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.
Savage Tribute
The morning storm left a pall of icy sleet clinging to the battered moot-hall roofs. Black smoke curled from the last of the Feast’s embers, staining the thin winter light. Before frost had truly broken from the mossy stones, the sentries on the northern ridge sounded a horn—three blasts, ugly and shrill, a call not for kin but for dread.
Kerr the Wolf was roused from exhausted sleep by the alarm. He snatched his cloak and hobbled out into snow still pocked by drunken prints and spatters of suspicion. The moot, so recently soothed by ritual, woke in confusion—Valskar stumbling from their tents, Skjald sharpening spearpoints, Sundr muttering prayers. Even the crows were silent in the bitter wind.
A dread procession crossed the river ice. First, the Raven banner—sprawling, bone-threaded, blackening all it touched—then four harrowed warriors armored in hide and iron. Between them, her hair a darkness unbroken by age or pity, walked Ylva herself. She wore no helm; her brow was circled in beads and claws, her every stride claimed frozen ground as her own.
She came within bowshot only, halting at the dead-men’s stones. Her warriors spread in a disciplined arc, shields resting but their eyes bright and hollow. One of them lifted a horn, sounded it long and strange, its note lingering above the camp like a curse.
Kerr and his warband assembled, outnumbered, armed more for recognition than battle. Seeress Freyja brought the runes and the white-ash staff; Inga, standing with her father, held a dagger hidden beneath her furs. Eirik emerged, pale but upright, cloak slung hastily about his frame, jaw set as if for war or a reckoning.
No parlay was offered. No invitation was needed. Ylva’s voice, when it broke the hush, whistled cold as river-ice:
“Fjordlanders! You have seen what nights my ravens bring. The feast is ended. The feast now begins.”
Her gaze swept the crowd, chewing silence to marrow.
“I demand tribute, as was given to kings and gods, to the dragon in the old hills: gold and the flesh that carries it. Slaves—forty of your stoutest, a chain from each clan, and all the torques and rings you can drag south. Bring them tomorrow to the dead marsh at sun’s lantern. If not—” her grin widened, teeth like a wolf’s—“if not, let every night witness the burning of your children and the gnawing of your old.”
No one answered at first. Even the hard-bit warriors did not spit or curse—superstition stilled their tongues. Eirik stiffened; only Kerr found a voice.
“Take our gold if you have the stomach. But we are not thralls, not to you or to any king bred in southern mud. Come for slaves and meet steel, Ylva!”
Ylva made no reply, only studied Kerr as one might study an animal resisting the trap. Her warriors drew back, horns sounded again, and the Raven Queen retreated into the morning, leaving terror behind as a pall.
The moot splintered in the aftermath. Chiefs and elders bickered and bellowed, their voices snarled by fear. In the moorland shadows, alliances thinned to threads. The Sundr wise-women argued, “Submit, and survive the winter. We must rebuild, not perish on the pyre.” The Skjald bloodswore by their fathers’ ghosts, “We are not cattle for her feast.” The remnants of the Fjorn shifted, silent, glancing to Hrawg and Kerr both.
Within the great hall, debate became a melee. Axes hammered benches; curses landed like thrown stones. Seeress Freyja stood, unmoving amid the tumult, her blind eyes cast skyward.
Kerr raised his wounded hand for silence. “Ylva will never be content with one armful of coin or a few kin sent to southern chains. She will bleed us dry, and when we’re too weak to fight, she’ll sweep in and finish what began in fire.”
An old Sundr spat: “She has broken us already. Every night we dig another grave. Will words mend our wounds, Wolf? Shall we trust your luck again?”
Inga’s voice, bright and fierce, cut through: “We are north-born. Raise steel, not chains. Give her tribute and kneel forever, or make a new mark in the old legends.”
Grudges boiled over: Jotunstag accused Skjald of cowardice; Fjorn accused the Sundr of treachery; Valskar, caught between, grit their teeth.
