Chapter 1 – The Weight of Nine Seconds

Don’t look up. That is the only rule of the inverted fjords that actually keeps you alive.

My boots slide on the black ice of the market square, breath tearing from my lungs in ragged, white plumes. The sky above is a shattered expanse of bruised purple, held together by the faintly glowing threads of rune-bridges. If you look up, you remember that millions of tons of ocean are suspended directly over your head, waiting for a single lindworm to fail. I keep my eyes on the dirt. I shove past a merchant peddling frost-bitten apples and slam a jagged piece of slate onto the counter of a desperate-looking jarl.

"Three days," I tell him, keeping my voice pitched low, smooth, entirely certain. "The sky-bridge above your estate fractures in three days. This rune will anchor it. But it costs twenty silver pieces, and I don’t barter."

The jarl’s hands shake. He doesn’t know the slate is just river-stone painted with ground glow-moss. He only knows the world is ending, and I am selling him a lifeline. He dumps a leather pouch of coins onto the ice. I sweep it into my cloak and pivot, diving back into the throng of scavengers before the moss loses its charge. Survival is a game of velocity. If you stop moving, the past catches up.

The real prize isn’t the silver. It’s the jarl’s tent, now left unguarded in his panic.

I slip through the heavy mammoth-hide flaps. The air inside is thick with myrrh and the sharp ozone tang of a containment ward. In the center of the rug sits a pedestal, and on it rests the aurora egg. It is the size of a fist, swirling with trapped, violent green light—the literal distillation of the sky’s last nine seconds before the cataclysm. The ward surrounding it is a blood-rune, designed to incinerate any living tissue that crosses the boundary. A flawless defense, if you believe in absolute rules.

I don’t. I am a forger. I know that blood-runes track the heat of a pulse.

I pull a small vial of corpse-root sap from my belt and pour it over my right hand. The cold is immediate and agonizing. My skin turns a sickly, bloodless blue. The pulse in my wrist stutters, then goes entirely numb. Dead flesh. I thrust my hand straight through the shimmering red ward. The magic ripples, confused, searching for a living thief, but finds only cold meat. My fingers close around the egg. It is horrifyingly heavy, vibrating with the trapped kinetic force of the apocalypse. I yank it back, shove it deep into my satchel, and slip out the back of the tent just as the feeling begins to violently burn its way back into my nerves.

I make it exactly thirty paces into the crowded bazaar before the temperature drops.

It isn’t the ambient, biting chill of the fjord. This is a predatory freeze. It sucks the oxygen straight out of the air. The chaotic roar of the market dies instantly. Hundreds of people—cutthroats, thieves, and hardened scavengers—press themselves flat against the ice walls, creating a wide, empty corridor.

I am suddenly standing alone in the center of a very silent circle.

He stands at the end of it. Eirik Var.

He is in his adult human form, though he moves with the coiled, heavy grace of the lindworm he truly is. Broad shoulders clad in scarred leather, silver-blonde hair whipping in the unnatural wind he brings with him. He doesn’t draw a weapon. He doesn’t have to. The collective terror of the crowd amplifies his silence. He takes a slow step forward, the ice fracturing beneath his heavy boots like gunfire.

I grip the satchel. Run. My instincts scream it. But my feet are cemented to the frost.

His collar is open, revealing the expanse of his chest and throat. Where a human would have skin, jagged patches of dark iron scales map his flesh—the permanent, calcified price of shifting forms and holding up the ocean. They are dull, lifeless, completely devoid of sensation.

But it’s the carving on the largest scale over his collarbone that paralyzes me.

Thợ rune can carve memories into a lindworm’s iron scales to lend them sensory flashes. Most carve the warmth of a fire, or the taste of mead. But on Eirik’s chest, deeply etched into the iron, is a single word. Skaal.

The breath punches out of my lungs. A phantom stench of burning pine and charred flesh hits the back of my throat, so violently I nearly choke. Skaal. The coastal village that burned to the ground ten years ago. The village that was wiped off every map.

My village. The home I ran from, the name I buried so deep I thought I’d forgotten how to read it.

Eirik closes the distance. The absolute lack of heat radiating from his body is a physical weight. He doesn’t look at my face. He looks down at my hands. My right hand is still trembling from the corpse-root sap, but my fingertips are stained dark with fresh forging ink.

I look back at the scale on his chest.

The horror doesn’t come from seeing the name of my dead home. The horror hits when I look closer at the rune itself. I know the stroke of that chisel. I recognize the slight, imperfect leftward slant of the second line, a flaw in the lettering.

I didn’t just survive the burning of Skaal. I know exactly whose fake, forged navigation-runes sent Eirik’s fleet in the wrong direction, dooming them all to the fire just so I could escape.

Mine.