The serpent remained.
Day after day, it circled the mouth of Frostfang's harbor like a dark thought that would not go away. Sometimes it sank below the waves, leaving only oily ripples on the surface. Other times, it surfaced in slow, rolling coils that gleamed slick and barnacled under the pale sun.
And always, its eyes found Frostfang's walls, watching. Measuring. Waiting.
Within those walls, tension coiled tighter with every passing hour. Children were kept indoors, huddled behind shuttered windows. Old men carried knives in their boots as they went about mending nets or hauling barrels of salted fish, their hands trembling but unwilling to appear afraid.
In the great hall, Aldric and his council planned through sleepless nights. Their faces were hollow, voices hoarse with endless debate, but still they clung to each other like the roots of a pine in a winter storm.
Kaelin's hammer lay on the table, a silent promise. Torven sharpened throwing axes until the floor beneath him was littered with curls of metal like iron snow. Rowena's arrows, feathered in white and black, gleamed in neat rows at her side.
Aldric studied the maps until the lines blurred. Every ridge, every channel, every shallow sandbank — he tried to see them as the serpent might.
How would you strike? he asked the creature in his mind. Where would you break us?
But there was no answer, only the slow grind of fear inside his chest.
The Oracle's Voice
On the third night, word arrived that the old witch of Thornridge had come — the same one whose warnings haunted their dreams. She was carried in on a sled drawn by four pale oxen, hunched and wrapped in so many layers of black wool she seemed more spirit than flesh.
They brought her into the war room, and all fell silent. Even the fire seemed to hesitate in its crackling.
The witch's eyes were milky, but behind them burned a spark that made Aldric's skin crawl.
"The serpent is old," she rasped. "Older than your blood. Older than your stone walls. It does not hunger as you know hunger. It remembers."
Rowena shivered. "Remembers what?"
The witch's toothless mouth stretched wide, as if to laugh, but no sound came. Instead, she lifted a hand gnarled as a tree root and pointed to the sea beyond their walls.
"It remembers who once defied it," she croaked. "It remembers the wolves."
Kaelin bristled. "Then let it remember why the wolves endure."
The old woman's eyes glittered. "It will come for your heart, warrior. And if you falter, your people will drown with you."
Then, as quickly as she had arrived, the witch turned and left. Her oxen drew her back into the night, their bells chiming like funeral chimes.
No one spoke for a long time.
The Taming of Fear
In the days that followed, Aldric made a choice. He would not let dread rule them.
He ordered the ballista crews to drill with sharpened quarrels, day and night. Net-makers labored over iron-stranded nets strong enough to bind a warship. Shipwrights fitted the harbor's shallows with fire-traps and weighted chains that could snare even a leviathan.
Kaelin oversaw archers on the high towers, making them shoot until their arms quivered. Torven led small bands of raiders on shallow boats, teaching them to throw harpoons from a rolling deck while the wind tore at their cloaks.
Rowena walked among the children, teaching them old prayers — not of submission, but of courage. Songs of the wolf, passed down from grandmothers who had survived storms and raiders, whose spirits had refused to break.
In the forge fires, weapons glowed like tiny suns. Hammers rang like war-drums.
Frostfang was becoming not only a fortress, but a spear poised to strike.
And in the darkness of his private chamber, Aldric let the doubts come — and then burned them away with the memory of wolves howling in the night.
A Test of the Tides
One dawn, a ship came limping from the south, battered by storms. The survivors told of a second serpent, half the size of the first, traveling in its shadow.
Panic roared through Frostfang like a spark through dry tinder.
Two of them.
Kaelin slammed a gauntleted fist on the table so hard the maps jumped. "Let them come," she snarled. "One or ten, it makes no difference — they will bleed."
But Rowena looked stricken. "How do we fight two?"
Aldric felt the chill of fear, but forced himself to stand straight.
"We adapt," he said. "If they expect fear, we give them fury. If they expect our walls, we meet them on the waves."
Kaelin's eyes gleamed. "A counterattack."
Torven bared his teeth. "Raiders' work."
Rowena hesitated, then nodded. "Then I will go as well. If this is to be the end of us, let me meet it in the open."
