The sea was not silent, even at night.
Long, slow inhalations that rolled against the shore in whispering waves. Soft at first. Then harsher.
Then quiet again. Like the breath of some ancient creature whose sleep was never truly restful.
Vetrúlfr sat at the edge of the surf, boots half-buried in the sand, the salt spray drying on his skin.
The stars above Vinland were different from the ones over Iceland, over Miklagarðr, over the green cliffs of Ériu. But he had long since stopped expecting familiarity from the skies.
He held nothing in his hands. His sword lay nearby, partially buried in the sand. Just close enough to reach.
But he didn’t touch it.
Behind him, the fires of the new settlement flickered; quiet, muted. The braziers above the timber walls of the first sea-fort glowed in the distance.
Somewhere, a child cried. A forge clanged. A horse whinnied in its pen.
But he heard none of it.
His eyes were fixed on the horizon. On the cold black where the sea ended, and the gods began.
Home, he thought. Though he no longer knew where that was. Iceland? Constantinople? The burial cairn of Basil II? Or Roisin’s arms?
The wet sand shifted behind him.
Only when the voice came, salt-thick, half-drowned, laced with something teasing and terrible, did he move.
"What’s the matter, White Wolf?"
"Do you still fear the sea, even after all the favor I have granted you?"
His jaw tightened. Slowly, he turned.
She stood no more than three paces from the sword he had once fetched from the sea in Greenland.
Not touching it. Not reaching.
Just as she had in Greenland. When he had nearly drowned. When his lungs filled with black water and the cold had taken him... but not quite.
Her skin was the color of glacial ice; blue-tinted, veined faintly like frost across porcelain.
Her black hair clung to her cheek like kelp. Her eyes were pale, almost silver, and far too calm.
Her robes bore the cut of a vanished world, Vendel perhaps elder still, and hung on her as if soaked in centuries.
They smelled faintly of rot and salt and shipwrecks. And yet... she was not unclean.
She was regal. Beautiful... Divine.
"You carry Gramr now," she said, stepping lightly, bare feet leaving no print in the sand.
"Drowned with that fool Sigurd. Reclaimed by your own hand. Blessed by me."
Her voice rolled like waves lapping at a hollow hull. Sweet, and sick with memory.
"And still you fear me?"
She whispered, tilting her head to the sea.
"The one who remade you?"
He narrowed his eyes. "You."
She grinned wider. Not cruelly; but not kindly either. "Me. Or someone like me. Does it matter?"
She moved closer; the wind brushing her hair across her face like ribbons of ink. Her fingers hovered near Gramr’s hilt but didn’t touch it.
"You drowned, Wolf-King. I gave you breath again. You lost your purpose. I returned it. A price was paid... And a bounty given... One you have yet to truly understand."
She leaned down beside him, her mouth nearly brushing his ear.
"You need not fear me, son of Ullr. I once claimed your ships to gain your attention, and now I know it is eternally mine. Haven’t you wondered why you have yet to lose a vessel since you built that grove on Greenland’s shores?
Vetrúlfr’s eyes widened. Just when he was about to interrogate the woman on how she knew all of this, she placed a finger to his lips and evaded the question masterfully.
"Do you want to know what lies further west?" she whispered, soft as surf on bone.
"The sea is watching. She remembers the ships that dared. The men who begged. The gods who drowned."
Then, pulling back, eyes aglow:
"Go on then. Chase your empire. Plant your trees. Build your roads. But don’t forget who made you, Wolf-King. The land may bear your name now... but the sea remembers the old ones."
She touched his cheek with a hand like cold tidewater; so briefly he thought it might’ve been wind.
And when he looked again;
Only seafoam remained. And the distant cry of a gull that had no business flying at night.
He reached for the sword that lay buried. Which the mysterious woman called Gramr.
Almost as if the heart he fed with the blood of those he had slain was Sigurd’s. Was this truly the blade of myth, of legend? If so, it would explain its ancient design.
But if so... Did that mean that woman... who smelled of salt and sea, was actually the sea itself?
The very thought forced shivers down his spine, but they were not chilling, nor were they discomforting.
If anything, they felt like the dainty fingers that once graced his chest in the depths below Greenland’s ice.
He swiftly turned around, pointing his blade behind him. Yet there was nothing there. No maiden, no witch, no spirit, or goddess. Only air.
And yet, he could swear he heard the faintest of giggles in the background. Fleeting, but present.
Vetrúlfr stood there, blade in hand, staring into the dark like a man caught between two shores; one of flesh and fire, the other of salt and shadow.
Behind him, the tide receded. Ahead, the world still turned.
He didn’t move for some time.
Not until the wind shifted, carrying with it the smell of cedar smoke and horse sweat from the camp beyond. The sound of men laughing, clanking iron, sharpening blades.
He sheathed Gramr in silence, the blade humming faintly in its scabbard like a sleeping thing.
And as he walked back toward the walls of his sea-fort, toward the hearth, the war council, he did not look over his shoulder again.
But he did wonder, not for the first time, if the sea ever truly let anything go.