Ragnar found Erik at midday, working a hinge on the grain storage.
The earl stood there, saying nothing, until Erik’s hands stilled on the cold iron.
“Walk with me.”
Not a question.
Erik set the hinge down.
Followed.
They walked through Kattegat in silence.
Past the docks where the drowned thrall had been pulled from the water three days ago.
Past Floki’s boat-shed, where the sound of hammer on wood carried a rhythm that felt too deliberate.
The sky was low and grey.
Snow coming.
Ragnar led him to the edge of the settlement, where the trees thickened and the ground sloped down toward a hut Erik had not seen before.
Small.
Half-buried in the hillside.
Smoke leaked from a hole in the roof.
“The Seer lives here,” Ragnar said.
He stopped at the threshold but did not enter.
“He will want to see you.”
Erik’s throat tightened.
“Why?”
Ragnar turned.
Looked at him with those blue eyes that always held an extra beat.
“Because I asked him to.”
He pushed the hide curtain aside and gestured Erik forward.
The air inside was thick.
Henbane smoke, damp earth, something older.
His eyes stung.
The hut was smaller than it looked from outside low-ceilinged, dirt floor, a single shape sitting cross-legged in the center near a smoldering fire.
The Seer.
Ancient.
That was the only word his mind could supply.
The figure sat perfectly still, robed in stained fabric that might have been white once, and the face above the yellowed collar was a ruin where eyes should have been, only dark hollows remained, the skin around them smoothed and sunken like scars that had healed decades ago.
Gnarled hands rested on bony knees.
The fingers were impossibly long.
Erik stopped just inside the threshold.
Ragnar entered behind him, silent.
That ruined head tilted.
Not toward Erik.
Toward something no one else in the hut could see.
“You brought him.” The voice was glacier-slow.
Worn smooth.
No urgency in it, no question.
Just fact.
“I did,” Ragnar said.
Silence held.
The fire crackled, and a pulse hammered so loud in his ears that he was certain the eyeless figure could hear it too.
“Come closer.” A command that expected no refusal.
His feet moved before he decided to move them.
Three steps.
Four.
He stopped an arm’s length from the seated figure, close enough now to smell the henbane resin crusted on those ancient fingers. Get faster updates on g.com.
That head tilted again.
This time toward his face, as if the empty sockets could read what lay beneath the skin.
“Kneel.”
Erik knelt.
The dirt was cold through his trousers.
Those hands rose.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Gnarled fingers reached for his face, and he forced himself not to flinch.
The touch came fingertips on his cheekbones, feather-light, reading something he couldn’t name.
They moved to his temples, his throat, the hollow beneath his jaw, and each point of contact felt less like examination and more like calibration as if the blind oracle were tuning an instrument only he could hear.
The Worldtree Sight pulsed.
He gasped.
The branches above the hut invisible to everyone else, translucent and blazing to him flared brighter.
Threads spilled from the Seer’s socketed face, hundreds of them, golden and fraying, stretching upward into the canopy of Yggdrasil and connecting to something vast.
His gaze followed the threads higher, higher, and for one guttering instant he saw it:
A figure hanging from a distant branch.
The shape was unmistakable someone suspended in the canopy, patient and watchful, outlined against a light that had no earthly source.
His breath hitched.
Fingers pressed against his closed eyelids not hard, but specific and the vision erupted.
The hanging figure blazed.
The threads connecting that eyeless oracle to the distant canopy lit like wildfire, and in their light Erik understood nothing except that he was being assessed by something far older than the man kneeling before him, something that had already decided what he was.
He could not look away.
Could not breathe.
The Seer withdrew his hands.
Erik sagged forward, catching himself on his palms.
His heart was trying to break through his ribs.
The blind oracle sat back.
Empty sockets turned toward Ragnar toward the earl who had brought this strange, useful, unreadable man here for divine assessment and was now getting his answer.
“You are already full,” the Seer said.
His head jerked up.
The words were directed at him, but spoken for Ragnar.
“The cup was filled before it reached this shore.” No emotion in that voice.
Just geology.
“You do not drink. You are the cup.”
He did not understand.
But behind him, he heard Ragnar shift his weight the small, deliberate adjustment of a man recalculating what he kept in his longhouse.
Gnarled hands returned to bony knees.
That head tilted one final time, listening to something only the eyeless could hear.
“The threads do not lie.” Quiet now, barely above the fire’s hiss.
“You are already claimed.”
Silence.
His throat worked.
No words came.
Ragnar’s hand touched his shoulder brief, steadying.
“Stand.”
He stood.
His legs shook, and for a moment the hut swayed around him, the smoke and the threads and the eyeless face blurring into a single overwhelming otherness that he could neither name nor escape.
Ragnar inclined his head toward the Seer.
A gesture of respect he had not seen the earl give anyone else not deference, but the acknowledgment one power offers another.
Erik followed.
The cold air outside hit like a slap.
Erik breathed it in, gulping, trying to flush the henbane reek from his lungs.
Ragnar was already walking back toward the settlement.
Erik caught up.
They walked in silence.
Past the boat-shed.
Past the docks.
The grey sky pressed down.
At the longhouse door, Ragnar stopped.
He did not look at Erik.
His gaze was fixed on the horizon, where the sea met the sky in a line too straight to be real.
Something in his posture had changed not tension, exactly, but the particular stillness of a man who has moved permanently from observation to assessment, from watching a stranger to testing what the gods have touched.
“The Seer has never been wrong about a man,” Ragnar said.
He left the rest unsaid: whether that verdict made Erik a danger or a tool was a question for the weeks ahead.
He pushed the door open and went inside.
Erik stood there alone, the words settling into his chest like stones dropped into still water.
You are the cup.
He did not know what it meant.
But his body knew.
His hands were shaking again, and the Worldtree Sight still pulsed faintly at the edges of his vision threads connecting the longhouse to the tree, the tree to the sky, the sky to something watching from a high and unreachable branch.
Erik looked up.
A raven sat on the roof beam, black against grey.
It cocked its head.
Then it flew.
Erik closed his eyes.
Counted to ten.
When he opened them again, the raven was gone.
He went inside.
Lagertha was near the hearth, sharpening a blade.
She glanced up as Erik entered.
Her eyes tracked him across the room the same assessing look she’d given him at the dock three days ago.
She said nothing.
He sat down in his corner.
Put his back to the wall.
His hands were still shaking.
You are already full.
The cup was filled before it reached this shore.
The words circled in his head, and he turned them over and over, trying to find the shape of what they meant which god had filled the cup, and to what end, and whether the answer was something he could survive knowing.
But the meaning stayed just out of reach, like a word on the tip of his tongue in a language he’d never learned.
He shut his eyes against the firelight, but rest wouldn’t take him.
Somewhere in the longhouse, Floki laughed high and bright, the sound of a man who’d just heard a joke no one else understood.
Erik kept still and let it pass.
The dark behind his eyelids was full of threads.
※ ────────────────────────── ※
The lattice whispers: more chapters thread free at unwrittenrealm.com.
※ ────────────────────────── ※
A wish costs nothing to make.
A review costs less.
Both shape what comes next.