Hours passed.

Grandfather Runar shared with Jorfr many a tale, none of which were recorded in tomes or scrolls that he could conceivably get his hand on; some hidden away in Fryg’s private possession, others lost altogether to all besides the memory of the ice witch.

His voice and form had both nearly faded by the end.

“Ah… It seems that our time has passed. One last tale, then: In bitter spite at that which the Smoke Witch took from us, Fryg all but banned our clan’s practice of ancestor-summoning. You, my dear Jorfr, know not the magnitude of your achievements; to reclaim the arts without a teacher or the collective knowledge of millenia, armed with sheer grit alone. A shaman, you are not. A berserker, you are not. What you are, my dearest grandson…”

The fading spirit reached backwards, through the glacierglass entombing his body, and pulled a ring from his own finger. It meant nothing on its own; a golden band. Its meaning was assigned at the moment Runar’s ghost passed it to Jorfr, a gleaming coat of glacierglass encasing the ring as it was passed from grandfather to grandson.

“Is Sagaborne. Go. Bring honor to us all.”

For a brief moment, as the ring’s ice-cold band tightened around Jorfr’s finger, he saw the form of each and every honored ancestor standing before him. All the way at the back, a formless, faceless figure bearing a spear towered over them all.

“We shall watch over you, always.”

Later in the day, after Jorfr’s return, he and Merete took Zef aside for a little while. When she returned, she came bearing a bottle completely covered in seals; seals with eldritch symbols written in black ink that glittered with silver particles.

“The Witch’s Vitae Elixir, for tomorrow. Jorfr figured that antediluvian glyphs could stabilize it without having to rely on the Essentia-Counterforce Reaction, and turns out he was right. It’s as concentrated as we could get it, so you’ll get a real kick out of the one permitted dose,” Zef said, holding the bottle out. The agreement to both use one dose of pre-battle elixir was seemingly just an assumption of holmgang, as had become clear to her when she spoke to Merete in private.

Zel smiled, taking the bottle and looking it over: “Promising. We’ll need to figure out the exact limitations of them to see how effectively they could be turned to mass-production. Just imagine every Newman Sect cultivator being able to use elixirs that would otherwise need to be prepared right before use…”

She turned it around in her hand. The glyphs’ unreadability nevertheless captivated her attention, and despite being completely sealed, the elixir’s spices were so strong that their scent still lingered about the bottle.

“Probably won’t work for true mass-production given that I have to be personally involved, but I’m sure we can figure something out. I could just really lean into eye-carving, maybe use the beam to blast the ink right onto seal-paper stock in some overly violent version of transfer paper. Who knows. The glyphs being utterly inscrutable will certainly help secure them from being copied at least.”

“We’ll see. I ought to stop looking past the mountain before I’ve scaled it.”

The morning of battle dawned.

Tens of thousands of Boreans gathered.

The venue was none other than the self-same place where our heroes had watched Borean show-fighting mere days prior; the Ginnungagap Arena. The word “Ginnungagap” was tentatively translatable as “Void” or “Abyss”. It related to the Fog-sea’s alternate interpretation in Borean creation myth, specifically the state it was thought to have even before the emergence of the Dead Gods; a primeval, tranquil emptiness.

“Why call it Ginnungagap?” Zel had wondered when they’d come here before, but now, standing in the arena while it was nearly completely empty, she understood. It truly did feel like a yawning, tranquil void, with seats for a small city’s entire population and enough space in the middle to count as a battlefield should that much space be needed. It felt like the Arches Amphitheater if it had been reconstructed in full. The place was lit by gigantic natural quartz pillars that had been turned into lightgems, arrayed to line up with stairways so that they would obscure vision as little as possible.She tossed two bronze pills into her mouth; she’s learned that the Boreans were surprisingly lax about such things outside of performance enhancers that were both high-impact and common enough to have been a problem in the past, meaning something as relatively subtle as her pills wouldn’t even register. She also had the backup of being able to argue that she couldn’t afford to miss a dose, making it Rikke’s problem that she had challenged Zel to begin with.

While the place filled up, members of both the Hulson and Ramdall clans both gathered in the rows closest to the arena. Soon enough, the Ginnungagap’s myriad seats had nearly been filled and mere minutes remained until the first round of two holmgangs.

Somewhat disappointingly, though not surprisingly, the Boreans did not use wax cylinders, mnemonic recordings, or essentech loudspeakers. Instead, individuals with inhumanly powerful voices would belt at volumes easily matching machinery while a wide variety of drums as well as gigantic standing lyres would provide percussive music with a droning backing track. Well before it all truly started, they were already at it, a droning sound echoing. To the rather obvious distaste of those Ramdalls who were present, as well as some others, it was a lament. Huge, pot-bellied men, obviously members of the Bjorn clan, howled out eerily tonal vocals.

Incredibly stretched out for the performance’s sake though it was, Zel did understand some of the lyrics: “Mighty Wide-wuth has laid down, never to rise again. He, strong of limbs and perfect of body! Slayer of wickedness, who brought mighty Eisengeist to heel! Wide-wuth has died, and forevermore, all Borea shall mourn!”

Just these few lines were stretched out over several minutes, but it didn’t drag. It transitioned to songs of another hero, this time from the Ramdall clan, proving that even they could produce great individuals, though something about the verses of that dirge felt as though it had been written far longer ago than Wide-wuth’s.