Elsewhere Bound

Posted on Wed Oct 15th, 2025 @ 1:49pm by Skjoldr Jórundsson (Hrimstrand)
Edited on on Wed Oct 15th, 2025 @ 2:22pm

1,903 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 7: Pathogens and Contagions
Location: Home, then somewhere in the North Sea
Timeline: March 1992

The island taught him the shapes of silence.

First came the hush after the gale: a white so deep it swallowed footfalls, a cold so clean it made breath sound like breaking glass. Then the stillness of empty halls—beds turned down, pots covered, nets coiled, doors unbarred. Later, the small noises of one man’s routines: fetch water, check traps, tend the beacon, walk the shore, call into the wind and hear only the sea answer back.

Skjoldr kept the headland fire going until the pitch ran low and even the gulls gave up the harbour. He widened his search in spirals day by day, reading every drift as if snow might relent and give him a trail. Varðbjörn paced at his shoulder when called—ghost-pale, edge-lit, breath like cold mist—nosing thresholds, pawing at lintels, staring long at the clan stone where the new rune had been gouged deep.

Bound Elsewhere. Fresh cuts; old dread.

He made his questions the old way. He climbed the north ridge where wind carried off smoke and words alike, set a small fire anyway, and spoke the names—father, mother, brother, sister—then the names of the gods his grandparents had taught him beside winter hearths. He burned a shaving of Hrímjárn filings—a smith’s tithe—the spark a strange blue in the coals. Varð lay beside him like a low hill of light. Frost crept the rim of the water bowl. The wind kept its counsel.

Days turned to notches on driftwood by the beacon. On the ninth day he found a child’s carved whale on the beach, weed-wrapped and salt-burnished, and set it on the forge shelf. On the eighteenth he followed fox tracks until they ended at an old collapse and added stones to a cairn that wasn’t theirs but would do. On the twenty-third he took down the festival pennants that winter storms had left flapping like tired hands, folded them, and stored them in cedar. On the fortieth, he cut the notch deeper and didn’t sleep.

He walked the halls one last time with purpose, not hope. In Jórund’s forge he banked the coals and stood with his hands on the anvil, jaw tight. He cleaned Hreggbrot until the star-grain shimmered and spoke the naming over it, voice low. Hreggbrot—storm-break. The metal hummed faint and cold, Hrímjárn answering the presence of Varðbjörn with a thread of sound you felt more than heard. He checked every strap of Hrímjárn—cuirass and backplate, gorget, fauld and tassets, greaves—and buckled the heavy runed bracers until they felt like his own bones. He braided his hair back. He oiled the hammer haft and rubbed seal-fat into the boots. He swept the forge, because that is what you do when you leave a place that taught you your hands.

He carved a waystone and set it by the clan stone: I keep the fire. I go to seek. When his palm pressed the Northstar rune on his breast, the metal hummed in answer, soft and cold, and Varð’s edge-light flared and settled like breath.

At the harbour he walked the line of boats and chose the one with the best bones. He tapped ribs, tarred seams, stitched a torn luff, spliced a weary halyard, lashed a spare mast, tested the tiller until it bit the water clean. Varð watched from the pier, ears forward, head cocked, edge-light feathering in the morning wind. The bear stepped aboard when he asked, putting weight where a seasoned deckhand would.

“Come,” Skjoldr said. He pushed off on the ebb.

The island fell behind like a dark tooth in a grey jaw. He ran by daylight on the set of the current and the line of cloud, by night on stars he knew better than most faces. He sighted on the crooked crown of the Wain, on the bright ice of the Hunter’s belt, on the faint dust of the road between. Varð kept low when asked, a gleam at his back to take the slap of spray and the hard fists of cross-waves. When he slept in snatches he did it braced, lines coiled round wrist and knee, the bear laid over him as a pelt of light to keep the chill from the bone. He ate what he knew—hard bread softened in broth, smoked fish, a heel of cheese that had outlived summer—and drank from a skin he warmed in his hands before lifting.

Weather is a patient enemy. It announced itself first as a bruise on the horizon and then as a band of darker sea that travelled faster than it should. The wind picked up in jerks, then in a steady hand that pushed at the sail and asked questions of the mast. He reefed early, because pride is dear and masts are dearer, and tied off with knots his fingers could find in blackout. By afternoon the swell had a different shape—longer-backed, meaner at the lip—and birds were gone inland. A fine, dry hiss began, like sand across slate, and then a mash of needles that stung the skin wherever armour did not.

