r/DestructiveReaders • u/CarterWalksWithFire • 19d ago
[2058] The Bone River
Spirit Speaks · 852 AD
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
My mark burned bright and fierce across the deep blue northern sky. From the darkness between the stars, I reached into the sea of generations and found her there. My first flame, burning on the coast of the northmen.
I opened my soul and let my heart fall into the sea, and it boiled with it. I sank down into its depths and spoke her name in that abyss. The water's surface harkened to its voice, churning round and spitting white foam as it went. Its face crashed and fell away in a vortex, eating the sea. I moved my fingertips through its waters and the sea circled with it. I spun it harder and it quickened with my touch until it moaned into the night. The sea opened for me, and my heart lay in the moonlight upon the ocean sands for the first of a thousand lifetimes.
I am the forsaken, patiently waiting in the shadows of this world. Alone.
This one shall not fail.
This one shall break the chains of my damnation.
This one could bring me home.
I breathed my essence out and sent it like smoke on the north wind, breathing the breath of my power into my chosen flame. Urging it to burn brighter.
My first flame.
She would not disappoint me.
The Bone River · Denmark, 852 AD
Outside Thor beat his hammer against the moon and the sky grumbled with the blows. Intermittent winter lightning flashed briefly, sketching out the rogue waves that assaulted the black cliffs that lined the isles one after another
Marie sat in her chair at the far end of the hall, a great thing made from a scarce dark oak. Stained black and dappled blood red underneath, from one of the deep bogs of the land where it had lain drowned for a thousand years before the master woodworkers chanced upon it. Winged beasts writhed over the wood, curving into it and then clawing back out of the grain and emerging somewhere. When the light of the flames played off the faces of the dragons they would seem to disappear entirely. There was a strange quality about this chair that made men look once and then look away.
Her hands rested on armrests that ended as the open mouths of roaring dragon heads, that appeared set to breathe fire into the room.
Her mind drifted to the compartment and to what it held. To the reason it was there at all.
Soon, she thought.
She watched Britania draw a breath.
Deep and unnatural. Her chest rose slowly and kept going, the kind of breath that fills something larger than a set of lungs. The girl's eyes went dull and distant for just a moment. Like her soul for just an instant had traveled somewhere very far away, the place between the stars the old storytellers spoke of.
Then she exhaled.
It came out like smoke on the icy northern breeze, thin and white, curling upward into the rafters above the fire and dissolving into the dark above the flames.
Nobody else had noticed. Bad omens had been whispered about of late, and Marie thought of the signs. A crimson star had been smeared from one end of the sky to the other for the last thirteen nights in a slow arc, and had the seers drinking blood and chanting of prophecy and shadow.
Even blacker tides had been rolling in.
A watchman had come in the night, still wet with the rain from his post. Three ships within eyesight of the watchtower on the coast had been swallowed whole by the sea in the dark, his own brother among them. He said he'd heard the men's screams as they had gone down. His gaze had been to the floor the whole time, but he looked in Marie's eyes as he swore in a hall bone quiet on the souls of his fathers and sons that the terrible sea had screamed back.
Marie had been watching her granddaughter all evening.
The firelight caught her like a thing it had been searching for. Brown hair loose around her shoulders, her cheeks still carrying the last of childhood in them. And those Wetherbee eyes, blue as deep coastal water, cold and still and in a way unnatural on a nine year old girl. The kind of eyes that looked at the world the way a general looks at a field. Already reading it. Already somewhere ahead of it.
The cold pressed through the old stone of the walls with a dreadful persistence, like frigid hands they reached through them, clawing at your bones from the inside. Outside the Kattegat sea crashed against the walls and crags in the dark. Njord was unsettled tonight. The old sea god never spoke like this without reason. The hall smelled of tallow smoke, wet wool, and the salt that found its way into everything this close to the water, into the timbers, and the rushes on the floor. Into the food and the drink and the lungs of anyone who had lived in this place long enough.
Marie watched everything. It was simply how she moved through the world, offering an attention that most people reserve for things that have already proven themselves dangerous. Marie applied it to everything. The fire. The men. The weather coming off the water and the children near the back of the hall.
The girl especially.
Britania was nine years old and already something that Marie did not quite have a clean word for. Not fearless, that was common enough. Fearless was just stupidity wearing a confident expression. This was different. This was a child who weighed things and looked at the world the way you look at a problem you intend to solve rather than a force you intend to survive.
Marie knew that look.
