Viking Lost

by Derek Nelsen

Something was moving in the blackest part of the shadow below Orri’s lifeless form. Tor stopped struggling. He stared into the black. Nothing. Quieting his breathing, Tor listened, the way he did when Vigi alerted during a hunt. He listened past Orri’s shallow breaths, and then he heard it. It was like a slither. Something was there, but he couldn’t see what it was. It was getting bolder now, rustling damp leaves, shifting under the snow.

  There. Something on the surface moved. Blood-red snow shifted near Orri’s ear. Orri didn’t move. Tor wanted to call his name, but he dared not make a sound. When he forced himself to breathe again, the warm air in his lungs clouded his vision.

  He shifted his head back toward the forest. Nothing. No Old Erik, no Anja, no light. Before the fog cleared from his last breath, he was staring back down toward Orri, scanning left and right, trying to pick up the sound again, the movement—any clue to what was there. Nothing. Runa lay still but breathing.

  Tor’s neck ached from holding his head up. He gave in and laid it down on the cold ground. He watched as the moon continued its rise high above, its light quickly erasing the shadow of the downed oak’s roots. The outline of it reached up like a massive claw waiting to drag them into the earth.

  Owwww. A wolf howled in the distance.

  Aaaowwwww, came a faint reply. Had the wolves picked up the scent of blood or heard the struggle? He wondered what the old devil would do when he returned.

  It wouldn’t matter soon—it was a clear night, and the cold had long ago settled into Tor’s bones. Even if Old Erik didn’t come back, even if the wolves didn’t discover them and tear them apart, they would all be frozen by morning—an odd way to sacrifice to Odin, or Freyja. Maybe the tribute was to Loki. The trickster might find this an amusing tribute since his mother was an ice giant.

  That must be it. He was freezing to death. When had Tor stopped shivering?

  He heard a growl. This was it.

  Vigi limped out of the shadows and dropped down beside him. He was warm and he smelled bad. He licked at his side, then raised his head, growling. Then, as if satisfied with that defense, nuzzled his head in close to his master.

  Tor’s mind wandered as he drifted in and out of consciousness. What would happen to his sons? They were out on their own tonight as well. Had they made it to the fields? Were they safe, warm? He imagined them huddled around a fire, telling scary stories, making sure Ragi did not sleep at all. Worse could be happening, but he tried not to think about it.

  Vigi jumped to his feet and growled into the leaves at his feet, his bared fangs crimson with blood. He yipped and jumped back, fur standing high along his neck and shoulders.

  “What’s wrong, boy?”

  Tor He stretched his head down. Nothing. Then back to look into the forest. Still no light. No sign of Old Erik.

  Vigi barked insanely, backing away.

  “Shush now,” he was killing Tor’s ears. “There’s nothing there—”

  A serpent struck out from under the leaves and hit Vigi in the side, knocking him off his feet. The snake was gone. Tor could see the fog of Vigi’s breath.

  “Vigi? You all right, boy? Vigi—Aaaaauuhhhh!” A sharp stick dragged the length of the cut across Tor’s chest. He pulled his arms to knock it out of the way, but practically dislocated his middle fingers as the saplings backlashed. Arms spread wide, lying on his back, helpless, he saw them, two black, hollow eyes.

  He shifted his head and pulled again, this time with quick, jerky motions, trying to pop at least one of his restraints. No luck. His slashing, spinning gyrations were all stopped short, pulled back in every direction except where he wanted his limbs to go. He helplessly turned back toward the source of his pain.

  The two empty eyes were set into what appeared to be an elongated face made of slipping, writhing, thorny vines.

  “Vigi! Wake up!” Tor turned his head wildly but Vigi was out cold. He turned back to his tormentor, and in his terror he saw that it wasn’t a stick scraping into the wound on his chest. It was the creature’s tongue.

  The long, dry instrument probed and prodded at his cut, each lick sending sharp strokes of pain ringing the length of his spine.

  “Get away from me!” He struggled. No reaction.

