Every Friday, the Warlord of Axiomra became a merchant of joy.
The central plaza of the stone citadel hummed with life. Beneath the paved stones, the vented heat from the forge melted the morning frost, leaving the courtyard dry and warm.
Bilal stood by the great wooden doors of the hall, a massive leather sack in his hands.
He was in his thirties now, though the Vikings swore he looked untouched by time. The orphans he had pulled from the mud years ago were lining up.
They weren't little, fragile sparrows anymore. Thanks to a diet of beef liver, boiled milk, and rigorous morning exercises, the teenagers standing before him were giants in their own right, broad-shouldered and glowing with health.
Bilal reached into the sack and handed a piece of "Candy Money"—a chunk of dried honeycomb and a polished silver coin—to a towering fifteen-year-old boy named Erik.
"Solve the physics of the bridge, Erik?" Bilal asked, his voice a deep, resonant rumble.
"Yes, Jarl. The tension is balanced," the boy replied, beaming with pride as he took the honey.
As Bilal watched the teenagers run off, laughing and comparing their silver, a profound, heavy realization settled into his chest.
He remembered his own childhood in the modern world. He remembered sitting at a desk for fifteen years, exhausted, staring at biology and engineering textbooks while his parents pushed him to rank at the top of his class.
"I used to wonder why the elders were so hard on us," Bilal thought, watching the city function like a flawless, hygienic machine. "I thought they were cruel to force us to learn. But looking at these kids... I finally understand the burden. If you do not forge the mind of a child, the world will break the adult."
He turned back into the warmth of the Great Hall, where his greatest joy—and his greatest challenge—was waiting.
Astrid was sitting by the hearth. She was heavily pregnant with their biological child, her copper hair tied up in a messy knot.
The pregnancy had made her deeply uncomfortable, fiercely protective, and incredibly moody.
As Bilal kicked off his heavy leather boots, leaving them near the entrance, Astrid's sharp blue eyes locked onto him.
"Are you going to leave those in the middle of the walkway, Giant?" she snapped, rubbing her aching lower back. "Or am I expected to trip over them while managing the grain ledgers?"
Bilal smiled, knowing better than to argue with a pregnant Viking Queen. He picked up the boots and moved them to the rack.
"My apologies, my love. The weight of the city distracted me."
"The weight of the city," Astrid muttered, rolling her eyes. "You spent two hours handing out honey to boys taller than me. Meanwhile, I am trying to balance the textile trade while carrying a baby the size of a boulder."
Bilal chuckled softly. He walked over, knelt beside her chair, and gently placed his massive hands on her hips. In his modern mind, he thought of a classic, playful tease to lighten the mood.
"Well, you are certainly getting a belly, my Queen," Bilal teased, poking her gently. "Are you sure you aren't eating the flour before the merchants buy it?"
In 2026, telling a woman she was getting a belly was a death sentence. Bilal braced himself for a slap.
Instead, Astrid stopped rubbing her back. She sat up perfectly straight, puffed out her chest, and placed her hands proudly over her large, pregnant stomach. A smug, triumphant smile spread across her face.
"Yes, Giant, look at it!" she boasted, her voice ringing with Viking pride. "Let the other Jarls' wives look at my waistline! Let them see that my husband provides so much butter, beef, and honey that I wear our wealth on my very bones!"
"If I were skinny, the world would think you were a poor, starving farmer."
Bilal threw his head back and laughed from his chest. He had tried to roast her, and she had turned it into a trophy. He leaned up and pressed his nose to hers. "You are more beautiful than the moon itself," he whispered. "After me, of course."
She slapped his shoulder, laughing with him. But her smile faded as she looked at the table behind him. Sitting on the wood was a terrifying new creation Bilal had forged that morning.
Two curved, fenestrated blades of polished spring-steel, joined by a central locking hinge. They looked like massive, blunt scissors.
"What is that?" Astrid asked, her tone turning serious.
"It is a lifeline," Bilal explained, his voice dropping. He picked up the steel instrument.
"Childbirth is a battlefield, Astrid. Sometimes the baby gets stuck. The mother labors for days, and both of them die in agony."
In Bilal's old timeline, this tool—the Obstetric Forceps—would not be invented until the 17th century by a family of English surgeons named Chamberlen.
For over a hundred years, the Chamberlens would keep the forceps a greedy family secret. They would carry the tool in a locked, gilded box and blindfold the laboring mothers, letting thousands of poor women die across Europe just to protect their monopoly and their profits.
Bilal despised that history. He wasn't building a secret for gold. He had forged the forceps six hundred years early to defeat the Reaper.
"If the child is trapped," Bilal demonstrated, showing how the smooth steel blades separated, "you slide these gently around the baby's head. You lock them together. And you pull with the mother's contractions. It saves them both."