Aldric felt something break free in his chest — pride, sorrow, love, all tangled together.
"Then so be it," he declared. "We strike at dusk."
The Salt and the Blood
The harbor was a forest of masts and sharpened spear-points as the sun fell behind the western peaks. The air reeked of pitch, fish oil, sweat, and the copper tang of fear.
Aldric climbed aboard a longship black as a crow's wing, its prow carved into a snarling wolf's head. Kaelin followed, hammer across her back, a giant among men. Rowena took her place near the archers, her bow strung and ready.
Torven stood at the tiller, shouting orders to the oarsmen.
"Steady now!" he barked. "Row like wolves, bite like wolves!"
Drums began to beat, deep and relentless, echoing over the waves.
The ships pushed out past the fire-traps, past the safety of the breakwaters.
And there — in the moonlight — the serpent rose.
A shape the size of a fortress, scales like wet iron, jaws so wide a longship might vanish whole between them. The second serpent coiled at its side, smaller, but no less monstrous.
They watched the fleet come, heads lifting from the waves, eyes cold and ancient.
Then the sea seemed to breathe, and the monsters came for them.
The Dance Begins
Chaos.
Water boiled as the first serpent struck, a tower of scale and muscle smashing down, shattering ships like toys. The wolf-prowed longship rocked violently, and men screamed as the second serpent lunged, its jaws snapping.
Kaelin bellowed, swinging her hammer, striking at the serpent's eye as it swept too close. The blow rang out like a thunderclap, and the beast recoiled with a roar.
Arrows flew in black clouds from the archers, striking deep into the beasts' hides.
Aldric shouted orders, his voice hoarse. "Net its head! Drag it down!"
Torven's raiders hurled harpoons, their ropes tangling around the serpent's coils.
Rowena loosed arrow after arrow, one lodging deep in the smaller serpent's gills, making it thrash wildly and churn the water to foam.
Then the great serpent dove, dragging a dozen ships behind it, ropes straining, men clinging to the rigging as waves slammed over them.
Aldric held on with both hands, the salt spray blinding him, the roar of the sea deafening.
This is death, he thought. This is the end.
But from somewhere in the dark, the voice of the witch came to him: If you falter, your people will drown.
He would not falter.
Into the Heart of the Deep
He leapt from the deck of the ship, blade in hand, straight onto the serpent's barnacled back. His boots skidded on its slick hide, but he caught the ridge of a spine and clung there, heart hammering.
The serpent twisted, roaring, trying to shake him free.
But Aldric crawled forward like a wolf on a hunt, driving his blade again and again into the cracks between its scales, the sea pouring over him until he could barely breathe.
Below, he saw Kaelin leap after him, a streak of iron and fury, her hammer smashing down with the power of a thunder god.
Rowena's arrows still sang, a constant prayer of steel.
And Torven, laughing like a madman, drove his spear into the serpent's eye, blinding it.
Together, they fought not like men and women — but like wolves, unbowed, unstoppable.
The Final Strike
In a final surge of rage and courage, Aldric planted his sword deep into the serpent's skull. He felt the beast shudder, a quake that seemed to reach the bottom of the ocean.
Kaelin struck the wound with her hammer, and with a sound like mountains breaking, the serpent began to sink, its lifeblood pouring out in a black flood.
The second serpent shrieked and fled into the deep, cowed by the pack's fury.
Aldric clung to the dying beast until the last of its thrashing stilled. Only then did he let go, plunging into the freezing sea, rising gasping beside the shattered longships.
Hands hauled him aboard.
Kaelin's face was streaked with blood, but she was smiling.
Rowena sobbed, relief flooding her face.
Torven roared to the sky, defiant.
They had faced the deep.
And they had won.
The Wolves Stand
As dawn broke over Frostfang, the survivors limped home. Their sails were ragged, their ships broken, but their spirit was whole.
The children of Frostfang came running to the walls, crying and laughing as they saw the heroes return.
In the courtyard, Aldric raised his sword, and the people roared their triumph to the skies.
No monster, no god, no sea would ever break them.
They were wolves.
And the wolves still ruled the North.