⚔️ PROLOGUE
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Silence.
That was all that remained after gods died.
The sky above Ragnar was cracked and bleeding starlight like open veins, streaks of dying constellations dragging themselves across a realm that no longer had a name. The Nine Realms had crumbled—not fallen, not broken, not lost—but ceased. There were no prayers now. No warhorns. No screams. Even fear was gone.
Because there was no one left to feel it.
At the center of all that ruin stood a throne forged of shattered divine bones and blackened world-root—crafted not by hands, but by the aftermath of slaughter. Upon it sat a man drenched in quiet wrath.
His name was Ragnar.
His enemies had once called him the Wolf of Ragnarok. The Godbreaker. The Devourer of Realms.
He did not deny them.
He sat forward slightly, broad shoulders hunched, elbows on his knees as though still carrying invisible chains. White ash clung to the scars across his arms. His hair hung in wild strands, streaked black and silver like storm-torn night. His eyes—once mortal green—now glowed a deep, molten amber, flickering like dying embers refusing to go cold.
At his side rested a weapon pressed lazily into the ground.
A warped, living armament that exhaled faint steam with every nonexistent breath of wind. Black metal wreathed in etched runes twitched now and then, like muscle beneath skin. In some places it was a sword, in others an axe or claw—caught in a form that looked unsettlingly organic. The haft was bound in charcoal leather and chain. The edge shimmered as though reality bent to avoid touching it.
Ragnarokulfr.
The Wolf That Ends Worlds.
A weapon forged from a god-beast's soul. Evolved by devouring pantheons. Howling without sound.
Sometimes, Ragnar wondered if it was still the weapon speaking… or if the howling had become his own spirit echoing back from eternity.
A windless cold drifted through the realm, stirring nothing. There was no soil now—only ash that had once been mountains, empires, and prayers. Ragnar watched it swirl around his boots. The throne beneath him groaned, though not from weight—it groaned like something trapped inside it still struggled in faint divine agony.
He did not look back when footsteps approached.
Not boots. Bare feet. Soft, deliberate, silent.
A woman stepped into view, though she did not speak. Her presence was not mortal—her hair fell behind her in dark braids streaked with crimson, as though dipped in battlefields that still bled in echo. A raven-wing cloak fluttered from her shoulders, though no wind touched it. Her eyes were not the same as they once were; now they shimmered faintly with Valkyric frost and some deeper, soul-born rage.
Eivor.
She no longer bore the face of the hunter girl he grew up with beneath pine trees and fog. She had become something fierce, otherworldly—Valkyrie Queen of the Fallen, resurrected in his wake after Helvotr shattered before his wrath.
Yet when her gaze met Ragnar's, something within the silence inhaled pain.
She did not speak. She merely stood beside him, her posture neither submissive nor equal—something in between, as if bound to him by choice yet burdened by what he had become.
Ragnar did not meet her eyes for long. He wasn't afraid. But some things hurt worse than fear.
He looked instead at his scarred hands.
Calloused. Burned. Cracked.
Hands that once held a farmer's plow.
Hands that once trembled after their first kill.
Hands that later tore open a god's chest and ripped out a beating heart to feed a weapon that roared like a wolf.
A bitter exhale left him. Not quite a sigh. Not quite relief. Not quite regret.
Just emptiness.
"I have done it," he muttered quietly, voice roughened by centuries of war. It was unclear if he spoke to Eivor, to the dead, or to what remained of himself. "They are gone."
When no reply came, he lifted his head. Above, lightning crawled across the broken heavens like dying nerves.
Everything is gone.
And yet… he could still remember.
Not the first time he slew a god. Not the moment he drove Ragnarokulfr through Havi's chest and watched his father die with disbelief in his one remaining eye.
No. He remembered something smaller.
Something filthier. Weaker.
---
He remembered the smell of wet soil after rain.
He remembered his mother's tired voice telling him to tend the fields.
He remembered a girl beside him, swinging a wooden axe at a post larger than her.
"Again," she had said coldly each time he fell.
A raven-blooded foster whose bruised fists looked more like survival than strength.
Eivor, before wings. Before blood. Before destiny.
"Why do you push yourself so hard, farmer boy?" she had asked once.
He had stared at the sky, fists cracked and bleeding.
"Because I refuse to die kneeling."
And then, one night under sacred fires, when a boar-bannered raider tried to drag her away screaming, Ragnar had buried a sickle in the man's throat until his own tears mixed with blood in the dirt.
That was the first time a wolf howled in his soul.
---
The throne moaned faintly beneath him again.
Ragnar slowly tightened his grip on Ragnarokulfr. The weapon stirred, almost expectantly, as though asking:
Is there more to kill?
He stared outward into the void of what used to be worlds. No answer. No gods. No mortals. No fate.
The vengeance was complete. The wolf had eaten the sky.
Yet some fragment inside him still burned—not with wrath, but with a distant, buried ache that even total war had not silenced.
Without turning, Ragnar rasped:
"Do you still see me, Eivor?"
She remained still for several long breaths. Then, softly, her voice brushed the silence like a blade over frost.
"I see the man who once trembled holding a bloodied sickle."
He did not reply.
Because deep within the ash-choked quiet of eternity, Ragnar could still feel that boy staring back at him.
And for the first time since the gods died…
The world felt loud again.