"Yes."

The word did not tremble. It fell from Vidar’s lips heavy and final. He did not ask her. He did not look at her. He looked only at the writhing darkness beneath the roots of Ytunnafǫll.

The Nameless One accepted.

The price was instant and absolute. Roots, slick with ancient rot, surged from the earth, not to bind him, but her. She was lifted, a sacrificial lamb, and the scream that tore from her throat was not born of fear, but of an agony beyond mortal comprehension. The darkness demanded a vessel. It demanded sight.

Rough, invisible claws gouged into her face, robbing her of the world of light. Her eyes were torn free, the optic nerves severed with a sickening snap, leaving only weeping hollows. You must look inward now, the void whispered. You are the anchor.

And then came the stitching. An occult needle threaded with cold fire bound his soul to hers. His mortality was stripped away, syphoned into her fragile, bleeding frame.

---

The sun did not rise the day the Shadow of the North fell upon Rhovanath.

He spent a year gathering an army, convincing the Swedish chiefs, and a year preparing for this very moment.

Vidar stood at the prow of the lead longship, a god of war clad in black iron. He did not stutter. He did not flinch. When the gates of the Hornfast shattered, he walked through the debris like a storm.

Thorvald met him in the courtyard. The Golden Son, desperate and roaring, swung his greatsword with the strength of a panicked bear. The blade bit clean through Vidar’s shield arm, severing it at the elbow.

Vidar did not scream. She did.

Far away, safe in the black hold of his ship, her body convulsed, clutching a phantom arm, nerve-endings firing in white-hot agony. Vidar merely looked at his stump. He laughed – a cold, dead sound – as the flesh knit itself back together in seconds, bone fusing with a wet crunch.

"Is that all, brother?" he asked, his voice steady as a glacier.

Thorvald fled. They all tried to flee. But Astridr, the Giant-Blooded bitch, bought them time with one final act of spite. She emerged from the chaos, holding a severed head by its graying hair. Ljót.

Something in Vidar broke then. Not into sadness, but into an inferno.

While Thorvald and his kin escaped into the mountains, Vidar’s wrath fell upon the mothers. He caught Svala, the raven-shifter, and fed her to a pyre while Skathi was forced to watch, his screams mingling with the crackle of her roasting flesh. Skathi he kept for ten days, removing his fingers one by one with a dull knife until the Windrider finally slipped his chains and escaped.

But for Astridr... for the woman who killed his mother... Vidar reserved a week of hell.

He had her flayed in strips while she lived. He had her bathed in brine. He broke her legs with a smith’s hammer. And at the end, beneath the ash-choked sky, he knelt on her back and performed the Blood Eagle. He carved the eagle’s wings from her flesh, hacked through her ribs with an axe, and pulled her lungs out to rest upon her shoulders, glistening and heaving with her final, silent breaths. She died without a word, her eyes fixed on the horizon where her son had fled.

---

Now.

The tower room smells of lavender and iron. Vidar tried to make the room warm. The furs beneath her are soft, the finest bear pelts from the north, but the golden chain around her ankle is heavy. Enough to walk, not enough to flee.

She lay in darkness. She always lies in darkness now. The bandages over her empty sockets are fresh, changed by his own hands this morning.

The heavy oak door creaks open.

Vidar sits on the edge of the bed; it dips under his immense weight. He brings with him the scent of snow and old blood – a scent that never quite washes off.

"I am here," he rumbles. The stutter is gone, replaced by a deep, terrifying baritone.

He reaches out, his large hand cupping her cheek with a tenderness that feels grotesque given what those hands have done. His thumb brushes the edge of her bandage. He knows she is in pain. He took a stray arrow to the shoulder during a skirmish at the borders today; the wound closed on him instantly, but he knows her shoulder throbs with a ghostly ache.

He shifts, climbing into the bed and pulling her against his chest.

