,” he grunted, the obscenity a vow in the silent clearing. “This womb is mine. You feel that? You feel me planting myself in you?”
“Y-yes,” she whimpered, her body jarring with each impact.
“Say it.”
“It’s yours,” she cried, her voice breaking. “All of it. It’s yours.”
He hooked an arm around her waist, holding her steady as he hammered into her. The wet, slapping sounds of their joining were obscenely loud. He felt the building tension in his balls, the inevitable crest. He was fucking the pull out of himself, fucking the desert sun and the spiral’s chill and the ghostly silence into submission. He was fucking himself into existence, here and now.
“Gonna fill you up,” he snarled, his rhythm growing frantic, erratic. “Gonna pump my seed so deep into your fucking womb it takes root in your spine. You’ll carry my weight forever.”
His climax ripped through him, violent and total. With a choked roar, he buried himself to the hilt and erupted. He spilled into her in hot, pulsing jets, claiming her, anchoring himself in the fluid reality of her body. He kept pumping, grinding, until he was spent, empty, utterly present.
They stayed like that for a long moment, him pressed against her, both panting, steam rising from their skin into the cold air. Slowly, he softened and slipped out of her. He turned her around. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright with tears and a fierce, unnamable emotion. She reached between her own legs, gathered a trickle of his spend that had already begun to leak out, and looked at it, glistening on her fingers.
“The anchor,” she said, her voice quiet, sure.
He pulled her gown down, wrapped her cloak back around her. He fastened his own clothes. The world felt heavier, more solid. The mist was just mist. The trees were just trees. The fissure in the rock, when he glanced at it, was just a shadow, no deeper or more meaningful than any other.
He took her hand. It was cold. He warmed it between his.
“We go back,” he said. “To the feast. To Alarik. We tell him the oracle has seen a new vision. That his reign is tied to the child you carry. That we stay in Bergen, under his… protection.”
She nodded, the strategist in her already working. “He will believe it. It is a better story for him. The oracle’s power continues in his line. He will cherish it.”
“And we live that story,” Nick said. “Every day. Until it becomes true.”
Together, they walked out of the pines, away from the silent rock, back toward the smoke and the noise and the bloody, complicated world. The North had its debt. He would pay it in days, and years, and in the eyes of a child he had yet to meet. The spiral was cold on his chest. A scar. A receipt. A reminder that some doors, once closed, stay closed.
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A reminder that some doors, once closed, stay closed.
They approached the Svear camp from the north, hand in hand. The grip felt foreign, a performance Nick’s mind understood but his skin rebelled against. His spent cock ached dully inside his trousers, a raw echo of his choice.
Svala’s palm was damp.
“When we enter, you look at the ground,” she murmured, her voice rehearsed. “You let your shoulders slump. The mighty oracle, humbled by the gods, blessed with a burden.”
“I know my part,” he said flatly.
The roar of the feast hit them first, a wall of smoky heat and boastful song that pushed back the forest’s silence. The path became a gauntlet of Svear eyes. Warriors, their beards sloppy with mead, watched them pass. Some leered at Svala’s dishevelment. Others squinted at Nick, seeking the crackling aura of a seer and finding only a tired man with dirt on his boots.
Astrid saw them first. She was at the edge of the firelight, arms crossed, her face a mask of stone that shattered when her eyes locked with Nick’s. He saw the trajectory of her thoughts: his absence, the girl, the hand-holding. Her knuckles whitened where she gripped her own arms.
He gave her nothing, not a shake of the head, not a blink. Just the slump of his shoulders, just Svala’s performing tremor against his side. Betrayal curdled in Astrid’s pale gaze, sharp and sour. He’d made his choice at the fissure. She was reading the public proof of it now.
Alaric was at the high table, a silver cup raised to some story Rurik was telling. The envoy caught sight of them over the jarl’s shoulder and stopped mid-sentence, his merchant’s smile slipping into something analytical. Alaric turned, his young face eager.
“Oracle!You return. And with my little rose.” He gestured expansively.“Come. Sit. You missed the roasting of a fine goat.”
Nick led Svala forward. They stopped before the table. The hall quieted in patches, a wave of curiosity smothering the noise.
“The vision is over,” Nick said, his voice carrying just enough. He released Svala’s hand, but let his own fall to her stomach in a possessive, undeniable gesture. It felt like placing a brand. “A new one has taken its place.”