  The figure was in the crude shape of a man made by a thousand thorny snakes trying to keep hold of one another. Only they were not snakes. They were vines, or maybe just one long vine—one long, writhing, dry vine with a sharp tongue scraping agony out of Tor’s freshly reopened wound. Its tip wetted, the vine sipped on Tor’s crimson blood, and Tor could feel the excess bleeding seeping warmth down his side.

  The vine was dressed in splashes of glowing foxfire, which cast an eerie, death-blue light with each heavy beat of Tor’s raging heart.

  The creature looked down at the heavy ring holding Tor’s chest solidly to the ground and poked at it, sliding it easily along the blood-soaked path with its barky tongue, apparently unaffected by its weight.

  Tor hoped it would lift the burden off him, but something else got its attention.

  The head turned to watch another vine, now two, emerge from the bottom of the pit. They slithered like snakes, pushing and prodding each other as they went. They moved tentatively at first, like dogs sniffing to find a trail. But then they made contact with the blood-trail Orri’s wound had pumped into the snow and immediately began to writhe as if jockeying for position.

  One of the vines slipped along up the hill while the second rolled and twisted until its end joined its beginning. A head raised out of the pile of prickly rope, then two crude hands lead two long arms up toward the stars. When the hands pushed off the ground they linked to the head with makeshift shoulders, and the whole of a legless torso was pushed out of the pile. One of the hands grabbed the other snake wriggling along the trail of blood and began to pull at it, throwing it into a pile at the bottom of the pit.

  The snake turned back on the body, wrapping itself around its assailant. The two were indistinguishable from each other, the snake coiling around and amongst the other’s chest and head, the hands of the first trying to pull the other out of its chest. A third arm grabbed the first by the neck from within the twisting, sliding core. Then a second head appeared.

  The whole thing was easier for the immobilized Tor to follow as the second body emerged. Only this one was shaped like a woman, who slithered up onto legs and stood over the man who still looked as if buried to his waist in a pool of quicksand made up of his own vines.

  Her long fingers were tipped with sharp thorn talons now gripping at his neck, which collapsed, then reformed, slipping in and out of her grip until she found what she was grasping for. The man-shape stopped as soon as she pulled a hidden gold medallion from the heart of his slithering chest. The creature had a soul!

  She carried it as she slinked over to Orri. The male figure stopped resisting, instead giving her line so she could saunter freely to her target.

  Tor’s eyes turned to the creature crouching next to him, its finger pinning Orri’s ring to his bleeding chest. There, he could see it, something reflecting in the moonlight as its vine slithered and jockeyed for position to maintain its form. Deep in its chest, his tormentor also bore a beautifully adorned soul ring. Its owner must have been wealthy, for it was not only dipped in gold, but there were glimmers of red ruby and green emerald, too.

  Tor gasped. How easily this creature was able to maneuver Orri’s soul on his chest, so heavy to him that he felt he could barely breathe under its weight.

  The female creature threw the other’s soul to the ground as she got to Orri, who lay there quiet and still. Her arm turned back into a vine and slithered over his body until it found his waist. Then it slipped underneath the fat of his belly until emerging again on the opposite hip, in the shape of a hand, holding a small flask.

  She pulled the wooden stopper with wriggling, excited tentacles. Patches of pale blue luminesced rapidly with excitement as she held the flask to her face and poured the drink into the cavity
where her mouth would have been, sending the red liquid tumbling over layers of dry, brown, twisting bark until it spilt into the snow at her feet.

  The creature next to Tor transformed, the tongue now playing the role of a finger as the vines of the face spiraled into a hand, the eyes disappearing into the mess until the old arm turned into a neck and head rightly atop the creature’s shoulders, the onyx colored eyes emerging in the spot on the face where they belonged. Tor’s companion’s face gave little interest to the frenzy, a passing glance, before turning his head upward. Those black, lifeless eyes cast skyward, reflecting the light of the moon that sailed the undulating river of green and purple now coloring the breadth of the cloudless sky.

  The female was oblivious as she turned the flask up to drain it of every last drop before letting it fall, only to be joined by the other, both dropping to the ground to frantically try to lick up what had tainted the snow with tongues of root probing the earth like a couple of blind snakes.

