Eirik Runemark's Arc

Chapter 1 of 9

Eirik scratched another mark into his wooden calendar, counting the days until the visions came true. The northern lights had shown him death—every villager's end written in green fire across the sky. Astrid would drown beneath ice, her lips turning blue. Henrik's boy would be ripped apart by shadow-beasts. He couldn't stop the images from burning behind his eyes. Now he trained farmers to fight, taught them protective runes, and walked the village edge every night the aurora appeared. Sleep was impossible when the lights danced. Somewhere out there, the source of the omen waited. He would find it before it found Frosthold. The dark wood structure at the village center became his war room. He dragged his calendar inside and spread grandmother's notes across the table. Maps marked with sightings of shadow-beasts covered one wall. Jars of salt and iron filings lined the shelves. This place would serve his hunt—tracking every clue, every pattern in the visions. He nailed Astrid's name to the wall beside the frozen lake's location. Henrik's boy went next to the eastern woods. Each death had a place and a time. He just had to find where they all connected, where the Abyss opened to let its hungry children through. The answer was out there, and he would drag it into the light. Eirik stepped outside and walked to the carved post near the village square. Bone horns mounted on bleached wood caught the gray morning sun. Leather straps held rolled messages—reports from farmers who'd seen strange tracks, heard sounds in the darkness. He unrolled each one and read. Three sightings of frost-wraiths near the northern ridge. Shadow-beasts circling the frozen lake where Astrid would die. The clues were building, pointing him toward something bigger than scattered attacks. He rolled the messages back up and tied them in place. Then he pulled out a strip of leather and wrote his own message in charcoal: Report all strange signs to the leader's house. Every detail mattered now. The hunt had truly begun, and Frosthold would survive only if he found the source before the visions turned real. Back inside the dark wood structure, he mounted the metal disk calendar on the wall. The bone pointers tracked the moon's path across rotating marks. He turned the mechanism until it showed tonight's phase. The visions always came stronger when the moon was dark. Three more nights until the new moon—three nights to find patterns in the sky, to read when the Abyss would open widest. He marked the disk with charcoal where each death-vision had appeared in the aurora. The marks formed a curve, following the moon's cycle backward. His grandmother's notes mentioned celestial gates, times when the barrier between worlds grew thin. He pressed his palm against the cold metal. The source wasn't random. It followed the sky's rhythm, and now he could track it.