The debate raged so long that evening shadows climbed the beams before any decision limped forth. Kerr hammered his fist to the table, final and wrathful:
"At dawn I will be at the marsh. Not with slaves, not with gold, but with shield-brothers. If any wish to trade their kin for a day’s peace, let them show their faces in the morning, and I will know my enemies."
Night fell quick as a curtain. Cold gnawed at the camp; snow hissed fiercely beneath boots. Inside the Valskar ring, anxiety simmered—not just over Ylva’s demand, but over small, wrong things: a loose dog that vanished, boots lost from a tent, the hush that fell in the wake of the Queen’s retreat.
Before the moon had climbed the pines, a new alarm: someone had stolen salted meat from the Valskar stores, dry rations meant for the wounded. In the Fjorn sector, a shield was pulled from under a sleeping man’s arm and used to club his tentmate, who woke strangled and purple. Sundr warriors found their bows tampered with—fresh hemp cut to useless frays.
Sabotage swept the camp. Knots of men prowled, blades bared, eyes scanning for traitors. Eirik, fox-eyed, moved through the shadows, seeking pattern among the chaos. It was he who noticed a fresh bit of linen, black as crow-feather, caught on a tent-pole near the food stores. He knelt to examine it—strange pigment, not of their dye, and the threadwork marked strangely, like script or runes but too small and curling. His heart leapt with sudden suspicion.
That hour, a Valskar thegn was dragged screaming before the high-fire. He bore a pouch of coins—raven-stamped, foreign. Under questioning, he broke: “Coin for open doors! Only that—I did not know they’d strike at our children!”
Kerr oversaw the trial, jaw set in sorrow and fury. The traitor’s intimacy with the Valskar made the betrayal worse than battle; the camp pressed close to see if the Wolf would show mercy. Kerr did not. “Let your blood serve as balm, if it cannot heal.” The traitor was bound and thrown to Hrawg’s justice—denied a sword, given only shame.
As night thickened, mistrust festered. Freyja worked her old rites, burning scraps or setting wards at the camp’s edges. Eirik, unsatisfied, doubled his patrols. He found Inga at the edge of Valskar’s circle, her breath wild in the wind. Together, they conspired: she would keep the Skjald sharp; he would go into the woods, tracking the signs of the saboteur.
Moonlight fanned through the birches as Eirik slipped away, lean and silent. The trail was clever—two sets of prints at first, then only one, leading to the river’s crackling edge. There, among drifted reeds, he saw a low shape moving—too short for an adult man, shoulders hunched beneath a travel cloak. Eirik pressed a hand to his knife, stepping light.
He did not see the Raven scouts until too late. From the darkness, two feather-helmed figures burst—one barking in a foreign tongue, the other looping an arm around Eirik’s neck, dragging him down with a brutal twist. Eirik fought—a quick, desperate struggle—but the third man, lanky and silent as a ghost, pinned his arm, muttering curses in guttural Slavonic. Eirik’s head struck a root, and lights flickered before his eyes. Steel glinted at his throat, just shy of fatal.
One of the scouts—features obscured by soot and grease—spat in broken Valskar: “You’ll fetch a better price if the Queen gets your tongue first.”
Before Eirik could call out, his mouth was stuffed with rags, wrists bound, and his weapons stripped. The Raven scouts bundled him southward, vanishing through birch and fog before the camp could muster a rescue.
At dawn, Inga searched for Eirik and found only his dagger, half-buried in the snow at the forest’s edge. She screamed for help, but too late; the camp discovered his absence amid shouts of fresh outrage and horror.
Kerr—faced with Ylva’s impending demand, an enemy within, and his truest friend now lost to the night—stood silent, the frost in his beard unthawed by anger or even loss. All around, the clans gathered, torn by the most savage of choices: kneel, and send kin to slavery, or stand, and risk all to steel and flame.
The chapter closes with Ylva’s threat storming at their hearts, and with the bitter certainty that the Raven Queen’s shadow is everywhere—in the woods, in their blood, and now, perhaps, in the secret will of every soul who yearns to survive, no matter the cost.