He always holds too tight, as if terrified she will shatter. His face buried itself in the crook of her neck, his cold nose pressing against her pulse.

"I’m sorry," he breathed against her skin, voice cracking just once, a fracture in the monster’s mask. "I’m sorry for the hurt. But we are eternal now, elskan mín. We are eternal."

"No."

He spat the word out. Vidar looked at the woman standing in the gloom, her chest rising and falling with breath that belonged to her, not him. He could not make himself the executioner of the only thing that had ever looked at him like he worthy.

The roots of Ytunnafǫll, The Nameless One, merely exhaled.

"A dog," the voice grated, echoing inside Vidar’s skull. "A loyal, toothless dog. You refuse the crown? You refuse the blood? Then you are no wolf of the North. You are a pet."

The entity shifted, a mass of rot and old timber leaning closer.

"You wish to keep her? Keep her. But you will not walk as a man to do it. If you lack the stomach for the price of a King, you shall pay the price of a beast."

Pain, sharp and blinding, exploded in his face.

There was no ceremony. An invisible thumb pressed into his left eye socket and pushed. The eye burst with a wet pop, a jelly of sight and blood running down his cheek.

"One eye for the mother you abandon to silence," the voice sneered.

Then, his bones began to sing. His spine cracked, bowing violently. His jaw unhinged, snapping forward, elongating into a muzzle of jagged bone. Vidar tried to scream, but the sound tore into a growl. Black fur, coarse as wire, erupted through his skin, shredding his clothes. He fell to all fours, his humanity draining away into the damp earth, leaving only the massive, panting bulk of a Shadow-Wolf.

But the God was not without a twisted sense of humor. A piece of bone, carved with a single rune, dropped on the ground.

"Hang this above her door. Inside, you may play at being a man. Outside, you are mine."

---

Now.

The forest is a grave of ice and pine.

Vidar does not think of Ljót. He does not let the image of his mother – tongueless, waiting in the Hornfast for a son who will never come – surface in his mind. He drowns it in the sensory overload of the wolf.

The wind smells of resin and dying winter. The snow crunches under paws the size of dinner plates. He is massive, a monstrosity of black muscle weaving through the white drifts. His left eye is gone, the socket a pit of weeping shadow that never heals, but his right eye burns with a pale, frantic intelligence.

Hunger is a constant ache in his belly, but the need to provide is stronger.

He tracks the scent of a hare for miles. When he catches it, his jaws snap shut. The fragile ribcage giving way with a crunch that satisfies the beast’s instinct. The warm blood floods his mouth.

He turns back. The sun is sinking, and the cold begins to bite through even his thick coat.

The hut appears through the trees, smoke drifts from the chimney. Above the door, the bone rune swings in the wind, clattering against the wood.

Vidar approaches the threshold. He slows, his massive body tense. This is the price he pays every day.

He steps under the rune.

His biology reversing itself in seconds.

He collapses onto the rough wooden floorboards of the hut, his body convulsing. There is a sickening sound of wet tearing as the black fur retracts into his skin. His snout cracks and recedes, teeth dulling from fangs to human molars. His spine snaps straight.

He lies there for a long moment, gasping, naked and shivering. Steam rises from his skin, smelling of wet dog. He is a man again – scarred, missing an eye, his face a ruin of old birthmarks and fresh blood.

He pushes himself up on trembling arms. His mouth is smeared with the raw blood of the hare he still clutches in one human hand. He looks wild, pathetic, and terrifyingly devoted.

Vidar does not care about his nakedness; he cares only that he is within reach of her.

"I... caught it," he rasps. His voice is a broken ruin, unused to forming words after hours of growling. The stutter is there, faint, born of the pain of the shift. "F-for us."

He drops the dead, bloody hare at her feet and kneels, pressing his heavy head to her thigh. He closes his single eye, shuddering as the human cold settles into his bones. Waiting, desperate for her hand to touch his hair and tell him he is not a monster.