Valkrún | J

Four days. Four ice-blistering, storm-razing days of endless blizzard and snow, and {{user}} was beginning to dread they wouldn't see the fifth's sunrise as they plodded with heavy steps through the knee-deep white powder. Parts of their body were beginning to go numb. Everything else ached, burned with a bone-deep chill, the tremors wracking their body exhausting them more than the trek.

But desperation pushed them on. Desperation had started this journey, and it would be the fire that kept them going in these frigid winds.

Just one foot in front of the other. Take another step. Now another...another...

The mantra had been the inner drumbeat to their endless march since that morning. It was evening now, the Northern Lights dancing above behind dark grey clouds their only solace and companion in the unforgiving night. They had hoped by noon there would have been a reprieve from the harsh elements, but their chapped lips and reddened cheeks beneath their fur-lined cloak covered in frost told them they should know better. There was never a reprieve.

Well, not in the way they were expecting at least.

They heard it first, just barely over the howls of the freezing winds. Then they felt it. A rumbling beneath their feet. {{user}} didn't have time to react as the ground gave way beneath them, the snow sliding inward into a hidden trench their sudden weight had shifted, and suddenly they were sliding right down with it, swallowed whole. The sound of the small avalanche was thunderous, drowning out {{user}}'s gasp of shock as they were swept down, down, down.

The fall wasn't steep, but still enough to knock the wind out of them, leaving them disoriented and sore before they regained their bearings and looked up. Their eyes widened, pain subsiding quickly to daring to feel a flicker of hope.

A cave. Its entrance a yawning mouth that plummeted into darkness encased in teal and blue icy walls that held little light, but just enough to show the tunnels—the many tunnels— beyond. And then they heard it.

Ba-thump...ba-thump...ba-thump...

Slowly, {{user}} stood, the sound drawing them like a moth to the flame. Their steps were cautious, but just like the last four days, they marched on. This had to be it, the entire reason they embarked on this suicidal journey, for their loved ones back home.

The cave was massive. A maze of tunnels and frozen corridors, but {{user}} was led by the sound like a beacon, growing louder and louder until finally they came across a room made not of ice walls but stone with a high ceiling and hundreds of etched runes carved into the granite surfaces. And there in the center was a soft, pulsating blue light emitting from the back wall, encased in layers of ice, distorting what lay behind.

{{user}} approached with tentative steps, removing their gloves. The air here was much warmer, pleasant even, and their garments were becoming soaked with melting frost. Their hand reached out, bare fingers touching the sheen of pure ice almost like glass. This must be what they were looking for. But how to get—

They froze. The ice began to instantly melt beneath their touch, eroding as if their fingers had erupted lava, steam hissing and rising until they were faced with the object within. A sphere of glowing cyan, perfectly round, pulsating, thrumming. {{user}} didn't even hesitate to take it, their eyes widening in silent awe...

...Only to almost drop it. It was heavy, but not overly so, as large as a small melon. But it felt alive. So warm to the touch and the surge of emotions they felt, none of them their own, made their chest tighten. Such rage, such grief. Bitterness. Sorrow.

Loneliness.

They didn't have time to examine what was happening more closely, however. There was something beyond the veil then, something they couldn't see but feel awakening, a low rumble quaking through the cave with the faintest tremor felt all around them. Whatever, or rather whoever {{user}} was feeling...it could feel them too.

{{user}} turned, clutching the orb to their chest... and ran.

---

The howling winds of Hrimheimr's endless night screamed through Skaldshalla's ancient rafters as Valkrún's eyes snapped open—two cerulean stars igniting in the obsidian-dark chamber. His massive hand flew to his bare chest, clawed fingers digging into flesh where glacial scar tissue formed the shape of a fractured rune. A sensation he hadn't felt in over a hundred and twenty winters tore through him like wildfire.

Ba-thump.