Alaric leaned forward, his drink forgotten. “Speak it.”
“The threads reweave themselves around a life,” Nick said, letting the archaic words fall like stones. “The power you sought… it does not leave with me.It transfers. To blood. To the son your noble kinswoman carries.”
The silence became absolute. Every eye in the hall swiveled to Svala’s flat belly. Alaric’s mouth opened slightly. Rurik’s eyes narrowed to calculating slits. Across the fire, Astrid went very still. Svala lowered her head, the perfect picture of chaste revelation.
“A son?” Alaric breathed, rising to his feet.
Nick nodded. “The vision was clear. My purpose here was not to serve you, but to seed the next vessel. The child will be the true omen. Your legacy and your strength. But its power is delicate. It must root in the soil where it was conceived.We remain. Here. Under your protection and your watch. It is the only way the thread holds.”
He was offering Alaric something far better than a wandering seer. He was offering a permanent, controllable source of mystical legitimacy, a dynasty sanctioned by the gods themselves.
Alaric’s face flushed with stunned delight. “A son. An oracle son, born of Svear and… whatever you are.” He came around the table and clapped Nick on the shoulder, the gesture proprietary. “This is better. This is permanent.”
Then his eyes shifted, landing on the other piece of this new equation. The piece glaring from the shadows.
Astrid. The shieldmaiden healer, tied to Nick, tied to the old Bergen. A relic.A complication.
“And her?” Alaric asked, his voice casual, but his meaning a blade held loose in his hand.
Nick didn’t look at Astrid. He felt her stare like a physical heat on the side of his face. “Her skills are useful,” he said, his tone bland, practical. “The child will need a healer who understands the local herbs. The air. She remains as well, to serve.”
He was tying her to this new horror as a servant, as staff. He saw the furious tension cord her neck, saw her hand twitch toward her seax. It was a gamble. He was betting her survival instinct against her pride, against the jagged shard of her heart he had just publicly trampled.
She took a single step forward, her lip curled.Then she stopped. Her eyes darted from Alaric’s pleased face to the Svear guards who watched with casual readiness. She saw the futility. She saw the cage Nick had just constructed for them both. Her hand fell from her weapon.
“A healer,” she said, the word scraping from her throat like gravel. She gave a curt, stiff nod to Alaric, a subservience that looked like it might poison her. “I serve the jarl.”
It was done. The new story was cemented in the eyes of the victors. Nick was no longer an oracle. He was a stud, a sire, a strategic piece on Alaric’s board. Svala was the honored vessel. Astrid was a tool. And the child was a myth waiting to be born.
Alaric ordered more mead, a celebration of the prophecy. Nick was given a seat at the high table, Svala placed delicately beside him. The feast roared back to life, louder now, charged with the thrill of a destined future.
Hours bled away in a haze of forced drink and heavy food. Nick drank just enough to keep the cup moving, his mind churning through the architecture of his new prison. He felt Astrid’s hatred as a constant, low hum from the corner where she’d been sent to tend a warrior’s split knuckles. Svala picked at her food beside him, playing her part with exquisite, silent obedience.
When the torches began to gutter, Alaric rose, swaying.
“To the oracle’s seed, and long winters of Svear glory!” The shout was echoed, sloppily, by the hall. He turned to Nick, his breath sour with mead and triumph. “Take your wife. Rest. The future grows heavy.”
Nick guided Svala from the hall. The cold night air was a slap, sobering and cruel. They walked toward the longhouse, now Alaric’s, where a small side chamber had been cleared for them. It smelled of old straw and unfamiliar sweat.
Inside, he barred the wooden latch. The room was dark, thin moonlight filtering through the smoke hole.
Svala sank onto the pallet of furs, her performance dissolving into a bone-deep weariness. She looked at him in the gloom.
“Your healer hates you now,” she said, not as a judgment, but a report.
“Yes.”
“Do you care?”
Nick didn’t answer. He walked to the small, shuttered window and looked out into the darkened yard. His body was tired, but his mind was a nest of vipers. He had anchored himself, but to what? A lie, a pregnancy, and the cold, watching eyes of a boy-jarl who would own every breath his child took.
Movement caught his eye—a furtive shadow by the smithy. Then another.
A scuffle.