By nightfall lightning stitched the sky and the sea flattened between stitches like beaten metal. The boat leapt, landed, juddered; fasteners sang. He smelt resin, wet wool, the old tar of the seams. He took the tiller in both hands and planted his feet wide. Varðbjörn swelled into Guard-Aspect, a dome of cold glow that turned white water into hiss and hammered glass, but nothing turns a sea; you only persuade it not to eat you first.

The spare mast went early—snapped with a crack like an oath breaking. He cut it free with Hreggbrot used as a wedge, the hammer head biting rope that had no business parting, and when the line flicked back it drew blood along his knuckles he didn’t feel until later. The next thing to go was his plan; the sea took that without asking. A cross-set of waves hit from two directions and lifted and twisted the hull until it groaned like a living thing. The sail snarled and he got it down by swearing at it in three languages—two his, one he had from a trader with bad teeth and good rum—because sometimes curses are tools. He kept the bow toward the worst of it and spoke to the boat in the voice he used for skittish animals. “Hold. Hold.”

The main mast did not break so much as tear, a long, bitter rip that took time to finish and dragged rigging with it into a sound like someone moaning through wood. The boat slewed broadside and a wall of water hit. Varð took one wave and the next, then faltered, not for lack of will but because there are only so many stones a man can carry in his head at once and still walk. Something hard struck the hull—rock or wreckage—and the world rolled.

Cold took everything at once. He did not thrash. Under-ice training is simple: make your body long, think down the spine, keep your mouth shut, protect your hands. He let Varðbjörn wrap him, felt the bear’s pressure along his back like plates sliding into place, and kicked when the bear pulled. Time thinned. Thunder became a distant door closing and opening. Weed brushed his knuckles. A plank clouted a shin. He thought of the whale on the shelf. He thought of Svala’s chart with the oil stain that looked like a hare. He thought of Jórund laughing, head thrown back, the day Hreggbrot rang true for the first time.

Stone under the palm. Another pull. Sand in the teeth. Air.

He lay on hands and knees on shingle under a sky ripped with lightning, coughing up water that tasted like nails. Inland, low buildings cut black against black; a square of human light blinked in a high window, steadied, blinked again. Not a star. Help, or at least an answer to a different question. The rain came in sheets that blurred distances and made edges slide. The surf pawed at his boots like an animal that hadn’t decided whether to keep him or give him back.

He sat until the tilt in the world steadied. The Northstar on his chestplate glowed once, guttered, then held, a coal coaxed by breath. He pressed his palm to it and Hrímjárn hummed back, faint but there. Varðbjörn stood a little way up the beach, turned toward the low compound as if scenting a wind he could not. The bear’s edge-light made a shadow of the rain where it fell through the glow.

“Not our island,” Skjoldr said, voice rough. “But land.”

Hreggbrot was still in his hand. He did not remember holding it through the roll, only that the haft fit the way it always had, as though his palm had learned it the way a mouth learns a prayer. He checked fingers and toes by touch, flexed the ache out of one shoulder, and got to his feet.

He took stock because that is how you live long enough to make mistakes twice. Boat—gone. Pack—gone. Knife—gone. Armour—scored but sound. Bracers—tight. Bear—here. Breath—here. Purpose—unchanged.

He started along the rain-slick shingle with Varð at his flank. The sea tried to erase the shape of his boots as he made them. At the headland a sign loomed out of the storm, letters picked in reflective paint he could not read. He touched it with the back of his knuckles like a greeting and carried on. The smell of oil grew stronger. So did the sense of being seen. There is a way that places look when they are kept by hands—gutters cleared, doors rehung true, paths worn by purpose—and the cluster of buildings had that look even in the strobing light.

He paused under the lee of a low wall to catch breath he pretended he didn’t need to catch. Varðbjörn pressed its shoulder against his back and the cold of the rain faded a little where the edge-light touched him. “Varð,” he said, not as naming, but as thanks. The bear’s head turned and he had the sudden, ridiculous thought that if he had a scrap of dried fish he would have fed it from his pocket.

He stepped out from the wall and crossed the last stretch. Fences resolved. A gate. A security camera’s red blink tucked under an eave. The buildings sat on rock that rose out of the sea like a decision—practical, unsentimental, a place made for weather to spend itself on. Somewhere behind the storm and stone, a generator coughed and settled. The light in the high window steadied, as if someone had put a hand to it.

If gods had answers, they’d kept them. If men had any, they were here—Muir Island, though he didn’t yet know the name. He squared his shoulders under Hrímjárn, set Hreggbrot to hang true at his side, and walked into the light with Varðbjörn pacing weight-sure beside him, the storm shredding itself to tatters behind them.

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