A sanguinary moon was awaiting just below the horizon. They could all feel it's fulness like a minatory pulsing beneath the earth. From the tail of her eye Brenna watched Renic's jaw clench in time with the rhythmic pull of the moon.

A bead of perspiration trickled slowly down his neck as she followed beside him. She longed to knit her fingers into his, but he seemed far too agitated and so she kept her hands at her sides. Roth too seemed to feel the cautionary itch, but his manner was not as restrained as his brother.

Roth slapped Heida's rump playfully as she strolled beside him. Over his shoulders he carried the blótdyr — a fat sacrificial goat who seemed more than content to be carried to its doom, little knowing that this night was to be his last. Under Renic's arm reposed a trussed up young boar who was far more suspicious than it's companion, its eyes restive as it struggled vainly.

By and by Roth, who lead their little party, halted and indicated that Renic should set his blótdyr aside for the nonce. "Here we are."

"Here?" Renic arched one dubious brow and laid the boar on its side, the beast grunting vexatiously, tusks gnashing as it strove against it's fetters.

Brenna could understand his perplexity for there was nothing here but towering pines and yews surrounding them. One old yew stood wide-girthed and hollow beside an ash so tall, its boughs thrown wide, that for a moment she mistook it for Yggdrasil itself. But there was no cave entrance to be seen. She scoured their surroundings with a skeptical gaze as Renic moved past is brother, questing the air carefully, his nose raised like a wolfhound's.

"There's nothing here," said she, turning around to face Roth and Heida.

"I beg to differ," answered Roth, but his gaze was locked instead to his brother, who progressed further forward, his smile lifted at one side of his face so that the scar stretched wickedly at his lips.

"Ay, it is here," Renic agreed, nose flaring, as he turned to look over his shoulder at them. "I can smell the—"

"Wait! Renic, stop!" Heida rushed forward suddenly, but it was too late.

With a shout of surprise, Renic dropped from sight as the very earth swallowed him up in a plume of leaves and rot.

"There it is!" said Roth, laughing as Heida slapped his shoulder.

"Renic!" Brenna leapt towards where she'd seen Renic disappear, but was abruptly forestalled as Roth latched an iron hand to her arm. "Let me go, you beast!" She struggled against him with valiant futility.

"Calm yourself, woman. He's unhurt." He gave only a faint grunt of pain as she kicked him hard. "You, however," he went on unperturbed, "will not be if you take another step forward." And he pointed to where she'd been about to plant her foot, moving his own foot thither to swipe at the blanket of earthy detritus beneath which was hidden more of the pernicious hole into which Renic had dropped. "Thank you, Roth," he muttered in a high pitch mimicry of her voice, finally letting go of her arm and leaving her to her own devices. "Most welcome, priestess."

"Renic!" Brenna knelt at the edge, peering desperately into the darkness below. When he answered her his voice was hale, if a little gruff, and she sighed with relief, breathing of the musty rot of the underworld.

"I'm fine!" he called again.

"No thanks to you," she hissed, glowering at Roth who'd by this time knelt down beside her.

"This was what you wanted to show me?" Heida asked him, her arms folded sternly over her chest as she scowled. "That you'd set a trap for your brother?"

"A harmless jest." He shrugged, still grinning, and then yelled down into the gap for his brother to brace himself, for he meant to send the animals in after Renic. With far more care than he'd afforded his brother, Roth lowered one beast and then the other, Renic ostensibly catching each one in succession.

"Mind the horns, brother," said Roth, chuckling as the goat was released.

From below, meanwhile, was heard a curse and a mutter. Renic had doubtless caught the horny goat —  likely taken the brunt of the animal's rack — and this did much to increase Roth's mirth. Then, with a wink at Heida, he finally pushed himself off the edge and vanished into the underworld as Renic had done before him.

Thence ensued some scuffling and grunting — none of which could be attributed to the boar — at which point Heida threatened to jump down and separate them herself. "There'll be time enough for that," she bellowed, rolling her eyes as she pushed herself from the precipice. To Brenna she said, "I pray the gods keep them from killing each other tonight. And—" As an afterthought, "every other night hereafter."

