The Wolf and the Raven: Saga of the Fjordlands
Steel rings and ravens scream in the blood-soaked Fjordlands! When ancient rivalries flare and a supernatural foe threatens their very existence, chieftain Kerr the Wolf must unite warring Viking clans before the land drowns in fire and ash. Betrayal, love, and prophecy set the stage for an epic saga where only the bold—or the lost—will survive.
Ashes and Iron
The moot camp brooded beneath a thick quilt of smoke. The Valksar fires flickered with a sullen light, no longer beacons but desperate attempts to ward off despair. Kerr’s battered band returned as ghosts, the faces of his warriors streaked with soot and old blood, shoulders bowed beneath the weight of loss. Snow trampled and fouled, the air tinged with the iron stink of wounded men and women, and above it all, the crows calling, hungry and bold.
With the alliance broken on the marsh's edge and Ylva’s terror still fresh, the battered survivors dragged the wounded over frostbitten ground. The dead—too many to name, the pain too raw to count—were left where they fell, or heaped in pyres that burned little, the fuel half-frozen and corpse-fat crackling with bitter protest. Inga, hair matted with gore and eyes bright with stubborn hope, pressed cloth to Hrawg’s wound as the Skjald chief gritted his teeth and spat curses at fate.
Eirik, bandaged and gray-faced, helped count the remnants—dark calculations, no comfort found in the tally. He spoke little, his gaze falling always on the reddened snow and the gaping spaces where friends and kin should have stood. Above them, the ravens circled lower.
It was not long before rumbling voices thickened the frozen air. The clans—Valskar, Skjald, Jotunstag, what little remained of the Fjorn—clustered among their own, tending wounds and flinging words like spears at the battered central ring. Grievances, some newly earned and others older than the moot itself, found new voice in defeat’s wake.
“My brother lies twisted outside Fjorgard,” shouted one old Skjald. “Where was the Wolf’s cunning, then?”
“Who led us into the marsh’s maw? We followed the Valskar banner to slaughter!” a Jotunstag elder spat, limping on a bloodied staff.
“Better the crows take us than trust southern silver,” another muttered between chapped lips, her words meant for company but not concealment.
Hrawg turned in the firelight, propped up by Inga and two grim thegns. His roar, full of pain and pride alike, silenced the bickering camps. “Let the Wolf speak for his pack! Are we to die cowering in his shadow, or stand tall in the blaze?”
Kerr, cloak shredded and bearing fresh scars beneath a mask of ash, climbed to the frost-choked mootstone. He gripped his father’s axe—its haft cracked, blade nicked—and drew himself to full height. His voice carried, bruised but unyielding:
“We fled the marsh not for fear, but to fight another dawn. Any chieftain who claims otherwise, speak now with your blade or your oath.”
Murmurs flickered. Hands sought hilts, but none challenged outright. Not yet.
In the lull, Seeress Freyja drifted forward, her steps silent as dusk. Her eyes rolled white and blank over the circle, unblinking. “Blood has outpaced reason here. If steel is all that’s left, then let the old rites judge who shall bear the wolf-helm—who is fit to bind the clans, or damn them.”
She drew from her belt a length of woven wolf-gut, knotted with runes and wound with iron nails. “The trial of the Ironforge,” she intoned, “older than walls, older than any throne. If Kerr’s claim is true, if his courage unbroken, let him walk where fire proves more merciful than lies.”
A ripple ran through the moot—fear, awe, the crackle of danger. The Ironforge: an ordeal not called since the days of legend, when kings and exiles alike let flesh speak to the gods.
Hrawg, bloodied but eager, spat and nodded. “Let the Wolf prove he is not yet a cur. If he fails, the Skjald stand alone, and let the Raven feast on his bones.”
Even Eirik flinched at that, but Kerr’s eyes shone through the shadow. “So be it. Fire and nails, and let the gods see what mortal hearts remain.”
Preparations unfurled as the sun crawled behind leaden clouds. Warriors shoved snow aside to clear a circle, giggling children driven off by curt curses. Two hearths were stoked, oak logs burning hot; in the center, Freyja set the bundle of iron nails in a copper basin, chanting low and steady. No one but the most devout would look her full in the face as she worked.
In swathes of the camp, arguments flared anew—some claimed the rite was folly, others pressed for blood and a war-leader chosen by slew. Inga wrapped her arms about herself and watched, torn between pride and terror, her gaze drifting to Eirik, who stood at her shoulder, blade ready but eyes scarred by hope he no longer dared name.
