Chapter 1: Awakening in the Cold
The first thing I felt was sand.
Cold. Sharp. Grinding against my cheek like broken glass. My fingers—God, why couldn't I feel my fingers?—scraped against something frozen and grainy. Beach sand. But that was impossible. The last thing I remembered was concrete and steel, the screaming of twisted metal as the earthquake tore through downtown Seattle. The engineering firm's forty-story building had been swaying like a drunk man, and I'd been grabbing my hard hat when the floor gave way beneath my feet.
I'd fallen. Twenty stories down through collapsing floors and snapping support beams. There had been pain—crushing, absolute—and then nothing.
Death.
I remembered dying. The strange thing was, I remembered what came after.
The Void.
Infinite space. No light, no sound, no time. Just... nothing. And then a presence, vast and alien, offering choice.
"Your thread is cut, soul of iron and blueprint. But threads can be rewoven. Choose: fade to final nothing, or forge anew in distant weaving. The price is everything you were. The gift is everything you might become."
I'd chosen. God help me, I'd chosen.
I forced my eyes open. Gray sky stretched overhead, heavy with the promise of snow. Salt air burned my nostrils. This wasn't Seattle. This wasn't even America. The horizon showed no skyline, no buildings, nothing but endless water meeting endless gray.
My body felt wrong. Not just cold—though I was freezing—but different. Lighter somehow. Younger. I tried to sit up and every muscle screamed in protest. My clothes were in tatters, fabric I didn't recognize hanging in ice-crusted shreds. Some kind of rough wool and linen, not the business suit I'd been wearing when—
When I died.
"The body you inhabit lived before you. A traveler from distant eastern lands, dead of winter's bite on these shores. His thread was cut, his flesh abandoned. Now it is yours to fill with new purpose."
The Void's words echoed in my skull. I wasn't just in some other place. I was in someone else's body. Someone who had died here, on this frozen beach, and somehow I'd been... inserted. Like a software patch over corrupted code.
I tried to remember more about my old life—Sarah's face, the sound of traffic, the taste of coffee—but the memories felt distant, wrapped in gauze. The Void had warned me: the price is everything you were. Apparently that included the sharp edges of my past.
But some things remained crystal clear. My name was Thanos Castellanos. I was—had been—a structural engineer. And now I was someone else entirely, freezing to death on a beach that belonged in a historical documentary.
I needed to move. Find shelter. Figure out where the hell I was.
I pressed my palms against the frozen sand and tried to push myself upright. The moment my skin touched the ground, something impossible happened.
The sand beneath my left hand grew warm.
Not just warm—hot. Steam hissed up between my fingers as ice crystals melted and sand grains fused together. I jerked my hand back, staring at the perfect handprint of glass I'd accidentally created. But that wasn't the strangest part.
The strangest part was the metallic fragments scattered through the sand. Tiny pieces of iron and copper from some long-ago shipwreck. I could feel them. Not just see them—feel them like they were extensions of my own body. When I focused on one particular rusty nail half-buried in the beach, it twitched. Actually moved.
"Three gifts for your new forging, soul of iron and blueprint. Metal bends to your will. Knowledge fills the void of ignorance. Vision manifests truth from nothing. These are the tools. What you build with them is your choice."
Three powers. The Void had given me three impossible abilities to compensate for... for what? Being dead? Being displaced across time and space into some primitive world where people still used iron nails instead of titanium alloy bolts?
I focused on the nail again. This time, instead of just twitching, it pulled free from the sand and hovered six inches above the beach. My wedding ring—somehow still on my finger despite everything—grew warm against my skin. The metal in it resonated with whatever force I was unconsciously projecting.
The effort left me dizzy and nauseous. My head pounded like I'd been hit with a sledgehammer. Twenty seconds of concentration and I was ready to pass out again.
Phase One, then. Whatever these powers were, they were weak. Unstable. Like a new muscle that needed training.
But they were real.
I let the nail drop and tried to stand. My legs shook with more than cold. The body I wore was malnourished, exhausted, and suffering from severe hypothermia. If I didn't find warmth soon, I'd die. Again.
That's when I heard the footsteps.
Soft crunches in the sand, trying to be quiet. Someone was approaching from the tree line behind me. I turned slowly, not wanting to seem threatening, and saw him.
A boy. Maybe twelve years old, blonde hair poking out from under a rough wool cap. He carried a bow—an actual wooden longbow—and had an arrow nocked but not drawn. His clothes were crude by my standards: leather, wool, and furs stitched together with obvious hand-work. But they looked warm. And well-made.
The boy's blue eyes were wide with a mixture of fear and curiosity. He said something in a language that should have been gibberish to me.
Instead, I understood perfectly.
"Are you dead?" he asked in what I somehow knew was Old Norse. The Void's gift again—perfect comprehension of the local language.
"Not yet," I managed to rasp. My throat felt like sandpaper, but the words came out in fluent Old Norse as if I'd been speaking it my entire life. "Though I'm close."
The boy lowered his bow slightly. "You look like a draugr. But draugr don't shiver." He stepped closer, studying my face with the fearless curiosity of youth. "Those scars... did you fight trolls?"
I touched my cheek reflexively. The body I inhabited had scars I hadn't earned—parallel lines across my jaw and forehead that spoke of some violent encounter. I had no idea what had given them to me, but if claiming troll fights would gain this boy's sympathy, I wasn't above lying.
I nodded weakly.
His eyes lit up with excitement. "I knew it! Father says trolls aren't real, but I've seen the signs in the deep woods." He slung his bow across his shoulder and approached without fear. "Can you walk? Our farm isn't far. Mother will want to see you—she knows about healing."
"Help," I whispered, the cold making it hard to form words. "Please."