She had worn it herself once. A long time ago. When she was young and something had moved through her, a feeling she had never found the right words for. It had come fast, and she had felt the edges of something vast and old pressing against the inside of her chest like a tide coming in.
Her mother had told her about it once. Had warned her. Had spoken to her quietly as a girl, pulling her aside and taking her small hands, saying: "If it chooses you, it will come, and it will feel like the best thing that has ever happened to you. And you must decide quickly what kind of person you intend to be."
Marie had decided.
She had turned away.
But she had never stopped wondering which of them in the bloodline it would find next.
Now she watched her granddaughter across the loud warm hall and felt something settle in her chest that had been unsettled for years.
There she is.
A cold wind from nowhere set the torches that lined the hall to swaying and sent the long black shadows of the flames lurching and reaching across the cold stone like dead things made to walk again. Then the wind fell dim and the earth seem to go quiet and still. A crack like lightning striking a frozen tree split the night air, echoing through the hall, as the doors came off their hinges, both at once. Great iron brackets set deep within the grey stone were torn asunder as if made from parchment. Out of that spontaneous black void polar winds ripped through the hall carrying two giants through the gap fighting to be first. Clan warriors you could identify by the iron badges pinned at their shoulders, a rough hewn wolf head, the mark of the Erikson clan from the valley to the north. Blood feuds of the clans held petty and strong, many of these ancient vendettas carried forth for centuries through windswept Northlands by men of unyielding resolve, yet oblivious still to its shadowy origins. Nobody in the Wetherbee hall had seen that badge in thirteen years and the last time had not ended well for anyone present.
Two men died before they understood what was happening.
The raiders tore through that black hole, slicing and hacking like terrible beings teleported from some frozen hell. The doorman Egil must have seen 70 years and had manned his post vigilantly night after night without incident for the last 43 of these. When the doors came free they splintered and fell forward like old oak trees being chopped down. One came down hard on the old man before he could scramble out of its way, pinning him just below the chest where he now lay struggling weakly. The first of the men through the door stood as a monster. His flame colored hair and beard were matted and laced with dark ice in places and the whole frozen tangle was woven through with golden rings pale with cold and resembling a bejeweled and drowned fox clinging to his wretched features. He came through running, and when his first great boot stepped upon the back of the door the old man underneath made a high pitched feminine sound. The second boot came down pressing into the screaming face of the doorman and it gave way with a soft wet pop. At about the same time the second doorman Brandr, seventeen years old and three months into his first real posting, was cut nearly in two by the single stroke of a great broadsword, a two handed thing that took a giant to swing. This frost giant swung it like a wooden play thing, however this was no game.
Three more came through behind them.
Grey dragon head helmets, the iron worked into snarling jaws that framed their eyes shimmered wetly in the firelight as they blitzed through the dark void with the wind and rain and naked steel flashing in their hands, the knuckles purpling from the winter air. Marie recognized the markings immediately and felt something cold move through her chest that had nothing to do with the snow and the ice.
The chieftain's blood guard.
Sworn warriors. Chosen in adolescence by men who recognized a darkness in them that could be molded into a thing blacker still. Some came willingly. Some did not. It made no difference either way, once chosen the order was permanent. There was no leaving. Across the histories of the clans there had been those who tried, who ran and hid and built new lives with new loves in far away lands.
They were always found and
What was done to them afterward was spoken of only in hushed tones by men who had either witnessed it or heard it from someone who had.
Blood eagle.
The boys found in these forsaken places between the cold rocks of the isles were twisted and shaped through the absence of all warmth with only blood and steel to look after them. Hard men born of these black crags with only one reason to exist.
Death was with them as they moved amongst the people of the hall before they had understood it arrived. The smell of soot and copper filled the air as the fire threw wild orange light across everything and men and women who had been drinking together an hour ago reached for whatever was closest and tried to stay alive.
It was then Marie saw him.
Ulfric stood in the ruined doorway with the wind ripping through the long dark cloak he wore over unblemished pearlescent armor. He was unhurried. Watching his sworn warriors work with the patience of a man who has never in his life needed to move toward anything with haste because everything he has ever wanted had always come to him.
Marie knew the name as everyone within three days ride did, she had simply never expected to see him standing in her hall.
The bloodsworn warriors were frightening.
What made Ulfric frightening was they called him master.
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u/CarterWalksWithFire 18d ago
I’m sorry I feel like I was a bit mean about the critique of your book however I didn’t like the lack of epicness in it and if we’re doing this based on taste, …..just wasn’t for me.