A sharp, bitten-off curse he knew. Astrid.
He was moving before he could think, his hand finding the worn handle of the seax at his side. He unbarred the door in a single motion and slipped out into the night, a ghost himself.
Two Svear warriors had her pinned against the smithy’s sooty wall. They were young, drunk, emboldened by the night’s stories of conquest and the easy disregard for Bergen’s surviving women. One had her wrists pinned above her head. The other was fumbling with the tie of her trousers, his breath coming in excited grunts.
“Stop fighting, you Bergen bitch,” the one at her wrists slurred. “You’re ours now.”
“Fuck yourself,” Astrid spat, bucking against his grip.
“We intend to,” the other laughed.
Nick didn’t shout. He didn’t announce himself. He closed the distance in five silent strides. He grabbed the hair of the man groping at Astrid’s trousers and yanked his head back, exposing his throat. With his other hand, he pressed the tip of his seax just under the warrior’s jaw.
“Release her,” Nick said, his voice so quiet it was more dangerous than a scream.
The man froze. His companion, holding Astrid’s wrists, blinked stupidly at the sudden intrusion.
“You heard him,” a new voice said. It was Rurik. He leaned against the smithy door, his arms crossed, observing like a man at a play. “Let the healer go. She’s under the jarl’s… and the oracle’s… protection now. Aren’t you, girl?”
The warrior holding Astrid’s wrists let go, raising his hands. Nick kept the blade at his other captive’s throat for a heartbeat longer, then pushed him away with a contemptuous shove. Both men stumbled back, fear cutting through their drunkenness. They scurried into the darkness.
Astrid straightened her clothes, her breathing ragged. She looked from Nick to Rurik and back, her face a battlefield of shame, fury, and the dawning, horrible understanding that he had just publicly reclaimed her. Rurik’s smirk said it all: See? You still need him. You belong to his story.
Rurik pushed off the doorframe. “Defending your property. How very… traditional of you.” He gave a slight, mocking bow and vanished toward the longhouse.
They were alone. The silence was a chasm between them. Nick sheathed his blade.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said, the words hollow.
Her laugh was a broken thing. “Where should I be, Nick? In my new master’s hall? In the shadows, waiting for you to throw me another bone of ‘protection’?” She stepped closer, her eyes glittering in the dark. “I saw you choose. I felt you leave. You fucked that quiet girl to bind yourself here, and you left me standing in the cold. Don’t pretend this is care.”
“It’s survival,” he shot back, the truth like a lash. “You and me and that child, we survive in that story or we die outside of it. That’s the choice. The only one left.”
“I don’t want to survive in your lie!” she hissed, raw anguish finally breaking through.
From the doorway of their chamber, a silhouette appeared. Svala stood watching them, a pale shape in her shift.
Astrid saw her. The last of her control snapped. “Go back to your breeding stock,” she whispered, the words venomous. She turned and stalked away, not toward the longhouse, but into the deeper darkness of the ruined village.
Nick watched her go. He didn’t follow.
Svala’s voice was a feather in the night. “She will freeze, or run, or get herself killed.”
“I know.”
He walked back to the chamber. Svala stepped aside to let him in. He barred the door again. The room was smaller, darker, closing in on him.
“Will you go after her in the morning?” Svala asked, lying back on the furs. She stared at the ceiling.
“Yes.”
He lay down beside her, not touching her, his body a tense line. Hours passed, marked by the distant call of an owl and the soft rhythm of Svala’s breathing. He didn’t sleep. He thought of the fissure, now just a dark crack in the world. He thought of Astrid’s eyes, full of broken glass. He thought of the child, the anchor, a chain he had willingly forged.
Just before dawn, when the world was a deep, cold blue, he rose. He strapped on his seax and pulled his cloak tight. Svala watched him from the furs, her pale eyes unreadable.
“Find her,” was all she said.
He slipped out of the longhouse. The air was biting, crisp with the promise of frost. No guards stopped him. He was the oracle-father now, with privileges.
He followed the path toward the village ruins, past the blackened timbers and the scavenged huts. He found her where he knew she would be, in the place where she always felt in control: her old herb hut. It was half-collapsed, one wall caved in from the battle, but she’d scraped a space clear near the cold hearth. She sat with her knees drawn up, her seax in her lap, staring at the dead ashes.
