Chapter 153: The Wolf Leaves the Crown
Blood dripped from Hakon’s neck onto the soot-blackened earth of Astrid’s ruined hut, a steady final tapping. The two Svear warriors who had come with him stared, their drunken bravado washed away in the cold dawn light and the reality of a dead jarl at their feet. They looked from the corpse to Nick, who stood empty-handed. He’d thrown the seax. It was still buried in Hakon’s throat.
One of the warriors bent, grimaced, and yanked the blade free. He wiped it clumsily on Hakon’s tunic and offered it, hilt-first, to Nick. It wasn’t respect in his eyes. It was calculation.
Nick took the knife. The metal was warm.
“He was already dead,” the warrior muttered, not looking at the body. “The wound fever… he was raving. This was a mercy.”
A convenient story. A way to report a messy end without blame. Nick nodded once, and the two men scooped up Hakon’s body, hauling it between them out of the hut, leaving a slick trail in the dirt.
Then it was just Nick and Astrid and the silence.
She had not moved from her defensive stance. Her seax was still pointed at the now-empty doorway. Her breaths came in short, sharp clouds. The fight had left her, leaving a terrible vacancy.
Nick watched her. The scrape on his shoulder throbbed. The world around him felt thin, like vellum stretched over a brighter, hotter light. He could smell the iron of blood, the cold rot of the hut, the faint rosemary from Astrid’s herb pouch. But underneath it, a new scent was rising. It was dry. It was dust and stone baking under a merciless sun. It wasn’t a memory. It was a summons.
THE NEW TIMELINE WAS A DESERT WIND.
It didn’t pull. It replaced. The cold of Norway began to leach from his skin, not into warmth, but into a neutral, impending absence. He felt Bergen—the weight of its fjords, the taste of its pine-scented air, the ache of its recent graves—starting to unlatch from his soul. He had closed the door in the forest, but another was opening from the other side, and this one he could not refuse. It was a deeper correction. He had overstayed.
Astrid finally lowered her blade. She looked at the blood on the floor, then at Nick. She saw the change. His gray eyes were fixed on a point beyond the wall, beyond the mountains. The restless light in them was moving, receding like a tide going out to a distant sea she could never swim.
“You’re leaving,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“It’s leaving me,” he corrected, his voice strangely calm. The desert wind scoured his mind, leaving clarity in its wake. There were no more choices. Only final acts. “I have minutes. Maybe less.”
She took a step toward him, her hand half-reaching out before she clenched it into a fist. All the bitterness, the betrayal, the rage she’d held since he’d chosen Svala at the feast, it crumpled under the sheer, incomprehensible fact of his vanishing. He wasn’t just walking away. He was being unmade from this world.
“What do you need?” The words were raw, stripped of everything but a shieldmaiden’s primal urge to act, even in the face of gods.
“A goodbye,” he said. He looked at her, truly looked, imprinting her face—the wind-reddened skin, the pale eyes, the stubborn set of her jaw—onto a part of him he hoped the desert wind couldn’t reach. “Not a word. A feeling. Something real to take with me.”
Understanding dawned, dark and fierce. Her chin lifted. “Where?”
“The forge. It’s the only place still standing with a roof. The only place that’s… mine.”
They didn’t run. They walked quickly through the corpse of Bergen, past Svear sentries who glanced at them with idle curiosity. Nick’s posture was different. There was no deference now, no performance of the humbled oracle. He moved with a dire purpose that parted the morning air. Astrid matched his stride.
The forge was dim, lit only by the low, banked embers in the hearth. The heat was a physical memory of work. Nick’s work. He’d fixed tools here, shaped metal, been useful. It smelled of charcoal and hot iron and his own sweat.
Svala was already there.
She stood by the anvil, a cloak wrapped tight around her slight frame. Her eyes were wide, watchful. She had seen the Svear carry Hakon’s body past. She had seen Nick and Astrid walking with ghostly intent. She had followed.
“I felt it,” she said, her voice a whisper. “Like a thread snapping in my chest.” Her hand went to her stomach. “The anchor… it’s straining.”
Nick went to her. He cupped her face. “It will hold. You will hold. You’re stronger than any prophecy.” He kissed her forehead, a benediction. “I need you both. One last time.”
Before she could answer, a shadow filled the doorway.
Freydis.
The Svear captive stood tall, her hands unbound, her sharp eyes missing nothing. Her composure was absolute. “The sentries are distracted,” she said. “They argue over who gets Hakon’s boots. You have a short window.” She stepped inside, letting the hide flap fall closed behind her. “I assume this… gathering… is the prelude to an escape.”
“No escape,” Nick said, turning to her. “An ending.”
Freydis’s gaze swept the forge: the hardened shieldmaiden, the pregnant noble girl, the displaced man who was slowly fading before her eyes. A strategist assessed assets. “You’re dying.”
“Worse. I’m being edited out.” He took a step toward her. “You wanted to understand what I am. This is your chance. Not observation. Participation.”
