Chapter 3 – The Inverted Fjord

We do not wait for the leviathan’s jaws to snap shut.

The moment the temporal shockwave collapses and forward time resumes, Eirik’s hand clamps over my wrist. His grip is iron-cold and absolute. He hauls me sideways, diving straight through the canvas wall of the jarl’s tent just as the abyssal roar shatters the ice of the market square behind us.

"Don’t look back," he snarls, his voice tearing through the chaotic screaming of the crowd. "And don’t drop the egg."

We hit the jagged frost of the lower causeway running. The world is coming apart. Above us, the bruised purple sky is splitting wider, the faint glowing threads of the rune-bridges snapping one by one with the sound of breaking bone. The suspended ocean groans, vast tectonic sheets of black water shifting as the leviathan thrashes against the fragile barrier holding it back. Gravity sickens. Snowflakes stop falling and begin drifting upward, drawn toward the massive tear in the firmament.

I stumble, my boots losing traction as the ground pulls away. The weight of the aurora egg in my satchel suddenly shifts, dragging me upward instead of down.

"The gravity is folding," Eirik says. He doesn’t slow. He doesn’t look back. He uses his sheer mass, the impossible density of his lindworm blood, to anchor us to the shattering ice.

We burst through the causeway gates and into the dead zone—the inverted fjords.

Here, the cataclysm has already won. Vast, black obsidian spires jut downward from the oceanic ceiling, suspended over an infinite drop into white mist. There is no ground. Only floating islands of shattered bedrock, connected by the faint, dying glow of older rune-bridges. It is a graveyard of broken geography.

Eirik drags me onto the first floating stone. It tilts violently under our combined weight. I scramble for purchase, my gloved hands tearing against the sharp edges. I am a forger. I survive in back alleys and crowded markets by reading the angles of desperate men. I do not fight leviathans, and I do not run across falling skies.

I look up. I break the only rule.

Directly above us, the ocean is a swirling, chaotic vortex. The shadow of the leviathan is a massive, shifting blot against the dark water, its colossal scales scraping against the underside of the breaking ice. It is too big for comprehension. The sheer scale of it shorts out my panic response, leaving only a cold, clinical horror.

"Sigrid."

My name, spoken in that subsonic rumble, snaps my focus back. Eirik is standing at the edge of the floating stone, staring across a fifty-foot gap of empty air to the next stable island. The rune-bridge that once connected them is gone, reduced to a few fading sparks of golden light.

"We need to cross," I say, my voice tight. "The egg… the egg’s kinetic charge is unstable. The loop didn’t stop the leviathan, it just delayed it. If the shell cracks—"

"I know," he interrupts. He doesn’t look at the egg. He looks at me. His pale, violent eyes are stripped of the cold calculation from the market. The wind whips his silver-blonde hair across his scarred, iron-scaled neck.

He steps to the absolute edge of the stone.

He reaches up to his chest, to the jagged expanse of iron scales where human skin should be. Where the name of my dead village—Skaal—is etched. His fingers, heavy and precise, trace the line of the forged rune.

"To hold the sky," he says, his voice flat, "a lindworm must surrender sensation. To build a bridge, I must use what is carved into the iron."

He looks back down at me. The ambient temperature around us plunges, the frost riming instantly across his leather armor.

"This is the cost of my survival, forger," he says. "I burn the memory to make the light. The memory vanishes from the world."

He digs his iron-clad fingers into his own collarbone. The sound is horrifying—metal tearing against metal. He rips the scale completely off his chest.

There is no blood. Only a blinding flare of golden light as the forged rune ignites. He throws the glowing scale out over the chasm. It hangs in the air, spinning, then explodes into a narrow, shimmering thread of solid light, bridging the gap to the next island.

"Move," he barks, the sheer force of his command pushing me forward.

I step onto the bridge of light. It holds. But as I run across, the air smells sharply of burning pine and charred flesh. The phantom stench of Skaal burning.

I reach the far side and collapse onto the stone. Eirik lands heavily beside me, the bridge winking out of existence behind him. The gap on his chest where the scale used to be is now a smooth, empty patch of dark iron.

I look at it, my breath tearing raggedly. The forged rune is gone.

"What did you just do?" I ask, my voice shaking.

"I built a bridge," he answers coldly.

"No." I scramble backward, my back hitting a shard of obsidian. The realization hits me with the force of a physical blow. "The memory vanishes from the world. That’s what you said."

I try to picture the coastline where I grew up. The shape of the jagged cliffs protecting the harbor. The color of the moss on the roofs.

Nothing. The space in my mind where the image of my home should be is a smooth, blank void.

"You erased it," I whisper. The horror is absolute. Not just the physical village—that was burned ten years ago. He erased the concept of it. The memory of its existence. "You took the last piece of it."

Eirik looks down at me, his face impassive. The tectonic plates of the world groan around us. The leviathan’s shadow passes overhead, blotting out the dying aurora.

"I bought us time," he says. "But the chasm ahead is wider."

He gestures toward the edge. The next gap is a hundred feet across. Beyond it lies the path to the higher fjords, where the sky is still holding.

"I have no more forged scales," he says, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous rumble. He steps closer, the unnatural cold radiating from his body pressing against me. "But you are a forger. You have the tools. You have the ink."

He crouches in front of me, his pale eyes locked onto mine.

"Carve a new memory into me, Sigrid," he demands softly. "Carve something you are willing to lose forever, or we die on this stone."