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.
Winter’s Grasp
The first hard frost of deep winter left the fjord valley nightmarish—trees cased in rime, the marshes a graveyard of shattered reeds, and the sky an unyielding dome of pewter. The storm which had battered them through the rescue of Eirik gave no sign of relenting. Around the battered moot, men and women huddled in dugouts, pressed against one another for what warmth survived.
What little there was left to burn—the last cords of pine, planks hewn from shattered wagons—went too swiftly. The air stank of sweat, mud, and old meat. Beneath every banner, hunger carved its own scars: faces gone gaunt, cheeks hollowed sharp as axe blades, children grown too listless to quarrel.
At dawn, the Valskar ration line stretched down the ruined avenue, warriors cupping palms in hope of a handful of oats, a heel of bread. The Skjald, bruised but proud, watched with silent unease; the Fjorn’s new captain—eerily boyish in the grim light—paced his remnant, eyes darting at every cough or empty bowl.
Kerr moved through the ranks, his wound itching beneath its wrappings, hand numb where frostbitten nerves pricked his memory. He clasped the shoulder of each clansman, murmured names, but offered no comfort. The Wolf’s courage alone kindled no fire in empty stomachs.
When a Sundr huntress—the last bold enough to challenge the queue—was caught red-handed spiriting a squirrel carcass from Valskar stores, violence answered hunger. Cries broke out; a Skjald youth swung his fist, a Fjorn woman drew her knife. Warriors bared teeth, steel flashed in the smoky dusk. Had Hrawg not appeared on a makeshift crutch—roaring Skjald curses, promising death for brawlers—blood would have wetted the very bread.
Only Inga, interposing the full fearlessness of her glare, and Kerr’s gruff command, kept the peace. “Whoever spills blood over crumbs does Ylva’s work for her,” Kerr growled, voice raw, echoing over the huddling clans. The hunger, almost, obeyed; the Sundr woman spat and slunk away.
That night, the moot’s heart throbbed with fever. Children shivered, lips blue, mothers dosing them with dregs of moldy ale or scraps of dried herbs. Even the Skjald, iron-willed, began to murmur: old kin, frail and coughing, took to their pallets one by one. A cough in the shadows fell on every ear like a war horn. Frostbite nibbled at toes and fingers; infection turned simple wounds into lingering harbingers of death.
Eirik, still bruised from his capture, watched as a young Sundr boy shuddered through the night, breath rattling, warmth stolen by a fever no hand could turn. “We cannot even bury our dead,” he whispered to Inga, “the ground is too hard. The ravens will have our stories before the spring.”
Inga pressed close, eyes burning. “We are not yet ghosts, Eirik. Not while you stand and I can strike.”
But there were fewer to stand now. That very dawn, word came that half the Sundr and the small Long-Head clan, desperate and fearing only cold and famine, had deserted—slipping away by torchless night, vanishing into the white woods or making for the horizon where Ylva’s banners were rumoured to offer food and mercy. Their places at the fire stayed cold.
Kerr called council as the snow began to swirl again, hard as tiny stones. The chieftains gathered, fewer every day, their faces drawn into sharp relief by want.
“We are dying by inches,” Halvard’s captain rasped, pride forced to a whisper. “Give us leave to hunt north—let us take what we can. Or else break the stores; even wolf and crow eat when winter rules.”
Hrawg rammed the butt of his crutch against the flagstones. “Fool! You scatter the clans, you feed the Raven Queen—she picks us off one by one, wolf-stray and desperate. Bind oath to ration. No man eats until every child is given first measure.”
“Your children are fed on Skjald pride,” a Fjorn grumbled. “Will you give them steel for supper?”
The council nearly came to blows. Only Seeress Freyja, drifting between them in silence, kept order. “You fight for bones. Bone is what you’ll have—unless you bend. The gods do not favor men who gnaw each other.”
She turned to the fire, eyes milky white.
It was then the first omen appeared.
Snow lashed sideways, blinding and strange, carrying whispers none could place. In the night, as Freyja prayed by the dying embers, a wind like icy claws flayed her cheeks. She glimpsed, in the curling smoke, runes—scrawled in frost—on the ground around the council ring. Shapes like birds’ footprints, impossible and sinuous; the words of another world.
A figure moved at the wood’s edge. Black feathers, white eyes—gone in a heartbeat. The snow flecked with tiny bones, set in ritual patterns. Above the camp, a cry: not a raven’s, but a human shriek, somewhere distant, shattering the hush. Freyja whispered curses—summoning old gods for protection, sending warnings to Kerr and Inga.