A flicker of something—not fear, but stark, thrilling risk—crossed Freydis’s face. To touch the unknowable. To have a story no skald would ever dare sing. She gave a single, curt nod. “Show me.”
There were no more words. Time was sand in a glass, running too fast.
Nick moved to the pile of heavy furs he used for sleeping near the forge’s warmth. He dragged them into the center of the floor, making a wide, rough nest. The embers cast a hellish, pulsing glow.
He looked at the three women. Three farewells. Three anchors to a world that was losing its grip on him.
“Clothes off,” he said, and his voice held the echo of the desert wind, a command from a dunes.
They obeyed with a solemn, surreal grace.
Astrid was first, her movements efficient and unashamed. Leather ties undone, wool peeled away. She stood naked in the forge light, her body solid and strong, scars mapping old battles on her skin, the pale curves of her breasts and hips a landscape he knew by touch and taste.
Svala was slower, her fingers trembling slightly as she let her cloak and gown fall. Her body was paler, softer, the slight rounding of her belly just becoming visible, a secret promise pressed against her skin.
Freydis undressed as if disarming, each garment folded neatly and placed aside. Her body was leaner, a noble’s body kept strong by riding and political tension, small breasts, sharp hipbones, a predator’s stillness.
Nick stripped, his own body a tapestry of faint, inexplicable scars and the new, raw line from Hakon’s axe. His cock was already hard, not from arousal alone, but from the screaming, desperate need to feel, to imprint this moment into the very fiber of his being before he was snatched away.
The air in the forge was hot and thick with the scent of them—herbs, fear, sex, and the iron-taint of blood that still clung to him and Astrid.
“Down,” he said.
They sank onto the furs. Astrid on her back, legs parting, her eyes never leaving his. Svala curled beside her, one hand instinctively covering her belly. Freydis knelt at the edge, observing, but her breath had quickened.
Nick went to Astrid first. He dropped to his knees between her spread thighs. He didn’t kiss her. He didn’t caress her. He lowered his head and put his mouth directly on her cunt.
She gasped, a sharp inhale that broke into a ragged moan. He ate her like a starving man at a last meal. His tongue plunged inside her, fucking her with fierce, flat strokes before circling her clit with a ruthless, focused pressure. He tasted her—the familiar, musky salt of her, the proof of her life. His hands gripped her thighs, holding her open, his fingers digging into her strong muscles. He was branding himself with her flavor.
“Oh, fuck, Nick… oh gods…” Astrid’s hands flew to his hair, not to guide, but to clutch, to hold him there as her hips began to jerk up against his face. Her climax built swiftly, driven by adrenaline and grief and the raw physical shock of his farewell. She came with a choked cry, her body bucking, her cunt pulsing against his tongue.
He drank her release, then pulled back, his mouth wet with her.
He turned to Svala. Her eyes were huge. He kissed her deeply, letting her taste Astrid on his lips. Then he pushed her gently onto her back. “I need to feel him,” he growled, his hand spreading over her lower belly. “I need you to feel me.”
He positioned himself at her entrance. He was too big for her, she was still tight, but she was wet—from fear, from anticipation, from the sight of him feasting on Astrid. He shoved into her in one deep, claiming thrust.
“Ah! N-Nick!” Her cry was one of shock and fullness. He fucked her with slow, devastatingly deep strokes, each one pressing against the mouth of her womb where his child grew. It was a possessive, terrifying act. He was marking the child, anointing it with this final, brutal joining.
“You remember this,” he grunted, his pace increasing, the slap of his hips against her thighs echoing in the forge. “You tell him his father was a storm. That he was made in fire and chosen in blood. You fucking remember the feel of me.”
Tears streamed down Svala’s cheeks, but she nodded, her body arching to meet his, taking every inch. He felt her inner walls begin to flutter, a tight, desperate rhythm. He drove her over the edge, her orgasm a silent, convulsing thing that milked his cock deep inside her.
He didn’t come. He held it back.
He pulled out of her, his cock glistening with her release. He turned to Freydis. The strategist’s composure had cracked. Her lips were parted, her chest rising and falling fast.
“Your turn,” Nick said, his voice sandpaper. “You wanted to know. Get on your hands and knees.”
Freydis moved. She positioned herself like an offering, her back arched, her head down. Nick moved behind her. He spit into his palm, slicked his cock, and without ceremony, rammed into her dry, tight channel.
She cried out—a sharp, pained sound that was instantly bitten off. He gave her no quarter. He fucked her with hard, rhythmic strokes, each thrust a punishment and a gift. This was no tender joining. It was a violation, an inscription. He was carving his existence into the memory of a woman who traded in secrets.
“This is the truth,” he snarled, gripping her hips, pounding into her. “This is the raw, fucking meat of what I am. Not an oracle.A man. A beast. A accident. Remember this when you make your calculations.”
Freydis choked back sobs, but she pushed back against him, taking the brutal fullness, her body betraying her mind as it began to slick with her own traitorous arousal. She came with a shuddering gasp, her body clenching around his invading length.
Still, he didn’t climax. He was a bowstring stretched to breaking.
