Duskfire Glacier hel kallar. við svörum.

@Faust — backdated to one hour after the gods call your name

an hour. long enough for the bleeding to slow. long enough for blackfell to watch gjalla breathe—and to feel something in him break.
he is not calm when he leaves the den.
he is not whole.
shoulders heaving, eyes hollowed out and burning red. snow clings to him, but melts too fast. heat pours from his skin like a furnace. the glacier is still blood-wet in his mind. gjalla’s breath—ragged. her voice, thin. her body, broken. blackfell walks alone at first. down from the cliffs, where darukaal's warmth cannot reach. the cold bites harder here.
he stops only once—outside faust’s den. with me. his voice is low, hoarse from the scream he gave the gods earlier. and he turns, expecting the bastard to follow.
they go north, where the ice thins into skeletal trees. where shadows hang like nooses between bare branches. at last, the land opens. a rotted tree stump, blackened and dead, jutting from the earth like a bone. carved into its face is a crooked rune—hel’s mark. the dauðavættur.
he drops the raven that had been clenched in his jaws, seeping with blood. small, limp, caught on the way. it hits the snow with a thud, cold and lifeless. it is blackfell's rageheld voice that breaks the silence. my wife nearly dead. but he lives. it cannot be. his voice is cold. shaking with wrath too vast to hold. hel takes death. always. this is so she takes his. not ours.

the silence is long. endless. only the soft rasp of his breath, the low rise of cold air curling around his paws. it gathers in his lungs, sharp as bone. he watches the raven bleed into the snow like ink—too small a price. far too small.
gjalla had screamed.
the memory is there, beneath his ribs. carved. her voice cracking like ice, her body thrown against the stones. the way she looked at him. not even like she knew him.
he had not touched her. had not dared. even now, an hour later, his limbs shook with the restraint.
he lifts his head slowly.
then we give hel more, he says. voice low. hoarse. edged with something dangerous. if she wants him, she’ll have to choke on his bones.
his green eyes meet his cousin’s.
no man mutilates a woman beneath my roof and lives.
a pause. then— we do this right. no screaming. no mercy. we take his name from his flesh. carve every crime into his spine. then, when he begs for hel’s door— he breathes, —we close it.
his tail lashes once behind him. the air tastes of blood and pine rot.

blackfell does not look at him right away. his eyes stay fixed on the stump, the pooling blood, the sacrifice already given and the promise still owed. the silence between them is not peace—it is judgment, old and heavy as the gods themselves. his voice, when it comes, is worn raw at the edges.
you know nothing of our heritage, he says, not as insult, but fact. you are a bastard. a wildling. cut off from the weight of our gods and the truth of our blood. but this changes tonight.
he turns then, eyes locking onto his cousin’s with a heat that smolders beneath the cold.
tonight, you've proven you are not like your traitorous father, nor the ones who crawl from his shadow. you did not flinch. you stood beside me.
his breath is smoke in the cold, chest rising slow with the force of the promise he is about to give.
complete this ceremony, and i will tell you everything. the truth of your bloodline. with those words, he turns back to the altar, gaze returning to the rune carved deep into the rot of the stump, the stain that marks them both now.
this is the helblót. sacrifice to hel. then blackfell recites the ceremony instructions to faust—quietly and harshly, each word a thread binding him to the rite, to their blood, to the gods watching in silence. when he finishes, his tone drops low. final.
now we kneel. we give her what she’s owed.

faust does not hesitate.
his knees touch the snow like stone, hard and certain, the cold biting into his joints like a warning—but he welcomes it. his head bows, not in shame, not in submission, but in reverence. in understanding.
he listens.
blackfell’s words cut true. deeper than blood, deeper than any wound he’s ever taken. bastard. wildling. truth.
he accepts it.
the weight of the rite settles over his shoulders like a cloak of iron, unfamiliar but not unwelcome.
he has lived his life outside the old ways, stumbling through the dark with only instinct as his guide. but now—now, the path is lit. carved into flesh and snow.
his voice is quiet. not meek. not small.
but anchored.
i offer what is owed.
he lifts his eyes to the rune, to the bloodstained stump. to the gods unseen.
not for favor. not for mercy.
a breath, ragged. solid.
for justice.
faust closes his eyes.
for gjalla.

blackfell kneels in submission and in silence. in recognition. his muzzle presses to the stump, stained and scarred, carved by crownore teeth. blood pools beneath it, from the warm body of the raven. his fangs close around the inside of his foreleg and tear.
the wound is shallow, but it bleeds. it drips to the ground in slow rivulets, soaking into the cold beneath them like ink into parchment. the earth drinks. he takes the raven—limp, bled—and presses it down with his forepaws. he digs. claws scrape into the frost-hardened earth. the soil resists, but he does not stop. he drives deeper, until the bones of the bird are swallowed in a hollow beneath the dauðavættur.
then, only then, does he close the earth with his own paws.
he lifts his head, blood dripping from his muzzle, his wound still warm. crimson eyes burn as they find the carved rune of hel once more.
his breath rasps through the cold.
and then—
hel kallar. við svörum. their voices join in a monotone chant.

his body is a sculpture of frostbitten stone—unyielding, weather-worn, carved by years of discipline and the colder years before that. he does not flinch at the cut, does not blink at the blood. when his cousin bites deep, he follows without hesitation, his own teeth pressing into the thick hide of his leg, drawing forth a line of red that seeps, drips, falls.
the ritual is older than their fathers, and yet it flows through faust’s veins like marrow. blackfell digs, and he watches. not with awe, not with reverence—but with grim, resolute certainty. this was no prayer. this was contract.
as the raven disappears into the hollowed earth, faust feels the pull of something unseen tighten around them—like the hands of the dead resting upon their backs.
blackfell chants first.
and then—
hel kallar, faust echoes, voice like gravel. við svörum.
their voices fold together. not in harmony, but in binding. in weight. the chant is not beautiful. it is not meant to be. it is an answer, an oath sworn through blood.
when silence returns, faust does not move. he stares at the rune, carved deep into rot and time, and then looks to his cousin—no, his kin. his brother in blood and belief.

red eyes linger upon the stump, on the blood-soaked soil. the silence that follows is not peace. it’s presence.
then, at last, his eyes shift to faust.
it is done. words that etch coldly into the frost of the long night.
he turns, and it is unceremonious, but weighted with cold. eyes vicious in the cold of the dark. when the war is won, blackfell's voice is cold as shrapnel, all will reveal.

exit BF