The Danish marsh was not a land; it was an open corpse that refused to finish rotting. Under a sky the color of an ancient bruise, a thick, yellowish mist clung to the stagnant water. It didn't float; it adhered to the surface like cooled tallow, exhaling a stench of sulfur and decomposed memories. It was the fetid breath of a world that had ceased breathing eons ago, yet whose heart, somewhere deep within the sludge, still beat with an obscene, convulsive life.
Beowulf moved through it. Every motion was a declaration of war against geology. His boots of boiled leather sank into a hungry, black mud, a silt so dense it gargled with every step, like the death rattle of a drowning man whose chest was being trampled. He was no longer a man. The lineage of mortals had been extinguished in him the day the runes of Asgard were hammered into his blood. He was a monument of knotted muscle, a three-meter-tall titan whose skin, tanned by the salt of storms and the iron of battles, bore the stigmata of a thousand divine lacerations.
Around him, the landscape seemed sculpted by a demented god. The dead trees no longer resembled wood. Their trunks were twisted like deformed spinal columns, their naked branches reaching toward the gray sky like skeletal fingers petrified in a final cry for mercy. The bark had the texture of dried skin stretched over millennial bones. In some places, clusters of reddish moss dripped from the branches, reminiscent of blood clots suspended in the stale air.
The air itself weighed on his shoulders. It was thick, saturated with invisible ash. Every breath Beowulf took was a burn, an intrusion of dust and death into his giant lungs. He was a siege engine designed for extermination, yet even he felt the oppressive weight of this place.
Suddenly, the world froze in a supernatural stasis.
The croaking of the marsh frogs, which had been tolling like a distant bell, cut off sharply. The wind, which made the dry reeds moan, snapped into stillness. A mineral silence, almost solid, descended upon the swamp. Beowulf stopped. He didn't reach for a weapon; his hands, broad as shields, were his only instruments of justice. He closed his eyes, his jaws clenched so tight his teeth ground together with the sound of crushed stone.
He felt the pressure rising at the base of his skull. There, beneath the occipital bone, Odin's runic mark flared, not with a protective light, but with the searing incandescence of red-hot iron.
The Vision.
The darkness behind his eyelids exploded. It wasn't an image that appeared, but a golden agony that devoured his nervous system. A colossal eye, a vortex of stellar fire and angry nebulae, opened in the vastness of his mind. It was the Eye of the One, the All-Father, the Great Architect who sees every atom but feels no mercy for the flesh.
— My Hound, rumbled a voice that was not human.
It was not a sound that traveled through the air, but a vibration of screaming metal crashing against the marrow of his bones. Beowulf felt his vertebrae crack under the weight of this presence. He was forced to his knees in the slime, his immense body struggling not to collapse under the divine will.
— In the depths of this filth, an heresy has declared itself, resumed Odin's voice, cold as the void between galaxies. Grendel. An aberration who has forgotten his place. He no longer contents himself with devouring the souls of the lost; he is sculpting reality in his own image. He has dared to tap into the roots of Yggdrasil to feed his delusion of a throne.
Images struck Beowulf like lightning bolts: a palace of white marble emerging from the mud, corpses fused into the walls to form friezes of pain, and at the center, an ebony silhouette, long and spindly, whose claws scraped the ground awaiting its hour.
— Bring me his head, Hound. Extinguish this spark of rebellion before it consumes the labyrinth of the world. Go, and tear down his pride.
The Vision withdrew as violently as it had appeared. Beowulf remained panting, a single tear of blood running from his left eye to lose itself in the thick beard framing his stone-like face. The pain still pulsed, a constant reminder that he was but an extension of Asgard's will, a tool to be shelved when blunt, or broken when useless.
He stood up, his titanic silhouette dominating the dead trees. On the horizon, where the mist was thickest, a glow of pure white, almost unbearable, began to pierce through. The Labyrinth.
He resumed his march, faster this time. Each stride kicked up sprays of black mud. He did not fear Grendel. He did not fear death. He only feared the moment the pain in his skull would stop, for that would mean he no longer held any utility for the One-Eyed God.
As he ventured deeper, the marsh began to surrender to the stone. The transition was visceral. The mud gave way to calcified earth, and the skeletal trees were replaced by pillars of white marble that seemed to grow out of the ground like cystalized tumors.
This was the intersection of worlds. The place where the organic rot of the earth met the cold, geometric perfection of the divine. Beowulf could feel it in the air, the scent of ozone and old dust. Grendel was near. The Architect was waiting in his garden of bone and marble.
Beowulf flexed his fingers. His shadow stretched long across the white stone, a jagged, dark blotch on a canvas of impossible purity. He was the Hound, and he had found the scent of his prey.