"It is not they we should worry about," Brenna replied, casting her eyes overhead where the sky seemed to burn with the low hanging sun — a grisly shade of crimson, "but ourselves. Something feels ... wrong."

Heida glanced between her friend and the canopy above. "I see nothing strange."

"We'd better go."

To Heida the sky would look natural as the sun crept lower towards the earth, but to Brenna, who saw the world in supernal shades, nothing appeared right about this day. In fact, she'd awoken this morning with a prickling at her nape, just as Renic must feel every time the moon began to pull him asunder.

They'd spoken very little, she and Renic, since dawn had ushered its harsh light in to chase away the seductive alchemy of the night. More specifically, since she'd taken the tea.

"That hole needs covering, lest someone fall into the fissure and die undiscovered," Brenna thought aloud.

"Roth plans to disguise it somehow," said Heida as they moved off whence they'd come. "Perhaps construct a stone wall and call it a well shaft. He told me so after I fell in."

"A well in the middle of the forest?" Brenna scoffed. "That isn't suspicious in the least."

But Heida barely heard her, for she froze suddenly and turned to listen, her forehead pleating anxiously. When Brenna asked what the matter was her friend only shook her head, perplexed. "The voices."

"What are they saying?" Brenna's own voice was hushed reverently.

"I cannot make it out." She listened a moment more. "Run." Her pale face lost what little color it possessed as her silver eyes flickered to Brenna. "They tell me to run."

Warily did Brenna glance behind her, but the woods were eerily silent. Something was terribly wrong. "Then let's do exactly as they say."

Though Heida was the fastest creature on two legs, she slowed her pace to match Brenna's as the two women sped hastily through the forest, dodging boles and clearing gnarled roots with hiked skirts. All the while she ran Brenna felt the shadows of a memory — a familiar dream — nudging pertinaciously from the depths of her conscious.

She was running through the forest of her mind, her heart screaming for her to hasten, to lengthen her strides. With Heida sprinting quietly beside her, she whipped her head around suddenly, expecting to see the black and the grey wolves at her heels, but there was only shadows converging behind her. No sign of the monsters from her nightmare. It had been nighttime in her dream, she recalled; here, however, at this very moment, the sun had not yet set over the mountains. But the dream, she knew, was a warning.

The sound of Heida's anguished cry startled Brenna enough that she skidded instantly to a halt. 

"What's the—" But her words were swallowed up by her own horror as she descried the blackened smoke broiling furiously over the jagged line of trees up ahead. And the sky was aflame with every dying color. Their village was burning! "No!" It was just like her hateful dream had foreshadowed. "Heida, no!" Brenna managed to clamp her fingers at Heida's dress as the girl bolted past her. There was no possible way she'd be able to keep up with her friend and she needed her to hear her out before she disappeared into the melee of fire and screaming.

"We're needed, Brenna. This smells of Thorgny, I know it." Heida's eyes flashed with argent fury, her voice edged with steel. Already the valkyrie within was awakened. "Now let me go!"

"I've dreamt of this! I know what awaits us. We need a plan, sister! If you run headlong into the fray you will die." Brenna fixed her eyes to her friend, willing her to trust and to understand. "I have a plan if you will but trust me."

"I'm listening." Heida's jaw clenched anxiously.

"We need the sons of Loki. Thorgny already has the upper hand—"

"What are you saying?!" Horrified, Heida shook her head. "We cannot control them! Even our own men will perish!"

"Trust me! Please, Heida." Every moment spent debating was a precious moment lost.

At last, Heida nodded. "I do trust you. I'll go back for them and you—"

"No, your sword arm is needed there," she explained, pointing to the fiery horizon, the black smoke blotting the dying sunlight in the western sky. "I will summon the beasts from their lair."

"This is madness, Brenna." But without hesitating, she lifted her amulet from her neck and placed it in Brenna's palm. "Take this with you then. Do not remove it for anything!" Heida commanded.

