The mud of the North was thick, tasting of iron and salt.
Skane "The Bone-Breaker" knelt in the center of the village he had just conquered for his King. His braided mohawk was matted with the blood of men who were supposedly his enemies, and his twin axes—notched and chipped—lay at his feet like tired hounds. Around his neck hung his trophies: a string of iron rings taken from the fallen jarls of the south.
He was the shield of the kingdom. He was the man the skalds sang about over their ale. And that was his death sentence.
"You've done well, Skane," a voice pulled him from his exhaustion.
Skane looked up. King Harald stood there, draped in fine furs that had never seen a drop of spray from a longship. Behind him stood a circle of huscarls—Skane's own brothers-in-arms. Their eyes were cast down.
"The village is yours, my King," Skane grunted, his voice like grinding stones. "The path to the coast is open."
"Yes," Harald whispered, drawing a short, silver-inlaid blade. "And with you gone, the songs will finally belong to the man who wears the crown, not the dog who bites for it."
Skane didn't have time to reach for his axes. He was exhausted, drained by the very war he had won for this coward. The silver blade sank into his chest, right between the leather straps of his armor.
The betrayal was colder than the steel.
As Skane fell, the world began to blur. He saw Harald's face—the face of the man he had razed cities for. The man he had made a god. Skane's hand reached out, grasping at the air, his tattoos rippling as his muscles buckled.
By the Old Gods... Skane's internal roar was louder than the dying screams of the village. If there is a path back... if the Norns have a shred of mercy... I will return. I will not just kill you, Harald. I will erase everything you ever built. I will be the monster you feared I was.
He didn't go to the Great Halls. He didn't go to the frozen depths.
Instead, Skane felt his soul shatter like glass. It didn't fade; it screamed. It was too heavy to sink, too sharp to rise. It tore through the fabric of the grey mist between worlds, hurtling toward a light he didn't recognize.
The World of Gaia (Parallel Universe)
In a small, drafty farmhouse on the edge of the Mist-Woods, a three-year-old boy named Kael sat staring at a wall.
Kael was "slow." A fall from a wagon as a baby had left his eyes vacant, his speech non-existent. His parents, Elin and Thomas, were poor farmers who spent their days praying to the Spirit-Gods for a miracle they couldn't afford.
Suddenly, Kael's body went rigid. His eyes rolled back, glowing with a faint, ghostly blue light.
In his mind, a storm was raging. A giant with a braided mohawk and bloodied axes was slamming against the insides of his skull. The "shattered" soul of the Viking Chief found the cracks in the boy's broken mind and poured in, sealing the gaps with iron will.
Kael collapsed.
"Kael! Thomas, help!" Elin screamed, rushing to the boy.
For three days, the boy burned with a fever that should have killed him. On the fourth morning, he opened his eyes.
The vacancy was gone. In its place was a cold, piercing intelligence that no three-year-old should possess.
He looked at his small, soft hands. He looked at the wooden rafters of the hut. He felt the hum of something in the air—not the smell of salt, but the vibration of magic.
"Kael?" his mother whispered, trembling. "Can you hear me?"
The boy sat up. His movements were precise, lacking the clumsy wobbles of a child. He looked at his mother—really looked at her—and spoke his first words.
"Where is the steel?"