For the first time in many winters, Vetrúlfr did not wake to the sound of sails or steel.
No horns blew at dawn.
No rider burst through the gates bearing tidings of conquest or treachery.
No drums beat along the fjord's edge to rouse men for war.
Only the quiet murmurs of a waking city, Ullrsfjǫrðr, capital of the North, greeted him.
His hall had grown colder in peacetime.
The great hearth still burned, but the fire no longer roared with the fury of returning heroes.
It crackled slowly now, like an old story being retold, softer each time.
At the head of the hall, upon a seat carved from the black stone quarried beneath the fjord, wrapped in furs and shadow, sat Vetrúlfr, no longer draped in the armor of war, but in the mantle of kingship.
A circlet of Damascus steel encircled his brow. Not ostentatious. Not imperial. Merely symbolic.
The wolf that had hunted the world now ruled it.
Below him, a long line of men stretched through the hall.
