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.
Twilight of the Clans
The barrows loomed out of the snow, ringed in skeletal birch and ancient, listing stones—a crown of frost above the battered host of the North. Here, in the deep twilight that was neither day nor true night, the last of the Fjordland clans drew breathing space from the waiting dark.
They came with what little remained: six score fighters, a handful of mothers with knives tucked in skirts, youths and the broken walking on last reserves of will. Kerr stood at the apex of the mound, the reforged Wyrm-Tongue strapped across his shoulder, his cloak crusted in frost, his jaw blackened by grief and a will steeled past despair. Beside him, Inga stalked the rim of the mound, spear in hand, her face gaunt as hunger and twice as fierce. Eirik followed, silent and hollow-eyed, his hand never far from his sword. Hrawg, battered and bandaged, argued for the Skjald’s last scraps of pride—though even he limped now, pride wounded beyond mending. Near the barrow entrance, Seeress Freyja knelt with runes and stones in a ruined bowl, her hair and hands crusted with the dust of ancient bones.
The wind stank of ice and coming blood. Above, ravens circled in a black gyre, their shapes swelling the shadows, mocking any hope of dawn.
In the lee of the stones, Kerr walked the line—the last shieldwall the clans might ever build. The Skjald crooned an old death-song under their breath, every refrain an oath mending a hundred feuds. The Sundr, much reduced, whispered the names of missing kin into the ground. Among the Fjorn, the new captain, eyes rimmed red, set axes and torches in the snow, marking places for the dead before the battle even began.
Eirik stopped beside Inga, his voice a low growl lost beneath the wind. “If we fall here, let no song call us cowards.”
“No,” she breathed. “Let it call us stubborn fools—kin enough to spill blood on hallowed ground for each other.”
Kerr watched them, envy and pride twisting within. Tonight, all their chances ran thin as a shadow’s edge.
Freyja, finishing her mute labor, pressed her palm to the earth atop the barrow. “They listen,” she said in her shagged voice, heavy with the weight of listening ghosts. “They hunger for story, for justice. But our plea is frail beside hers.”
The ravens’ ring widened, then broke. From the north, through the last haze of falling snow, marched the Black Ravens. A forest of banners emerged—skeins of dead men’s hair, shields painted with sigils bleeding into white. Drums thudded, a heartbeat of doom. Ylva strode at their head atop a black horse, her cloak thrown back to show armor stitched with bone and jet. Her hair hung in black ropes; her eyes, catching the torchlight, flared with an echo of storm and fire and something old as folklore.
The ground itself seemed to resist her—frost lancing up at her horse’s legs, the wind battering her banners. Still she smiled, pale lips splitting in mirthless invitation.
She raised her hand. The drums stopped. Even the ravens stilled. “I am Ylva, dread-blood, Queen of the Last Winter. You, exiles and traitors, rootless sons and scraped-bone daughters, think you can hold old ground with names and memories. This barrow is a door. I am the key. Your ancestors built it for kings—but kings rot, and ravens grow fat.”
A shudder passed through the defenders. The Skjald shivered in dread, remembering tales told to frighten children.
Ylva leaned in the saddle, her gaze sweeping Kerr and the ragged shieldwall. “I offer the same mercy: kneel. Surrender, I will give you to the dead with honor. Resist, and I will open the door to every shadow that ever hunted you—all at once.”
Kerr answered, voice cracked but carrying: “We choose the living. Take your poison and choke on it.”
Ylva laughed. The torches on her side guttered as though starving for air. She muttered a word, sharp as breaking ice—and the world shuddered.
The boundary between sky and earth blurred. Midnight blue welled up from the old stones. A wind rose—not the north wind, but a cold out of legend, a night banished by the eldest gods. All sound stilled; colors leached to monochrome. Between the standing stones, shadows thickened, bending and twisting, birthing figures with faces like the dead—men in ancient arms, their mouths sewn with cords, women with hair of ice and fingers sharpened to black claws. The dead of the barrow, waked and woven.
Among the Raven host, a ragged chant took up—a cruel, ululating cry. The two lines met in dire silence, axes beating against shields, then crashing together with a fury untouched by the living’s memory.
Snow erupted red. The shieldwall held, just. Kerr and Eirik fought shoulder to shoulder, hacking and stabbing as figures emerged and vanished in the storm. Inga dragged Sundr and Skjald alike into the line, each desperate to keep the cold at bay for one more breath.
