“Oh my.” Vár had moved behind him. “That will do very, very nicely.”
He heard Göll scream something as he felt a prick in the center of his back. The pain came as the dark grey, immaculate blade pushed its way through his chest. Erik tried to exhale and the lung she’d pierced collapsed. His body spasmed as it realized something had gone horribly wrong. The spasm wrenched him to the side and the blade moved effortlessly sideways, pulling more of his insides apart. Vár pulled the blade out of him. Blood rushed out of the hole and down the front of his body. He dropped to his knees and slumped over, all his strength gone.
“No! Not like this!” Göll shrieked the words, but she was behind him and he couldn’t see her face. He felt his heart shudder and stop and as the world became a blur, he saw Vár flee into the night.
chapter|5
Erik shot up to his knees, sucking in a breath as fast as his lungs could manage. He slapped at his chest, front and back, frantically feeling for blood, but there was nothing wet or even odd feeling about the area where he knew he remembered a blade going through.
He noticed the ground below him was covered in grass and decided that it might be worth looking at his surroundings. He came to his feet, and aside from a stiffness in his chest there was no pain. He looked around idly, finding himself next to a very old looking well in a thin forest of oak and spruce trees. Erik looked down at his shirt. There was a hole through it, but no blood that he could see. Checking his pants, he saw the same. His shoes, somehow, had gone missing. A cursory look around showed that they weren’t in the area. Looking back to his clothes, Erik lifted his shirt, checking his chest for wounds. There wasn’t so much as a scratch where the blade had gone through him. The bruises on his stomach were gone as well. The only blemish at all was a small scar on his side where a piece of fencing had cut him as a child. He rubbed his hand over it, not quite sure what to make of the situation he now found himself in. It wasn’t Valhalla. At least, he didn’t think so. Valkyries were nothing like what he’d been sold in stories, so maybe Valhalla was just a stupid forest with a well where he waited for something to come and kill him. There were no weapons around and so, though the air was warm, he decided that it was best to go somewhere else.
He took his socks off, not entirely comfortable walking around with them on but no shoes. The grass under his feet was pleasant. Soft, and on loamy soil that felt more like walking on a cushion than ground. There was a trail nearby that he headed for, reasoning that trails usually led somewhere. The trail seemed clean and smooth but dirt paths weren’t exactly in Erik’s wheelhouse so that could have meant just about anything. He flipped a mental coin to decide which way to go and, not liking the outcome, decided to go left instead.
The trail wasn’t unpleasant to walk. Only a few small rocks pressed into the bottom of his feet from time to time. The worst part of it all was the quiet. There was nothing except the sound of his feet falling and the occasional sound of hooting from the forest.
He’d been walking for what felt like a mile at least when it struck him that Göll had not been near him when he woke up. Something must have gone wrong. Or maybe it hadn’t. He vaguely remembered her screaming when Vár stabbed him. Maybe he hadn’t died as he was supposed to. If he could find other people, they might know. And they might have food.
In spite of apparently having died, he was starving. Somehow, noticing that he was hungry made it all the worse. Another hour had gone by when the trees thinned and the babbling of water could be heard somewhere off the trail. He could see the moon for the first time. It looked different, somehow. A ball of light that he couldn’t really see features in, even squinting. The clearing went on for ages, but at least the moon was bright enough to show him the shapes of buildings in the distance. He was so happy that there were signs of human existence that he almost broke into a run. As soon as he jogged his first step, it occurred to him that a strange man running into a small village at night was probably not received well, regardless of the level of advancement of the people living there.
He kept his pace steady, nerves building the closer he got. Making it to the edge of town without being attacked by anything with a sword or bow and arrow was something Erik was willing to consider a success, considering how he’d ended up in the woods to begin with. Remembering the fight in the parking lot sent a shiver down his spine.
There was more noise in the small town than there had been in the woods. He could hear people talking behind the walls of wooden buildings. He’d spent a few summers in Iceland as a child where his parents forced him to stay in one of the earthen walled long houses that the vikings lived in and these were decidedly not those. They looked more like things built later. Stave churches, only they were simple houses rather than anything meant to revere gods. There were dim, flickering lights from behind some of the shutters and some of the buildings had two storeys to them. There were signs on those, but not enough light for him to be able to read them easily. He wandered through the town, sticking to the main road,