He pulled out of Freydis. He was sweating, breathing hard, the desert wind roaring in his ears now, the forge beginning to waver at the edges of his vision.
“All of you,” he commanded, his voice cracking. “Together. Now.”
They understood. In a tangle of limbs and shared intent, they moved. Astrid lay back again. Svala straddled her face, lowering her cunt to Astrid’s mouth. Freydis, her knees weak, positioned herself over Astrid’s, her own wet sex hovering above Astrid’s mouth. They formed a living, breathing altar of flesh.
Nick stood over them. The sight of them—Astrid’s tongue laving Svala’s slit while Freydis ground down against her mouth—was the most visceral, beautiful, and terrible thing he had ever seen. His Bergen.His farewell.
He dropped to his knees. He guided his throbbing cock into Astrid first, sinking into her heat one last time. He thrust three times, feeling her clench around him. Then he pulled out, and pushed into Svala’s well-used opening, four deep, affirming strokes. Then out, and into Freydis’s ravished channel, two hard, final pumps.
He was everywhere and nowhere. Fucking all of them at once, in succession, a dizzying loop of heat and wet and clinging flesh.
He finally returned to Astrid, burying himself to the hilt. He wrapped one hand in Svala’s hair, the other in Freydis’s. He looked down at Astrid’s face, her mouth busy on the two other women, her eyes rolling back to meet his.
“This is me,” he whispered, and let go.
His orgasm was not pleasure. It was a detonation. He came with a soundless, wrenching scream, jets of hot seed erupting deep into Astrid’s womb, a final, futile planting as his vision shattered. The forge, the women, the world of wood and ice and blood dissolved into blinding, golden light.
He was falling. Upward or downward, he didn’t know.
=====
His seed still pulsed deep inside Astrid, a final, searing warmth against her core as the world peeled away. She felt his body’s sudden, impossible lightness through the connection of their joined flesh. The crushing weight of him dissolved.
The fingers tangled in Svala’s and Freydis’s hair went slack, falling away like dropped stones.
Astrid’s eyes, blurred from tears and the obscene pressure of two cunts on her mouth, snapped open. She saw his face. It wasn’t a face of pain. It was a face of release, of a man finally unbound. His gray eyes, which had always held a shadow of another horizon, were clear. They held hers for a fraction of a heartbeat.
THE SPIRAL FLARES BLINDING WHITE.
It seared the room, not from his chest, but from the very air around him. The forge’s ember-glow was swallowed by this sterile, consuming brilliance.
Freydis jerked back, a choked gasp escaping her as her view was obliterated. Svala cried out, tumbling sideways, clutching her belly as if the light could harm the child. The furs beneath them, the soot-blackened walls, the anvil—all of it bled into whiteness.
NICK FEELS THE GROUND VANISH BENEATH HIM.
He felt the pull let go. He felt the scorching heat of the forge, the slick grip of Astrid’s body around his shrinking cock, the press of the other women’s skin—all of it ceased to be sensation. It became memory instantly, coded into a part of him that was already retreating.
THE LAST THING HE SEES IS ASTRID’S FACE—TEARS AND BREATH FINALLY FREE.
Her expression wasn't grief.It was recognition. As he unraveled from her, from them, from the world, he saw the hard shield of her anger shatter completely. What remained was raw, unguarded truth. Tears cut clean tracks through the smithy grime on her cheeks. Her breath hitched, not in a sob, but in a gasp of awful understanding. She saw him go, and in seeing it, she was free of the terrible hope that had bound her to him.
THEN SNOW BECOMES LIGHT.
The whiteness shifted. It wasn’t forge-light or spiral-light anymore. It was the diffuse, flat glare of sun on a boundless expanse of white. The scent changed in an instant—charred meat and wet wool and sex evaporated, replaced by a dry, metallic cold so profound it felt sharp in his nostrils. The roaring silence of a frozen wasteland pressed in on his eardrums.
BERGEN FADES.
Its sounds—the distant sea, the groan of pine boughs, the murmur of a conquered people—vanished. Its smells, its textures, its weighted history, dissolved. The pressure of its stories, of Eirik’s boisterous ghost, of Hakon’s dead stare, of Sigrun’s prophetic whisper, evaporated. Leif’ eager smile, Bjorn’s brutish loyalty, the cool, recording eyes of Skarde—all of it was stripped away, leaving him weightless and empty.
“HONOR,” HE THINKS, “IS CHOOSING THE COST.”
The thought was perfectly clear, a final verdict in the silent court of his own mind. He had chosen the cost.The child. The lie. The brutal, messy love he’d just performed. The killing of Hakon. The acceptance of the cage to keep them safe within it. This vanishing was the receipt. It was the price paid in full. There was no heroism in it, only a bleak economy of survival for those he left behind.
THE NORTH GOES SILENT AS HE DISAPPEARS BETWEEN HEARTBEATS.
One moment he was a body, a mind, a collection of scars and choices suspended in freezing light.
The next, he was not.
He was… elsewhere.