Among the chaos, Freyja chanted at the barrow’s crown. Her voice reached into the howl of the world. “Defend us, old kings! Wake, wolf and raven both—carry our oaths above the storm!”
The earth trembled. Blue fire guttered up from cracks in the barrow, swirling around her staff. The dead of Fjordland rose—forms pale and translucent, bearing axes and swords of ghost-light, locking arms beside their descendants. The lines between living and dead blurred—Skjald and Valskar fighting iron to iron, but now flanked by shadows of men and women lost a dozen generations gone.
Ylva, seeing this, howled a word that bent the air itself. “I am the reckoning kept from you by fathers’ lies. I am vengeance, not a crown!”
She leapt from her horse, her body contorting, the armor shrieking at her change. Her eyes turned full midnight, her hair became a mantle of smoke and tomb-dust. Shadows bent to her touch, congealing into a mask of wolf and raven both, her arms gloved in claws of void. The ancient power of the barrow and the hungry ghosts vied for supremacy.
Hrawg, battered and proud, limped forward, axe braced in one hand. “You will not take us like lambs, Queen! My brother fell to betrayal, but I fall to no shadow!” He charged, roaring the Skjald death-song.
Ylva’s shadow-beasts swept toward him, jaws gaping. Hrawg’s axe cut once—twice—before he was overwhelmed, his cry ringing out even as his frame vanished in a flurry of claws and ancient night. The sacrifice flowed through the clan—breaking some, hardening others. Inga screamed, rallying the Skjald in his stead.
Eirik and Inga found themselves back to back atop the mound, ringed by bodies and wraiths and shadows in riot. “I made you a promise,” Eirik shouted over the gale. “If we live, we make our own oath. If we die, we shame the gods for letting it be so.”
Inga clasped his hand, fingers slipping in blood. “Live, then. Die as kin, not as prey.”
Kerr forced his way through the melee, Wyrm-Tongue aglow with fire and azure. Ylva met him by the barrow’s mouth—the air around them torn by wind and the shriek of spectres.
Her face flashed human, then monstrous, then something old and genderless, every form a cloak for the hunger underneath. “Why do you fight, Wolf?” she asked, her voice a hundred ages’ worth of sorrow and rage. “Even your ancestors would not stand together. You sacrifice kin on the pyre of pride—so did I.”
Kerr, heavier for every loss, answered, “I fight because someday a child might walk these hills and remember we did not kneel.”
Ylva struck—darkness welling from her hand, lashing the sword from Kerr’s grasp. They wrestled not as man and queen, but as avatars—wolf and raven, steel and talon, fate and fury.
Above, Freyja cried a word in the tongue of barrow-kings. Light lanced from the mound, striking the two at the threshold: Kerr’s wounds blazed, Ylva’s shape writhing and smoking.
All around, men and dead fought shadow for shadow. Some fell, the life torn from them, only to rise again in ghost-form. Sundr mothers keened with voices that stirred the snow to new flurries. The air blazed with the song of the ancient North, and bled with the agony of the present.
At last, Kerr seized Wyrm-Tongue and drove it through the heart of Ylva’s shadow. She screamed—a noise that shattered the stones and silenced the battling dead. Her arms dissolved into feathers and dust.
But at the same moment, the mound shook. The dead, called forth, could not return easily. Freyja collapsed, spent. Eirik caught her before her head struck stone. Inga fell to her knees beside her father’s spirit, who gazed on her once before vanishing in the silver mist.
Kerr stood, half-mad with battle and loss. Ylva’s form faded, but her voice lingered, a prophecy: “The Queen gives her last: Spring comes only when the last wolf’s oath is kept. Watch the hills for ravens. Bury your dead, Wolf.”
The Black Ravens, leaderless, broke and ran. Their banners tore in sudden wind. The clans, decimated, ringed the barrow atop battered shields, eyes wild with the terror of what had been unleashed, and what had been stopped only by equal horror.
That night, the survivors built pyres not just for the fallen, but for the spells that bound them. Freyja’s body was placed atop the barrow, crowned with birch and cold gold, her staff shattered and cast upon the fire.
Kerr stood alone, mourning more than victory—lost kin, broken legends, a world changed forever beneath the twilight. Beside him Eirik and Inga held each other, wounded but bonded by the savagery and miracle they had survived.
Above, at last, the ravens circled wider and drifted north, away from the mound. And as the dawn broke, weak red in the east, not a single bird lingered to trouble the barrow’s hallowed ground.