  Tor’s tormentor’s eyes looked longingly at the beauty of the heavenly show while the others dropped their masculine and feminine facades and melted into one large, swirling, slithering mass around the site of the spill.

  They looked like two thirsty serpents, but with no real mouths, no throats, no stomachs—no way to get satisfaction. Tor knew Orri, and thought it likely the flask had been firewater, making the weeds no better than a couple of sots fighting over a drink they had no way to taste.

  The male raised a head from the swirl as if catching a scent, and began to slither over to Kiara. Just as it was climbing up onto Kiara’s chest, the owl returned and dug its talons into the serpent, causing it to draw back, slithering away from her soul to its pulsing coil nesting in the shadows.

  The owl screeched at the vine as if in warning, then took its sharp beak and started biting at the Christian’s ring. It was as if everything in these haunted woods were after men’s souls. But the owl stopped short of taking it, turning back to screech again at the vines, who drew back in respect of the white bird.

  A cold breeze blew, and Kiara’s soul began to sing as new pinpoint holes in its fractured exterior acted as key holes on a flute. The owl took another dig at the ring, unbreakable by any means of men, and the pitch changed again, invisible bellows playing a new song for all manner of creature lurking in the cold, dark forest that night.

  Enter Darkness

  The feminine vine left Orri and slithered over to Tor. Around his ankle she slipped, encircling his calf, then up his thigh.

  “Get away from me!” The words were ripped from his throat. She ignored Tor’s rebuke, and the creature sitting next to him ignored her. Instead, its blank eyes continued to stare at the beautiful night sky. Tor wasn’t sure if he should be happier his tormentor was ignoring the oncoming snake or whether he wanted it to fight her for him. Then he recognized something in the creature. It was looking at the night sky the way a boy would on his first night sleeping out under the stars.

  Was it in awe? Could they feel at all? Just because it chose to take on the form of man did not make it like him, but there was something, something eerily recognizable in the way those two fought over Orri’s flask, and now the way this thing stared at the moon and stars.

  They were made of vines, like roots, or weeds, but it was as if there was something more, something recognizable, not like some mindless thieves who’d scavenged bright trinkets. It was as if the souls they carried could be their own. Could these be draugar? Their bodies returned to dust but their souls living on, if such an existence could be called living at all. It was more like living a nightmare. These things seemed to be yearning for things they couldn’t have, unless they wanted sacrifices of flesh and bone and a few fresh souls.

  Large swaths of green bands danced above the trees, turning purple then back to green again, and the draugr stared on. It seemed to be looking for something, affected the same way his cohorts were when they deeply wanted a taste of Orri’s flask.

  The vine climbing his leg seemed to be sniffing around his belt, prodding and probing. Tor hoped she was just looking for firewater.

  “Get off me, you blood weed!” He pulled his hands in, just unable to reach the snake as it slithered over his stomach and up to the ring on his chest. The vine slipped through Orri’s soul and lifted it up off of Tor’s blood-soaked chest as easily as if it were just a simple gold ring. Tor threw his head back, coughed, and breathed deeply again, finally relieved of the unbearable weight of it.

  As she passed through the ring, the vine spiraled up into her female form again and sauntered back to Orri, his soul rolling along the length of vine making up the cracked, barky fingers of her left hand.

  She didn’t slow as her right hand dropped into a lagging vine before slithering over to wrap around Orri’s thick ankles. As she walked, she slinked her form down to that of a serpent, then slid down into a shadowed opening at the bottom of the pit where the dead roots once lived. She dragged the barely conscious Orri, too drained of life and blood to cry out, down into the darkness, like she was plucking him from this world to be her bridegroom in the next.

  A marriage arranged as a sacrifice to the gods he spent his life chattering about, but never actually worshiped.

  “So, this is it?” Tor shouted angrily. “This is what I get for sacrificing my soul? It’s not what the old gods promised!” As he looked at his still unconscious wife, his heart sunk, and his anger grew. Mustering the power of the wolf, he went as berzerk as his strength would allow and started jerking wildly to try to free himself one last time. After he’d exhausted himself, he looked up and laughed.

