Draugr

Vetrúlfr gazed down at his own reflection in the ice-mirrored snow.

His hair hung damp over his shoulders, heavy as seaweed, and the sword in his hand seemed to pulse faintly with some buried heartbeat; foreign to him, yet tied to his own.

There was something in the hilt that writhed in silence, as if the steel itself had gorged upon a soul.

He let it fall to the snow with a thud. Not out of fear, nor fatigue, but because the weight of it no longer felt like something a living man ought to carry.

His mother, Brynhildr, had always been a woman of silence. But the gaze she now cast upon her son was neither maternal nor human.

She was not gazing upon the boy she had raised, nor the man she had anointed. She was looking past him, towards the sea.

Her lips parted slightly, and her breath clouded in the frost like incense before an altar.