The stars looked smaller now.
Ask tilted his head back, tracing their faded trails across the blackened sky. No constellations. No signs. Just cold dots in a colder world.
Embla walked beside him, silent, dragging a weathered satchel full of salvaged scraps—bones, roots, pieces of rusted tools. Their boots left no prints in the ash. The land had long since forgotten the weight of gods or mortals.
They were the last of something.They just didn't know what.
In the valley below, where trees twisted like crippled hands and the wind screamed names it couldn't remember, the ruins of a temple lay half-swallowed by stone. No one came near it. The villagers called it a place where language died—where you dreamed in voices that didn't belong to you.
Ask had heard those voices. So had Embla.
Each night, a dream returned. Not his own.A name.Vilseidr.
He spoke it once aloud and the firepit cracked. Embla hadn't flinched. She dreamed the same name, in the same tongue neither of them had ever learned.
The world was wrong. It had always been wrong.
They didn't remember the fall of gods. They didn't even know gods had fallen. But somewhere between the bones of forgotten rituals and the cold breath of the wind, something was waking.
And beneath the ruined temple—beneath what men called Earth—He stirred.