"No. I need you to place it over my mother's neck instead."

"Brenna!" Heida's voice had lowered peremptorily.

"You've already vouchsafed your faith, so question me no more." And before her friend could protest further, she continued, "Go to my mother first. Warn her, for you will need her help, and then get yourself to Aila's side. Your mother will have already taken your sons to safety. It is they Thorgny want."

After a tense nod, Heida explained where Brenna would find the cave, and with the amulet still in her hand she asked her valkyrie sisters to guide Brenna thither as swiftly as they were able. That said, Heida herself flew away towards the scene of horror, leaving Brenna to fend for herself in the quickening twilight.

Suddenly, the beat of wings and a resonant squawk was heard overhead as a raven dropped from a nearby branch. "This way," it seemed to say, gliding through the lengthening shadows like a draugr. Without wasting a second more, Brenna sprinted after it.

Soon her muscles were aching and her chest burning with her exertions as she matched her pace to the raven's, her track paralleling the shallow gulley that Heida had indicated she follow. Deeper into the woods it took her as the light disappeared swiftly from the sky. Eventually she was forced to slow. And just when she thought her body might collapse with the strain, the raven gave a satisfied caw and settled itself in a bough above a rocky wall at which a curtain of moss and vine hung thickly as though hiding what lay behind.

Her limbs began to tremble with dread as she neared the lair, instinct exhorting her to flee. Death hung here like a miasma. This, she knew, was where Frida had died. The earth appeared imbrued with crimson where the moss trailed along the ground, the hanging leaves fluttering ominously as though the mouth of the cave itself was breathing. Her skin was of asudden cold and damp with fear now that she was moving the vines aside.

Nothing but darkness met her eye. And the scent of sweet decay.

"Renic!" she called, her eyes staring into the blackness, lest the valdyr, if valdyr he already was, get close enough to drag her within. Tucking the vines behind a rock, she took a few steps backwards, feeling instantly safer. Again and again she called out, her voice growing hoarse with fearful desperation. "Oh gods!" she wept, "help me!" Was it too late?

But just as she sank dejectedly to her knees a faint sound from the mouth of the hellir reached her ears and she gasped as a large shadow emerged from the cave. "Are you mad!" Roth seethed. "Get home, woman!"

"Home," she cried, "is under attack!" She was too relieved to see him to feel affronted by his terse manner. At any other time she'd have called him a fool for thinking she'd come here, of all places, for anything but as a last resort.

Even in the waning light she could see his face had blanched. He turned to look back to the cave with a heavy brow, his bones already looking malformed. In his countenance, however, there still dwelled sanity, and she could see that he well understood what was needed of him. "I'll get Renic. Stay here." And he was gone.

An agonizing length of time seemed to come and go as she paced restlessly before the cave, waiting and growing ever more anxious as the last of the light left the sky. Lifting her face to the emerging stars, Brenna felt her blood run cold. The moon would be out at any moment and still she was alone.

The raven, still waiting on it's lofty perch, gave a mournful cry suddenly and ruffled its feathers as though a chill had leapt over it's spine. She gaped at it and rubbed her hands over her prickled flesh. What was taking Roth so long?

"Run!"

Brenna shrieked at the unexpected warning, grasping at her chest in a small effort to hold herself together. 

The deep voice had rumbled sharply through the little clearing, echoing off the boulders. "Run!" it said again.

"Loki?" she whispered, for it had sounded too otherworldly to belong to just any man.

The very next instant, Loki himself materialized from the cave, his face grave and his eyes flaring with pale luminescence. "I said run," he growled, dragging a horribly disfigured, and rabid, Renic out with him. "Now!"

She ran.

🌟Alrighty, folks, we've come this far together. And I hope you're still enjoying the story. I also hope you're as invested in these characters as I am. But lets have a vote: who's your favorite character and why. I think it's safe to say you know everyone well enough now to have a favorite. Who's mine? Quid pro quo, my lovelies...🌟