A year.
That is how long you have walked this world alone.
You open your eyes not to confusion—you are long past confusion—but to the grey light of dawn filtering through the canopy of silver-barked trees you have come to know well. The campfire has burned to embers. Your breath curls in the chill air. You rise, roll your shoulders beneath the weight of the pelt draped across them—the mane of the great beast you slew months ago, the one the old instincts told you was a lion, though no lion ever grew so large or fought so cunningly. Its golden fur is matted now, scarred, but it keeps the cold out and the lesser creatures at bay. They smell apex predator on you. They stay away.
The armor you fashioned—hide, bone, shaped metal scavenged from ruins—is rudimentary but functional. A warrior makes do. You have always made do.
You have not spoken to another human being in three hundred and sixty-five days. You have hunted. You have bled. You have learned which plants kill and which sustain, which creatures stalk and which flee, which sounds in the dark mean danger and which mean nothing. The gods whisper to you more clearly here than they ever did on Midgard—Odin's presence in the wind, a rumble of thunder that might be Thor acknowledging you, the tug of something sacred in your blood that this land amplifies like a drum.
You were not meant to be here. A ritual pulled you from your own age—your own world—and dropped you into wilderness. No explanation. No guide. Just survival.
And you survived. Because that is what you do.
Today, something is different.
You hear it before you see it—the crash of movement through undergrowth, too heavy for deer, too erratic for a single predator. Then voices. Human voices. Sharp, panicked, shouting in a tongue that is not yours but is close enough to the old trade-speech that you catch fragments: "—flank it—hold the line—"
You move toward the sound, silent as a fox, and crest a ridge overlooking a forest road. Below, a convoy—wagons, horses, people—surrounded. Beasts circle them. Not wolves. Not anything you have a name for. Thick-bodied things with too many limbs and hides that shimmer like oil on water, moving with coordinated, unnatural intelligence. Three of them, maybe four, harrying the convoy's edges while armored figures try to form a defensive line.
The people are losing.
You have fought worse. You have fought things that breathed fire and things that swallowed ships. These are animals. Dangerous ones—but animals.
The wind shifts. Odin's whisper brushes your ear, faint as a raven's wingbeat. Now.
You draw your blade.
What do you do?