Skuld enters the abandoned fortress of Stromvik on the solstice, searching for the truth behind the missing cattle and the whispered legend of a window that should never be seen through.
Vargheim Fortress had stood above the fjord long enough for the stone to learn every winter storm by name. It never looked welcoming, but on this night it looked awake. Wind worried at the broken battlements, and salt damp clung to the walls like breath on glass.
Skuld crouched beside the low fire in the chief hall, flexing her cold fingers until the pain came back. Around her, the others waited in silence. Gunnar sat with his axe across his knees, broad-shouldered and still as carved oak. Eirik wore a crooked half-smile that never quite hid his nerves. Halldis, who could gut a fish faster than most men could draw a blade, kept checking the doorway as if she expected something to step through it.
The village had spent the past weeks counting losses. First the storms, then the cattle gone missing from the outer pens, and after that the whispers. Shapes in the fog. Footprints that stopped at the old fortress of Stromvik. A figure seen near the ruins after dark, tall enough to unsettle the men who claimed fear was for children and skalds.
Skuld had heard the stories about ghosts, but she had grown up on her father’s words. The worst dangers usually had names. Faces. Hands.
Still, the solstice was not a night for reason alone.
The old ones said Stromvik held an ancient window hidden in its heart, a narrow opening framed with runes no one could read now. Look through it on the solstice, and it would show you what had been lost. Or what was coming. Most dismissed that as drinking talk meant to keep young fools from wandering into the ruins. Skuld had meant to do exactly that anyway.
She rose, tugged her cloak tighter, and moved for the door.
Gunnar caught her arm. "Are you certain?"
Skuld met his gaze. The question was simple. The answer was not.
She nodded once, and that was enough.
They crossed the moor in a wall of fog so thick it seemed to swallow the sound of their feet. By the time the dark bulk of Stromvik emerged ahead of them, the fortress looked less abandoned than waiting. Its great gate groaned when Halldis forced it open, and the smell inside was cold stone, rust, and something older beneath it.
Their torches threw shaky light across empty chambers, fallen beams, and walls marked with damp streaks like tears. At last they found the window.
It was narrower than Skuld had imagined, no wider than a spear’s reach, set deep into the stone and ringed with carvings worn almost smooth. The runes around it caught the torchlight in strange, broken lines. Eirik stepped closer first, peering at the glass.
Then the light on the other side moved.
Not a reflection. Not a trick of flame.
Something shifted behind the pane, and a shape gathered there, thin and too tall to be human. Gunnar drew a sharp breath. Halldis went perfectly still. Skuld lifted her torch higher, and the shadow leaned nearer, as if it had been waiting for her to arrive.
A whisper brushed the dark behind them.
"You must not look through that window..."
Skuld turned so fast the torch shook in her hand. No one was standing in the doorway.
But in the glass, the shadow had already begun to turn back toward them.