Astrid stared at the steel, her eyes wide with a mix of awe and horror.
"I need to gather the midwives," Bilal continued, pacing the room. "I need to teach the women how the pelvic bones work, how the nerve—"
"No."
Bilal stopped. Astrid was standing up, her jaw set.
"You will not teach them, Giant," she said fiercely.
"Astrid, they need to know—"
"I said no," she interrupted, stepping into his path. "You are a man. You are the Jarl. You do not understand our ways."
"If you lock yourself in a room full of women to talk about their hidden bodies and the bleeding bed, the men of this city will feel a deep shame."
"They will think you are a pervert, or worse, a dark sorcerer violating the sacred women's rites. They will hunt you for it, even if you are the Giant."
She reached out and took the heavy steel forceps from his hands.
"You forge the steel, my love," Astrid said, her voice softening, realizing he only wanted to save lives. "But I am the Queen. I will learn the anatomy. I will teach the women. I will be the shield that protects your reputation."
Bilal looked at her. She was right. His modern logic had blinded him to the deep cultural taboos of the 11th century. He bowed his head in respect. "As you command, my Queen."
They did not have to wait long to test the steel.
Three weeks later, in the dead of a freezing night, frantic pounding echoed through the Great Hall. It was Erik, the young bridge-builder Bilal had given candy to just days ago. His face was pale, his eyes wide with absolute terror.
"Jarl! Please!" Erik wept, falling to his knees. "My wife, Sif... she has been pushing since yesterday. The midwives say the baby will not turn. She is bleeding. She is dying!"
Bilal's blood ran cold. The adrenaline hit his veins like lightning.
"Astrid!" Bilal roared.
He didn't wait. He sprinted to the kitchen, grabbed the steel forceps, and plunged them into a pot of boiling saltwater over the hearth to sterilize them. He grabbed clean linen.
Bilal ran out into the freezing night, his massive strides eating up the distance to Erik's stone house.
He could hear Sif's agonizing, breathless screams echoing through the dark courtyard. The sound twisted like a knife in Bilal's gut.
He reached the heavy wooden door of the birthing house. His hand gripped the iron handle.
His Warlord instinct—the instinct to kick down the door, take control, and fix the problem with his own hands—screamed at him to go inside. I know how to do it. I have the medical knowledge. I have to save her!
But as his fingers tightened on the handle, Astrid's words rang in his ears. And deeper than that, his own Islamic morals—the strict observance of Awrah (modesty) and respecting the sanctity of a woman's privacy—paralyzed him.
He could not cross that threshold. It was not his battlefield.
He stopped. He let go of the handle, his massive chest heaving with the sheer effort of restraining his own power.
Footsteps crunched rapidly in the snow behind him. It was Astrid, a heavy cloak thrown over her pregnant belly.
Bilal turned to her. He pulled the boiling-hot steel forceps from the protective leather pouch, his hands shaking slightly from the stress. He held them out to his wife.
"Boiled in salt. Perfectly clean," Bilal choked out, his eyes begging her to succeed. "Slide them gently. Do not crush. Pull only when she pushes. You are the hands of life now, Astrid."
Astrid looked at his terrified face. She took the steel, her hands perfectly steady. "Guard the door, Giant," she said. And she disappeared inside.
For two hours, Bilal stood in the freezing snow outside the door. Erik knelt by his boots, weeping openly into his hands. Bilal placed a heavy, comforting hand on the boy's shoulder, silently praying to Allah in the dark, begging for mercy for the young mother.
The screams inside grew louder, more frantic, and then—
Silence.
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the courtyard. Erik stopped breathing. Bilal closed his eyes, bracing for the wail of a grieving mother.
But the sound that pierced the night air was high, sharp, and furious.
It was the crying of a newborn baby.
The heavy wooden door creaked open. Astrid stood in the doorway. Her forearms were covered in blood. She looked exhausted, pale, and sweating.
But in her hands, she held a tiny, screaming, perfectly healthy baby girl wrapped in a clean woolen blanket.
Erik let out a choked sob and rushed forward, falling into his wife's arms just inside the door. Sif was alive. She was exhausted, but she was smiling.
Astrid looked up at Bilal. She held up the blood-stained steel forceps. A triumphant, exhausted smile spread across the Queen's face.
"The demon is defeated," Astrid whispered.
Bilal looked at the woman he loved. She hadn't just saved a life; she had changed the history of medicine for women in the North forever.
He didn't care about the mud or the blood. He stepped forward and kissed her deeply, right there in the freezing snow.
"You," Bilal whispered against her lips, "are the greatest Queen this world will ever know."