  All the trees he’d fallen in his life, and he was being held captive by two spindly little saplings. As his head fell back into the snow, Tor started laughing hysterically through cold tears.

  “Are these your Valkyries, you old demon?!” he screamed into the beautiful night sky. The vines did not seem to care.

  With a final burst of energy, Orri managed to turn his head back toward Tor before he was tugged through the small black passage to the underworld, the opening stretched wider by the fat of his belly.

  Tor’s tormentor pulled back his thorny finger that had been tapping the blood flowing from the cut across his chest. Sweet relief. He took a moment and breathed a sigh of brief respite.

  The sky that fascinated the stone-faced weed at his side—was brilliant. The sound of Kiara’s soul changed pitch again amidst the sound of dragging.

  Tor watched as his guardian began its decent into the pit but it wasn’t finished tormenting. Its thorny finger slithered around his neck and began to clamp down as if to punish him for his insults. But the pain of the thorns digging into his throat was quickly superseded by the need for air.

  Only silence came as Tor tried to lash out, and by the time he felt his hands were free from their bonds he had to ignore his want to grab something to keep from being dragged down into the pit for his overwhelming need to breathe. The palms of his hands were pierced by thorns as he pulled and struggled against the vine around his throat, but he was no match for it.

  The white owl, their only champion, screeched, rolled its head and ruffled its feathers in protest before being forced to give up its post, as the third vine began dragging Runa and Kiara into the pit.

  The last thing he remembered of the light was the silhouette of his own bloody hands grasping at the mouth of the world that would swallow him whole. The moon faded as Tor slipped into unconsciousness. Then there was only darkness.

  Enemy of My Enemies

  Tor spat twice, waking to the taste of blood and dirt in his mouth. His hands were free, and he could breathe, so that was an improvement. His head hurt—neck stiff. Eyes open wide, he tried to find light, a change, something.

  Am I blind? No, keep calm. I’m alive. He felt his waist. Nothing. Then he remembered; he’d given his fire kit to Erik.

  The smell was dank but clear of the foul, decaying smell of the draugr. He ran his fingers along a rough-h
ewn wall of stone. Cool earth settled under his fingernails.

  “Runa?” The sound of his whisper was hollow, empty. Something moved in the darkness. Thoughts of the vines filled his head. He felt around for a weapon, a rock, anything.

  “Unnngph.”

  Tor stayed silent. Still no rock.

  “Who’s there?” The words were Irish.

  “Kiara?” Tor exhaled.

  “Tor.” The voice shook with terror. “Help me.”

  “Have you seen my wife? Is Runa with you?”

  “I can’t see anything. Wait,” whispered Kiara. “Something’s here.”

  Tor felt a chill run the length of his spine. “What is it?” Boyish nightmares raced through his mind.

  “It’s sniffing my leg.”

  “Have you got a knife—anything sharp?” Tor had to be strong—for Runa and Kiara. Neither of them deserved this fate. “I think they’re just vines.”

  “They’re not just vines,” she sobbed. “It’s in my pocket.”

  “A knife?” Tor’s heart jumped.

  “No,” Kiara’s voice was filled with terror. “It.”

  A high-pitched note played through the darkness.

  “Shhhh! Are you crazy? Put your ring away.” Tor couldn’t believe this girl.

  “I’m scared. I always play when I’m—what do I do?”

  “Maybe you can slap that ring over its slithering head.”

  “I’m scared,” she moaned.

  Tor gritted his teeth and frantically scoured the area for a weapon. Whatever those things were, he’d be next. “Runa!” he whispered harshly. His hand ran over something. Pebbles? He picked up a handful. No good. They crumbled in his grip—soft, and a little wet. He dropped them and continued running his hands along the ground. There had to be something. Then he felt it. Like a huff. Like breath. He froze. He was on all fours, no weapon, and something was there, close to his head. It had just sniffed in his ear.

  Tor thought of the creatures—like people, but able to shift, like snakes. No reason to strike at it. That would be like punching a thorn bush. He would have to grab it. Nothing else made sense.