The next morning, more found strange things. A frozen hare, splayed on the snow with its innards shaped in spiral runes. A dog, eyes pecked clean, strung from a birch with dead man’s knots. Runic symbols scratched onto doors; elders claimed to hear children giggling in the night, though none played.
The clans grew wild with dread. Some whispered it was the end-times, the last winter. Old feuds reignited—in the supply lines, the Jotunstag accused the Skjald of hiding smoked fish, the Valskar hounded the Fjorn for pocketed grain. Rumor said the Sundr, now among Ylva’s host, were rewarded with meat, women, and warm fire. Despair and rage braided together, tight as death.
When word came that the Long-Heads—once sworn to Fjorn—had sent a runner to Kerr, offering terms to join again if only the Wolf offered sanctuary and food, Kerr, nearly mad with exhaustion, slammed his fist to the stone.
"They broke oath once and would break it again at the first crack of ice. We do not feed traitors in the name of mercy!"
Yet Eirik, rubbing frostburnt hands, muttered, "A wolf alone is only a shadow. But all shadows together, even the ravens fear."
Kerr nearly struck him, but Inga stood between, pleading for compassion.
It ended moot. The Long-Heads never appeared. A scouting party—Inga, Eirik, and the young Fjorn captain—found their camp two days later, little more than a handful of trampled snow and a ring of gutted sleds. No sign of men or children, no tracks save a line of bare footprints, toes pointed always south. Torn strips of cloth marked a circle, with a heap of black feathers atop—a warning, or a claim. The only message scrawled in blood on a shattered shield: Choose the living, or be meat for crows.
The same blizzard that drove them back howled with unholy violence. Wind screamed, screaming louder at every barricade. Tents collapsed; a Jotunstag sentry, out beyond the ditch, never returned. When the search found him, he was frozen bare, eyes wide and mouth gaping, black feathers wedged behind his broken teeth. The old claimed something evil rode the wind—Ylva’s craft, or worse, gods unmoved by mortal suffering.
That night, starvation drove a group of Fjorn to breach the Skjald’s stores; a fight broke out in the main hall, knives drawn, the air thick with curses. Kerr waded in, bloodying his mouth to break it; Freyja scraped runes on the post, calling down a curse on oathbreakers. Those caught in theft were given a share of bread—then driven out to the camp’s margin, forced to make their shelter in the open snow.
“How many wolves must freeze before you call us family again?” Inga asked, voice sharp with the echo of prophecy. Kerr only answered with silence, bearing the mantle of chieftain more like a shroud than armor.
That night, the camp heard the wailing. Some said it was a child, others a wounded wolf. Eirik and Inga, braving the storm, followed the sound in hopes of finding a stray kin—only to discover, at the edge of the treeline, a snowdrift hollowed by something crawling on all fours. A ring of old bones and stone runes marked the place. In the center: a doll, eyes sewn shut and mouth sewn open, filled with melted black ice. Eirik spat, muttering, “Ylva’s poison is thick as glue.”
They returned, shivering, to the camp’s flickering fires, bringing only dread for comfort. All that remained was scarcity and prophecy, shaping hunger into wildness.
Before midnight, the wind dropped, and with it came silence—a hush after pain, when even hope dares not breathe. Shapes moved beyond the firelight, just outside sight. When Kerr rose to challenge them, torches flaring, the shapes withdrew—only to reappear nearer by dawn, assembling before the moot’s ring a figure in dark armor, cloak glittering with frost, flanked by two grim guards.
A Black Raven envoy.
He bore a carved box in gloved hands, black-stained wood etched with runes. He stood where the snow was undisturbed and called aloud in the Queen’s tongue:
“From Ylva, daughter of thunder: tribute unoffered is tribute taken. You have until the sun sets thrice in the valley. Surrender, or the storm will not lift. This is mercy’s last howl.”
He placed the box at the boundary stones and departed, vanishing into spiraling flakes. When Kerr opened the lid, in full view of council and kin, they found inside a heart: not a man’s, nor beast—too large, veins blackened, steaming in the cold. A token, an omen. Ylva’s last warning writ in gore.
Kerr stood, snow swirling about him, the heart at his feet, the silence broken only by the fitful weeping of a child who would never remember a world before frost, famine, and the wolf’s long night.