It began not with a war horn, but with a sound the Viking Age had never heard before.
THOOOOOM.
A shockwave ripped through the freezing night air, violently shaking the heavy oak doors of the Royal Citadel. The ground shuddered. A blinding column of unnatural, emerald-green and furious orange fire erupted into the sky from the southern quarter of the inner walls.
Inside the royal chambers, Bilal was thrown from his feet. He hit the stone floor hard. The glass in his imported windows shattered inward.
For a terrifying, disorienting second, Bilal's modern mind couldn't process it. Then, the smell hit him. Acrid, choking, and metallic. Sulfur. Saltpeter. Naphtha.
"The Armory," Bilal gasped, his blood running cold.
He didn't grab his armor. He grabbed his axe and sprinted out of the Citadel.
When he reached the courtyard, Axiomra was in absolute pandemonium. The sky was lit up like midday, but the light was a sickly, demonic green. The Greek Fire and the primitive gunpowder he had spent five years painstakingly scraping from manure, mining from volcanoes, and refining in secret were detonating in a chain reaction.
The citizens were screaming, falling to their knees in the mud. To an 11th-century Viking, an explosion of green fire meant only one thing.
"Surt is here!" a woman screamed, clutching her child. "The Fire Giants have broken the sky! Ragnarok! Ragnarok has come!"
Bilal sprinted toward the inferno. The heat was blistering, singing the hairs on his arms from fifty paces away. He watched as the roof of the heavy stone storehouse blew clean off, sending a geyser of sticky, burning pitch raining down on the surrounding buildings.
"Five years," Bilal's mind screamed, a soul-crushing weight pressing on his chest. "Five years of grinding charcoal. Five years of boiling saltpeter. The only thing keeping the Kings of the world from tearing down my walls... gone. Burning in front of my eyes."
Suddenly, from the chaos of the fleeing crowds, a shadow lunged at him.
It was Cassius, the "refugee scholar" Runa had allowed into the city months ago while Bilal was nursing Astrid. Cassius wasn't holding a book. He was holding a long, poisoned Byzantine dagger, aiming straight for Bilal's neck.
Bilal's reflexes were fast, but the explosion had deafened him. He barely turned in time.
But he didn't have to fight.
Before the spy's blade could even touch the Giant, three of Bilal's "Green Tunic" orphans—now broad-shouldered, 18-year-old men—crashed into the assassin like a pack of wolves. They didn't use weapons. They used pure, fanatical devotion. They tackled Cassius to the stone pavement, pinning his arms, breaking his wrist to disarm him, and holding him down by his throat.
Cassius spat blood, looking up at Bilal with the fanaticism of a zealot.
"You think you can build a kingdom of demons?!" Cassius screamed, his voice cracking over the roar of the fire. "The Pope knows what you are! King Olaf knows what you are! I am the messenger of God's revenge! Kill me, Demon! Kill me, and you start a Holy War that will drown this valley in blood!"
Bilal stood over him. The rage inside him wanted to crush the man's skull. He wanted to scream. He had welcomed this man, fed him, housed him, and this was his repayment.
But a King cannot afford rage when his city is burning.
"Bind him," Bilal ordered his men, his voice a low, terrifying rumble of absolute control. "Gag him. Throw him in the deep cell. He does not get the mercy of death today."
Bilal turned his back on the spy and faced the inferno. The Greek Fire was spreading, sticking to the wooden beams of the adjacent houses. Water wouldn't stop it; water only spread oil fires.
"Listen to me!" Bilal roared, his voice cutting through the panic of the screaming citizens. "This is not Ragnarok! This is just fire! Runa! Leif! Bring the heavy hammers!"
Runa, covered in soot, sprinted to his side.
"We cannot put it out, Father!" she yelled over the roaring flames. "It burns the water!"
"Then we starve it!" Bilal commanded, his engineering mind taking over. "Tear down the houses! Break the ring!"
He led the charge. Bilal, his elite guards, and the strongest men of the city didn't fight the fire—they fought the buildings next to it. Using massive sledgehammers and pulling-ropes, they smashed the stone walls and tore down the wooden roofs of the structures surrounding the armory.
They created a "Firebreak"—a circle of empty, smashed rubble thirty feet wide around the inferno.
When the green flames finally reached the edge of the ruined buildings, they found nothing left to burn. The fire hissed, spat, and slowly, agonizingly, began to die upon the bare stone.