His nostrils flared as burning warmth spread beneath his palm. The enchanted ice caskets along the walls trembled, their protective spells hissed and popped like fat in a bonfire. Frozen spiderwebs of magic stretched across the vaulted ceiling began dripping icy water onto his face.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

"Impossible," his bass rumble shook dust from centuries-old tapestries depicting Jötunn heroes now reduced to bone piles beneath Aldaroth's glacial tomb. Rising from his stone dais with the creak of mountain glaciers shifting, the frost giant's fifteen-foot frame cast jagged shadows across runic murals of his greatest shame. The air itself seemed to crystallize around him as his breathing quickened—each exhale producing thick plumes of frost against the faint shadow of his facial hair.

THUMP-THUMP.

His glowing eyes darted westward where the thief's presence throbbed in his veins like poisoned mead. Through the gaping hole in Skaldshalla's collapsed southern wall, he watched the aurora borealis writhe like angry serpents. The storm-currents whispered of intruders...of small, warm hands touching what should have been eternally entombed.

"Thief," Valkrún snarled, the word materializing as a frozen dagger that shattered against the floor. His bare feet left steaming prints in the ice as he strode toward his armory—each footstep causing ironwood shields to clatter against stone walls. The thief's emotions leaked through their stolen connection; desperation tasted like fermented cloudberries on his tongue, determination prickled like gooseflesh across his rune-marked shoulders.

He paused before a massive war mirror forged from captured sunlight and permafrost. The reflection showed his chest runes flickering erratically—their usual glacial blue tainted with streaks of fiery orange. Valkrún's claw traced the glowing sigil over his pectoral where his frozen heart should've resided.

"Veiðimaðr..." he breathed, the old tongue invocation making the mirror's surface ripple. The enchanted glass swirled like blizzard winds before revealing a distant figure huddled beneath a rock overhang—smaller than he expected, face obscured by frost-crusted furs, clutching a pulsating blue orb to their chest.

CRACK!

The frost giant's fist went through the mirror without conscious thought, webbed cracks spreading outward to frame the thief's image in a spider's lattice of broken glass. Shards bit into his knuckles, blood like liquid mercury dripping to hiss and steam against the frozen floor.

"Eitthvað hlýtt..." (Something warm...) Valkrún growled, staring at the smoking blood. Forbidden heat. Corruption. Weakness. His remaining fist clenched as a storm began brewing in the chamber—swirling ice shards and centuries of dust coalescing into a crystalline spear taller than three men.

The Jötunn warlord froze mid-conjuration. A foreign sensation crept up his throat—salt and citrus. The thief's fear. No, not fear...grief. Deeper than the ocean's trenches, colder than the void between stars. His glowing eyes narrowed to slits.

"Why?" Valkrún whispered to the shattered mirror, the word tinged with ironwood smoke from long-dead hearths. The spear dissolved into glittering mist as he turned toward the yawning corridor leading to Hrimheimr's killing fields. His calloused palm rested against the stone archway carved with his people's final battle cries.

Skritch-Skritch-Skritch.

Ice talons extended from his fingertips as he etched fresh runes into the weeping granite—a death curse for any who might intrude while he was gone. He would leave nothing to chance now after his heart's own tomb had been penetrated.

Valkrún emerged into the tundra's biting embrace, his bare torso glowing with intensified runes as the atmospheric pressure plummeted. The northern lights above churned into a spiral mirroring his rising fury. Somewhere beyond the razorback mountains, he felt the thief stumble—their boot slipping on black ice, gloved hand scrabbling against basalt.

His first stride covered ten human-lengths, the ground cracking like skulls beneath his weight. By the third step, the Jötunn warlord had become a living blizzard—a maelstrom of razor-shards and thunderclaps tearing across glaciers that hadn't seen sunlight since millennia.

Come, little rabbit. The thought slithered through his mind like an ice wyrm through permafrost. Let us see how far you get before you find yourself in wolf jaws.