She didn’t look up when he entered. “Come to check your property?”
He ignored the jab. “You need to come back. Alaric will notice.”
“Let him.”
He crouched down across from her, the ashes between them. “Astrid.”
Finally, she looked at him. Her face was smudged with soot and exhaustion, but the fury had banked into a hard, cold ember. “Why did you come for me last night? Not for Rurik’s show. The real reason.”
He held her gaze. “Because no one else would.”
It was the barest truth. Not love, not loyalty, but a simple, awful fact. In this new world, she was alone, and he had made her so.
The silence stretched, thin and brittle. Then she jerked her chin toward the ragged entrance. “They’re here.”
Nick turned. Three figures blocked the gray light of dawn.Hakon. He stood unsteady, the wound Nick had given him just a dark stain on his tunic. His good eye was bloodshot, insane. Two Svear warriors flanked him, looking uneasy but loyal to their disgraced jarl.
Hakon had found a weapon. It was a heavy, notched hand-axe, stolen from a Svear pile no doubt.
“No grand hall to hide in now,” Hakon rasped. His voice was raw from the wound in his side, from hatred. “No jarl to spin stories for.”
Nick rose slowly, putting himself between Hakon and Astrid. “Walk away, Hakon. There’s nothing left for you here.”
“There’s you.” Hakon took a stumbling step forward. The Svear warriors hung back, letting their fallen jarl have his vengeance. “You took everything. The jarlship.The woman. The future. You left me with a scratch.” He spat on the dirt floor. “I’ll take your life for it.”
Astrid was on her feet now, her seax ready. The odds were bad, but not impossible.
Hakon’s gaze slid to her, a monstrous smile twisting his ruined face. “I’ll fuck her on your corpse, wanderer. Make her watch you die, then fill her with something real.”
That was the trigger.
Hakon charged, not with skill, but with the last of his mad strength, the axe raised high in a clumsy, powerful arc meant to split Nick’s skull. Nick sidestepped, and the axe slammed into the sod where he’d stood, biting deep.
The Svear warriors tensed but held their ground, spectators to a duel.
Hakon wrenched the axe free, panting. He swung again, a wild horizontal swipe. Nick ducked. He could end this. He could draw his seax, step inside the swing, and gut the man. A messy, close-quarters kill. It would be justice. It would be necessary.
But it would be a death, and he was so tired of anchoring himself to the dead.
He backed toward the collapsed wall, drawing Hakon away from Astrid. He wanted space. He wanted a moment to think.
Hakon saw the retreat and grinned, a gash of yellowed teeth. “Running? Finally!”
He lunged again. This time, Nick didn’t fully dodge. He let the axehead graze his shoulder, a searing line of pain. The impact spun him, gave him an angle. He kicked out, his boot connecting with Hakon’s wounded side.
Hakon roared in agony, doubling over, his grip on the axe loosening. It was the opening.
Nick could have closed in. He didn’t.
Instead, he backed up another step, his hand closing on a splintered timber from the collapsed wall. He yanked it free. It was about the length of his arm, jagged and heavy.
Hakon straightened, his face a mask of pain and rage. He raised the axe for another killing blow.Time thickened. Nick saw it all: the spittle on Hakon’s lip, the frayed leather of his grip, the wild hate in his one good eye. He saw Astrid, braced to fight. He saw the Svear watchers, ready to report. He saw the faces of the past—Leif, Eirik, Sigrun. He saw the closed door in the rock.
He made his choice. He dropped the timber. His hand went to his belt, but not to his seax.
Hakon saw the movement, misinterpreted it as surrender. He let the axe fall, shifting his weight to deliver the final, crushing blow to Nick’s unarmed form.
Nick’s hand came up. It wasn’t holding a knife. It was empty.
Then it wasn’t.
(NO SEX) NICK HURLS THE BLADE. IT CUTS CLEAN THROUGH SMOKE AND NIGHT, BURYING ITSELF IN HAKON’S THROAT. THE JARL STAGGERS, DISBELIEF FROZEN ON HIS FACE. BLOOD POURS. HE COLLAPSES WITHOUT A SOUND. ASTRID STARES—SHOCK, GRIEF, RELIEF CRASHING TOGETHER. HER EYES FIND NICK. HE GIVES A FAINT NOD. THIS IS NOT VICTORY. IT’S RELEASE.