The first thing Erik tasted was salt.
Not the chemical burn of scaffold dust, not the copper of his own blood pooling under collapsed steel salt.
Ocean salt, thick and wrong, flooding his mouth as his body convulsed and ejected a lungful of water onto cold sand.
His hands slapped stone, fingers splayed against surfaces his mind had no name for.
The air scraped his throat raw.
Above him, a man’s silhouette blocked the sun.
Erik’s vision swam.
The figure crouched, water dripping from a braided beard, and tilted Erik’s chin with one calloused hand.
The face was weathered, amused, assessing.
Blue eyes held an extra beat the pause of a predator adjusting its read of prey.
“Where is your boat?” The words were Old Norse.
Erik’s new body understood them before his mind caught up.
He tried to answer.
His throat produced a wet rasp and more seawater.
The man Ragnar, some distant part of Erik’s brain supplied, Ragnar Lothbrok, and that couldn’t be right because Ragnar Lothbrok was a television character and Erik was dying under a beam in Minneapolis stepped back and gestured to someone Erik couldn’t see.
“He’ll drown on land if we leave him.” The voice carried dry humor, someone genuinely entertained by whatever the morning tide had coughed up.
“Bring him.”
Hands gripped Erik under the arms.
Two men thralls, by the threadbare tunics and the dull resignation behind their eyes hauled him upright.
His legs folded immediately.
One thrall grunted and shifted his grip; the other said nothing, just bore the dead weight with the patience of livestock.
The world tilted sideways, and through the gap between their shoulders Erik saw the sky.
It was full of light.
Not sunlight threads.
Translucent lines pulsed across the grey morning like a web someone had strung between clouds, branching and rejoining in patterns that hurt to follow.
Erik’s vision blurred.
The threads remained, clearer than the faces of the men carrying him, sharper than the dark wood buildings rising from the shoreline.
He closed his eyes.
The threads didn’t go away.
A raven circled overhead, wingbeats lost in the surf-noise.
Erik saw it from two directions simultaneously: below, where his body hung between the thralls’ grips and his feet dragged furrows in wet sand, and above, where something vast and patient watched Kattegat’s morning through black eyes.
Smoke threaded up from the longhouses.
Boats rocked at anchor, small as splinters.
The doubled sight folded his stomach.
He retched again, dry this time, and the raven-view snapped shut like a door he hadn’t known was open.
By the time the thralls dragged him through the longhouse entrance, Erik had stopped trying to make sense of anything.
His last coherent thought in Minneapolis had been the taste of his own failure twelve seconds pinned, conscious, knowing he was about to die because a support beam had been under-braced and he’d signed off on it anyway.
Now his hands were someone else’s hands, scarred in ways his 23-year-old construction-worker palms had never been, and the air smelled like woodsmoke and old fish and a world that had no steel in it.
They dropped him onto furs near a cold hearth.
Erik lay still.
He counted his breaths in, hold, out, hold the same four-count the scaffold safety instructor had drilled into him three years and one lifetime ago.
Proof the body still answered orders.
Around him, the longhouse woke.
Voices spoke a language his ears understood and his tongue didn’t.
Footsteps.
The scrape of benches being dragged across packed earth.
Somewhere a child laughed, high and piercing, and Erik flinched because the sound was exactly wrong for a place that shouldn’t exist.
“Breathe.” A woman’s voice, low and clinical.
Erik opened his eyes.
She knelt beside him, older than his mother had been, face weathered into permanent skepticism.
Her hands moved across his chest, checking ribs, pressing his throat.
“Breathe slower. You’re not drowning anymore.”
He tried.
His lungs stuttered into a rhythm that felt almost normal.
The woman made a short sound satisfied, or at least no longer alarmed and stood, leaving him staring at rough-hewn beams overhead.
Load-bearing, his mind supplied uselessly.
Post-and-lintel construction.
Adequate for the span, under-braced for wind load if this was actually coastal Norway.
The observation was absurd and it steadied him anyway.
His hands found the fur beneath him coarse, animal-rank, nothing like the synthetic blankets in his apartment and he pressed his fingers into it hard enough to feel the hide underneath.
Real.
Solid.
Present tense.
He knew where he was.
The knowledge sat in his chest like a stone: Kattegat.
Ragnar Lothbrok’s hall.
9th century.
He’d watched the show in a Minnesota apartment that no longer existed, in a body that was twelve seconds past dead, and now he was here and the here was real and the salt was still thick on his tongue.
The man from the shoreline returned as the light through the smoke-hole shifted toward noon.
He carried two wooden cups, steam curling off one, and crouched beside Erik with the same spare grace he’d shown on the beach nothing wasted, every joint bending exactly once.
One cup he set on the floor.
The other he held out.
“Drink.”
Erik’s hand shook taking it.
The liquid was watered ale, sour and thin.
He drank anyway because his throat was raw and because those blue eyes were reading him not casually, but with the focused patience Erik recognized from his own trade, the long stare you gave a foundation before trusting it with weight.
“No boat,” Ragnar said.
It wasn’t a question.
“No crew. No tribe I recognize. The tide brought you, and the tide doesn’t lie.” He paused.
“But men do.”
Erik set the cup down carefully.
His voice came out scraped and foreign.
“I’m not lying.”
“No.” Ragnar smiled teeth, no warmth.
“You’re just not telling me anything.” He stood, brushed his knees, and held Erik’s gaze from above with the calm of someone who’d already decided to keep the strange fish the tide dragged in.
“You’ll stay. When you can walk, you’ll work. When you can work, we’ll see what use you are.”
He walked away.
Erik closed his eyes again and saw Kattegat from above the longhouse roof, the harbor full of dragon-prowed ships, the forest edge where the settlement bled into wilderness.
The raven circled once more, patient and unfathomable, and something in Erik’s chest the part that had died under a scaffold and woken here, salt-soaked and shaking understood that the doubled sight wasn’t going away.
He was in a saga.
The gods were real, or something was, and it had chosen him for reasons he couldn’t guess.
Somewhere in a world that had collapsed behind him, his body was cooling under steel in Minneapolis.
Here, his hands gripped furs that smelled like smoke and salt, and a legend who shouldn’t exist a ghost from a television screen, flesh and braided beard and real had pulled him from the tide and decided to keep him.
Erik had no boat.
No crew.
No answers.
No idea if he was chosen or broken or simply the unluckiest dead man in two worlds.
But he could breathe.
His hands worked.
And the beams overhead were under-braced he could see it from here, the gap where a knee brace should sit, the grain splitting where the tenon bore too much shear.
He’d start there.