Hrawg watched, hawk-like. “It should have been my hand, not the Wolf’s, leading that charge. If the gods still favor me, let the fire show it.”
No one replied. Even his own thegns seemed weary of blood.
The gathering formed three thick rings, the entire moot forced by spectacle to a grim unity. No one—Skjald, Valskar, Sundr—would miss such a trial, for in ancient law it spoke not only to who led, but to whose life the gods measured as worthy.
Kerr knelt before the basin. Freyja intoned rites in guttural verse, invoking Norn and wolf-spirit, the dead and unborn alike. Then—bare-armed, jaw set—Kerr plunged his hand into the seething nails, grasping the iron as pain scorched up to his shoulder. Flesh sizzled. Some gasped, one woman fainted. He lifted the nails and dropped them onto the snow, his hand trembling but unyielding, the scars already blooming angry red.
Freyja examined the wound. “The gods say: if your courage falters, the wound will fester, and so your claim will rot. If it heals true, the Wolf’s right endures.”
The camp watched as Kerr wiped blood on snow and stood shakily, but did not fall. “There is your answer,” he said. “Now hear mine: I will lead, or I will die. We cannot part, not now—not with Ylva’s shadow twice as thick and our kin already half-swallowed by the dark. If you must doubt, challenge me with steel, not poison. If you must grieve, let us all grieve together now, and be done with it. In morning, we hunt.”
The hush after was deeper than fear. Even Hrawg, for all his bluster, only snarled and looked away.
But the ancient rites demanded more than public agony—they also called for the judgment of dreams, a proving of spirit no flesh alone could win. So, late that night, as the clans settled uneasily and the wind worried the scorched banners, Freyja summoned Kerr to the woods beyond the campfire haze.
She led him to the barrow-hill, where the snow lay undisturbed save for raven tracks and twisted pine. She handed him a draught—a blend of bitter herbs and mushroom, black as the bottom of a fjord—and pressed her hand to his brow. “Drink, Wolf, and see if the old ones will answer.”
Kerr drank it down, the taste a purging burn. The cold wrapped him tighter, the world dimming, his senses opening to something vaster—silence and wind and the far-off crash of spectral sea.
He wandered the dream-world beneath the roots of the earth, guided by flickering blue fires. Between ancient trees hung with shadows, he beheld the broken shields of his kin, piled into cairns, crows pecking fearlessly at eyes unseeing. In the dreams, he fought—clash after clash—his father’s voice crying, “Only by binding wounds can you bind people, wolf-cub.”
He saw Eirik collapsed under a black sail, Inga crowned beneath icicles, Freyja turning away with her sightless eyes full of sorrow. Ylva stood at the threshold of a crimson hall, beckoning, her arms outstretched and her eyes pits of midnight. “You cannot win by blade alone,” she whispered, voice at once cruel and pitying. “Iron and fire devour all. What do you surrender that you might save?”
Kerr answered—but whether with words, a howl, or a bared soul, he could not recall. The woods unspooled into frost and mist. The last thing he saw before waking: a great wolf and a raven circling the same narrow path, neither able to leave it, fangs and talons shining red in the false dawn.
He woke by the barrow, Freyja watching with a mixture of hunger and dread.
“What did you see?” she asked, voice brittle as hoarfrost.
“Everything broken, but still bound together in the hunting,” he rasped. “A path forward, if we don’t tear ourselves apart before walking it. But we must pay a price, all of us.”
Freyja only nodded. “Then let the clans see the scars you bear—let that buy their hope, if it can.”
As dawn stained the sky copper and magenta, Kerr strode back toward the sleeping camp, hand wrapped in soot-blackened bandages. His step was heavy, yet no longer shamed. Word had already spread of the trial survived, the wounds hardening into proof of worth and will.
He summoned the torches and banners to the shattered moot, calling the battered survivors to council once more. “I will not promise easy victory,” he said, holding high his wounded hand. “But unity, even in ash, is worth more than silver and vengeance. I have seen how this ends if we do not hold fast: wiped from memory, a tale of ghosts written in winter’s teeth. But together—iron and fire—at least we make a mark before the end.”
A long silence. Then—slow, uncertain but real—Eirik stepped forward first, and others followed. Inga. The oldest of the Sundr. Even Hrawg, still pale, raised his fist in bitter salute, acknowledging the ordeal’s outcome. Hope flickered—a wolf’s ember in the long night before the storm. For now, Kerr’s claim held. The clans would march behind him again.