Hadding shifted from side to side growing more restless as time moved on.

“We should attack now,” he said, eyeing the sky just coming into the first colors of the morn.

Halvar grunted as his response. Boy had said the same thing nigh onto a dozen times now. Surely he felt vulnerable going into battle without shifting into a beer.

Cnut looked just as vexed but the Thane's ire stemmed from the slaughter Halvar had put an end to.

It had taken most of the night and a few cracked skulls but the Hastings were now in line, most putting out fires and 100 or so joining their Jarl. The Wodanar survivors were few, maybe a third of their number accepting imprisonment. The rest had been slain or ran off into the wood and unforgiving night inviting a far worse fate than death.

The order to end the raid had been like ash in Halvar’s mouth. Arvid, Saxa, and their mist-cursed daughter had brought this down on their people. They’d broken faith and took his mind, played with it like some fucking toy! Vengeance was his right and those it fell upon were more deserving than even the Vargr Tribe. Any Jarl would have them dead or slaves. It’s what a man and Jarl did when wronged but it would have them all dead. The churning in Halvar’s stomach promised him as much.

It was prescience insight, an unmistakable knowledge of the future. With the surety of his own name, Halvar knew slaughtering the Wodanar would be as putting the sword to his own people. He knew not how or why. Food was scarce and after killing so many, treachery was all but certain, still, worse awaited them all down that path.

“We have more shifters,” Hadding persisted. “Why not use our strength to end this?”

All eyes were on Halvar. What could he even tell them, that the runes covering the great hall's massive doors were spelled? The ice covering it might as well have been iron with the magin coursing through it. But the runes would lose strength in sunlight as they were powered by vaettir, so they had to wait.

Gry, sleeping after expending so much of her magin, hadn't even known. Halvar knew though, but admitting so would be the heights of unmanliness.

Syn had been a sorcerer and like it or not her climax had flooded Halvar’s mind just as Gry’s had. But where the Völva gave him hints of what lay beyond his grasp, Syn plunged him into the depth of the beyond.

With one look Halvar recognized the runes covering Skorradalr’s great hall. Jötunn runes calling on the power of Niflheim mist spirits. And such beings were everywhere as that world's mist choked Midgard for a thousand years.

The revelation had Halvar wishing for a barrel of mead to wash it all away but still more came. The worst so far had been of his own nature.

Aslaug had bound a troll to him, telling him so only when its power manifested, but she hadn't told him the price.

Upon seeing her body, a vision came to him, one of Aslaug in her youth calling on the power of the other worlds.

Like a cruel vaettir, the sight forced him to watch as she spent her youth. The whole time a man eyed her, the late Jarl Alfdan, Halvar’s own father, without a shred of care. And of course, the sight revealed the kind of man he truly was.

It was like Halvar had become his father, feeling Alfdan’s chest as he breathed and the clattering of Aslaug’s teeth as he struck her. Halvar felt himself scream threats, choke her, cut her. It had been he who broke her, but she’d found her revenge in time.

“End this,” Alfdan whimpered.

His mouth remained closed as he spoke, the plea for mercy coming from his very soul, tied to the floor by streams of shadows. His body resided on a bed of furs. Sunken cheeks, paled skin. Halvar remembered this time, the week before his father died.

Aslaug smiled as Alfdan failed to hold back a whale of agony. Teeth and claws poked out of the chains holding his soul. They tore away at his ethereal flesh spilling not quite blood into the astral realm.

“This will end, Jarl, but in many days to come,” Aslaug grinned, all signs of the girl she’d been gone. “You’ll feed me body, keep me alive long enough to see your son become a man.”

Alfdan pressed forward, some strength still left in his weathered soul. “Do not touch my son, Witch!”

Aslaug chuckled. “Halvar is a good boy and will be a better man. He knows to respect and fear his Völva. Naught shall befall him.”

The Völva raised a knife, the same blackened fang she’d be murdered for years later. With a swing of the blade, another biting chain snaked around Halvar’s mouth. No, Alfdan! It was so hard to tell.

The door to the room opened, a boy’s head peeking through.

“Will-will father live?” the boy asked, his voice breaking.

Aslaug strode close, placing a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I don’t know the god’s plan for the Jarl, but I will do what I can.”

Alfdan roared, the chain cutting into his mouth but he cared naught for the pain. “Get the fuck away from my son!”

“Have you gone mist mad?” Hadding asked.

Halvar immediately blinked away the vision. Troll shit! When had it even started and why was everyone looking at him?

“What?” Halvar demanded

“You shouted at nothing about not touching me!” Hadding exclaimed. “Has that Völva’s trench poisoned your mind?”

In a way, it had, Gry, but most of all Syn with her sorcery. It was all too much. The sight, magic, Halvar wanted none of it. With the troll he could forget, engender some measure of peace in battle, but the sun now fully graces the sky with its dulled light through the mist.

Already Halvar could hear the ice surrounding Skorradalr’s hall cracking. Soon he would be in battle once more where he could forget.

Halvar ignored his bewildered son, addressing Cnut. “Man the battering ram. We attack now.”

An hour later and the resoundimg bang of the ram still echoed. 20 men at a time swung the felled tree while more jammed stakes into the doors and pulled. Halvar wished to be there too. Working his muscles was the next best thing to battle but Gry had woken and now sat with him on the battlements far out of earshot of anyone save ghosts.

Halvar ran his finger through his hair as if to claw out his brain. “I see too much,” he said as the landscape changed.

Another fucking vision, this one filling Skorradalr with hundreds of men and women, blue and gray-skinned, eyes milky like those of corpses, and the shortest of which was a head taller the Halvar.

They were jotnar, the ones whose home men now called their own. Halvar thought or hoped the devourers of myth were at most vaettir, but they were too real now. Just another truth to plague his dreams as he could see many feasting with whole limbs in hand, human limbs.

Gry shrugged. “What could be so terrible-”

“Aslaug killed my father. More than kill. She devoured his soul.”

The silence that followed felt harsher than any outburst of refusal but by the shock of Gry’s face; she hadn't known.

“The man deserved whatever she did,” Gry said.

So she knew what he'd done. Did Alsaug tell her or did Gry see the past as he did?

“I know, but I don't want to. Take the sight from me.”

Gry looked like she thought him just as mad as everyone else. “I can't take the sight. You have to control it or…” She wavered.

Or it would fade in time as long as he refused to touch her. That seemed apt to suicide as Halvar was still prone to going feral. Without Gry he'd cease to be human, likely this very day.

So he'd have to live it.

Halvar blinked and the world dulled to one overflowing with shadow. He blinked again and was in a hall of gold sitting at the head of a table reaching on and on, never-ending and covered in the most lavish of meats and fish, fruits and vegetables. Again his eyes closed and opened to a white wolf racing across the sky, its massive jaws biting down on the moon.

Halvar chuckled. “I don't even know what I'm seeing most of the time.”

“Neither do I,” Gry said laughing with him. “But don't tell anyone. A Völva is supposed to know all.”

A clattering stole Halvar's next words bringing his attention to the great hall's entrance. The massive doors opened, scraping away ice as they went.

“Less time than I would have thought,” Gry said.

Halvar stood and drew the sword on his hip. “No. It opened on its own. Arvid is inviting us.”