The boy—he couldn't be more than seventy pounds—tried to pull me to my feet. I managed to get upright with his assistance, but walking was another matter entirely. After twenty steps toward the tree line, my legs gave out completely.
"Wait here," the boy said, displaying wisdom beyond his years. "I'll get Father and the sledge."
He sprinted off through the sparse forest, leaving me collapsed against a wind-bent pine tree. I used the time alone to experiment carefully with my new abilities.
The knowledge power was the easiest to test. I looked at the tree supporting me and suddenly knew things about its structure I had no right to know. The grain pattern, the stress points, how it had adapted to constant wind exposure. When I focused on the distant shoreline, engineering insights flooded my mind—how the erosion patterns suggested underlying geology, where you'd need to place pilings for a stable dock, what kind of foundation would work best for a coastal fortification.
It was like having access to a vast technical library, but one that existed only in my head. The information came slowly, piecemeal, and trying to access too much at once made my skull throb.
The blueprint power was harder to test without materials, but when I concentrated on a simple design—say, a basic wooden bridge—I could almost feel the specifications trying to manifest themselves. Like phantom parchment hovering just beyond my mental reach.
And the metal manipulation... I practiced on my wedding ring, making it warm and cool at will. The iron content in the sand responded when I really focused, tiny fragments shifting and aligning themselves into crude patterns. But each use left me more exhausted.
Twenty minutes later, I heard voices approaching through the trees. The boy was back, along with two adults pulling a wooden sledge.
The man was tall, lean, with calculating blue eyes and the kind of presence that commanded attention even when he was trying to be quiet. Blonde beard streaked with early gray, wearing well-made clothes that suggested prosperity. He moved like a warrior, but one who thought before he acted.
The woman was striking in a different way. Shorter than the man but radiating competence and strength. Dark blonde hair braided back severely, intelligent green eyes that missed nothing. She carried herself like someone accustomed to making life-or-death decisions quickly.
These weren't random peasants. These were leaders.
"Bjorn says you fought trolls," the man said without preamble, studying me with the intensity of a predator evaluating potential prey. "That's a child's story. What are you really?"
I met his gaze steadily despite my chattering teeth. "A traveler. From distant lands." The words came easily in Old Norse, though I had to be careful not to reveal too much. "My ship was lost in a storm. I washed ashore."
"In winter?" The woman's voice carried skepticism. "No one sails these waters in winter. Not unless they're running from something." She knelt beside me, checking my pulse and examining my eyes with the practiced movements of someone who knew medicine. "He's hypothermic, Ragnar. We can question him after he's warm."
Ragnar. The name sent a shock of recognition through me, though I couldn't place why it seemed familiar. Some half-remembered history lesson, maybe. But the way the woman deferred to him while maintaining her own authority suggested these weren't ordinary farmers.
They loaded me onto the sledge with surprising gentleness. As we moved through the forest toward their settlement, I caught glimpses of well-maintained paths, strategic clearings that would provide good sight lines, and defensive positions that any military engineer would approve of. These people knew about warfare.
The farm, when we reached it, was more substantial than I'd expected. Multiple buildings arranged in a defensive square, with clear lines of sight between them and the surrounding area. The main hall was large enough to house fifty people comfortably. Smoke rose from several chimneys, suggesting wealth enough to maintain multiple fires.
But what really caught my attention were the details. The metalwork on the doors and gates showed sophisticated techniques. The timber joints were precisely cut and fitted. Someone here understood engineering principles, even if they applied them with primitive tools.
As they carried me into the main hall, my powers stirred again. The iron fittings on the door grew slightly warm as I passed, and I felt the presence of every piece of metal in the building—nails, hinges, cooking implements, weapons. It was overwhelming, like trying to listen to a dozen conversations at once.
"Put him by the fire," the woman—Lagertha, I heard Ragnar call her—instructed. "Bjorn, fetch warm water and clean cloth. Gyda, help me with his clothes."
A younger girl, maybe ten years old, appeared at Lagertha's side. She had the same intelligent eyes as her mother and moved with similar purpose. As they began stripping away my ruined garments, I caught Ragnar examining the fabric with intense curiosity.
"Strange weave," he murmured, holding up a torn section of what had once been my shirt. "I've never seen work this fine. And these fastenings..." He was studying the metal buttons and zipper with the expression of a man who recognized quality craftsmanship when he saw it.
The warm furs they wrapped me in felt like heaven against my frozen skin. As feeling returned to my extremities, bringing with it a symphony of pins and needles, I began to think I might actually survive this.
But survival was only the beginning. I was alone in what appeared to be some kind of medieval Scandinavian settlement, wearing a dead man's body and carrying impossible powers I barely understood. The family that had rescued me seemed intelligent and resourceful, but they were still strangers in a strange world.
As consciousness began to fade again—hypothermia and exhaustion finally claiming their due—I heard Ragnar speaking quietly to his wife.
"Look at his hands, Lagertha. Soft. But these scars speak of violence. And those strange clothes... I've seen fabrics like this in the far eastern markets, but never work this precise." His voice carried the tone of a man solving a puzzle. "This one has stories to tell. When he wakes, we'll hear them."
I let my eyes close, but his words echoed in my mind. Stories to tell. If only he knew. The truth would either get me worshipped as a god or burned as a demon. Neither option appealed to me.
Better to be a mysterious traveler from distant lands. At least until I figured out what the hell I was supposed to do with these powers, and why the Void had dropped me into what was clearly a world where iron was still precious and electricity was thousands of years in the future.
As sleep took me, one final thought drifted through my fading consciousness: the boy had called his father Ragnar. And in the warmth of the furs, with the sound of a Nordic language flowing around me like music, I began to suspect I knew exactly when—and where—I was.
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