Months passed. The ship navigated the coasts of Europe, slowly making its way toward the Mediterranean.
The physical deterioration of the Giant was horrifying to watch. Without his diet of beef and milk, and without the will to live, the 105kg Warlord began to wither. His dense muscles, starved of protein and movement, began to consume themselves. The thick layer of "Viking Wealth" fat melted away, leaving his skin hanging loosely over his massive, broad skeleton. His hair and beard turned completely, snow-white.
He was forty-eight years old, but chained in the dark, he looked seventy.
One night, a fierce storm hit the ship. The wooden hull groaned and shrieked under the crashing waves.
The sound of the cracking wood triggered something violent in Bilal's fractured mind.
CRACK.
Bilal didn't hear the ship. He heard the Swedish arrow tearing through Elin's chest. He heard the screaming of the women in the plaza. He heard the gate of Axiomra breaking.
He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his hands over his ears, pulling against the heavy iron chains until his wrists bled.
"Stop," Bilal whispered, his voice a raspy, broken croak. "Please, Allah, make it stop. Let them sleep."
A young Italian guard, hearing the commotion, walked down into the hull with a lantern. He looked at the terrifying "Demon of the North" curled into a fetal position, rocking back and forth in the filthy bilge water, weeping uncontrollably.
The guard didn't understand. How could the monster who bombed Rome and defied Emperors be reduced to a crying child?
The guard didn't know that true strength is not the absence of pain; it is the ability to carry it. Bilal had carried it for 26 years. But a human spine can only hold up the sky for so long before it shatters.
Bilal closed his eyes and tried to picture Astrid's face. He tried to remember the smell of the pine trees, or the sound of Sahra's laugh.
But the depression—the heavy, suffocating blanket of the "Dark Age"—stole even his memories. When he tried to picture Astrid, he only saw her crying. When he tried to picture Runa, he only saw her covered in blood. The sickness in his mind convinced him that he had ruined their lives by entering their timeline.
"They would have been better off if I had frozen to death on the first day," Bilal thought, the ultimate lie of depression settling into his soul like poison.
He stopped eating the bread. He turned his face to the dark wall of the ship, waiting for the dark to finally take him.