Being an infant was, objectively, one of the worst experiences of Ethan Cole’s life.
He understood, in the abstract, that this was the universal condition—that every human who had ever lived had survived this stretch of smallness and gone on to develop opinions about wine and foreign policy and other respectable markers of adulthood. He understood that the brain did not keep clean memories of early infancy, which was probably a mercy the species had evolved on purpose. The alternative would be a world full of grown adults with unresolved emotional baggage about being burped.
He understood all of this.
It did not make it better.
The first days were a sensory ambush. His vision was the worst offender—what his eyes were seeing and what his brain could actually make sense of were operating on entirely different timelines. The world arrived in washes of color and soft-edged shapes, occasionally interrupted by faces that appeared far too close and spoke to him with the bright confidence of people who were very sure this was helping.
He could hear perfectly well, which was both useful and deeply irritating, because he could tell—clearly—that meaning was happening just out of reach.
He treated it the way he’d treated bad conditioning days back home: noted the problem, accepted the timeline, and trusted the work to do its job.
The Ancestral Tongue was already moving in the background. He could feel it the way he felt the Wyrd itself—not as something visible, but as a quiet turning somewhere under the surface of things. Words landed differently than they should have in a newborn’s mind. Not understood yet, but held. Remembered. Stacked up somewhere deep, like kindling waiting for a spark.
He couldn’t use it.
Not yet.
But the pile was growing.
Bj?rn talked to him often.
This had not been fully accounted for.
Ethan had known—academically—that fathers spoke to their infants. What he had not expected was the particular texture of it. Bj?rn didn’t simplify much. Instead, he spoke carefully, like a man who wasn’t sure how much was getting through but meant to give the effort honest weight anyway.
Low voice. Measured pace. Plain words shaped by a life that had been lived mostly outdoors.
Ethan liked him almost immediately.
That part surprised him.
He had expected some distance to linger—observer instinct, historian’s habit—but what he actually felt when Bj?rn held him was something much simpler and much older.
Safe hands.
There were worse places to start a second life.
His mother was… harder to sum up.
If he was being honest, part of his brain had been prepared to keep her at arm’s length—to stay in observer mode, to treat this like fieldwork in a very immersive historical reenactment.
That plan lasted about three days.
Sigrid Ormsdóttir moved through the house with the quiet steadiness of someone who had spent years being the calmest person in the room when things went wrong. Not stiff. Not distant. Just deeply, unshakably centered.
When she handled him, her touch was warm and sure, the way experienced healers carried themselves in emergency rooms and field tents alike. She understood bodies—not abstractly, but in the lived, practical way of someone who had spent long nights putting people back together and had come to trust her own hands.
She watched him closely.
Not with fretful new-mother nerves.
With attention.
With care.
With the calm confidence of someone who already knew babies were tougher than they looked but wasn’t about to take unnecessary chances.
It was, he admitted privately, profoundly reassuring.
The house itself was small, which meant it was learnable.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
One main room. Fire at the center, its smoke threading up through a gap in the roof that let in cold air and starlight in equal measure. A curtained sleeping alcove. Shelves along the far wall filled with Sigrid’s herbs, salves, and carefully stoppered jars.
Near the door stood Bj?rn’s workbench.
Leather tools.
Maintained weapons.
A whetstone worn hollow at the center from long use.
The whole place smelled of pine smoke, rendered fat, and beneath both of those—the clean mineral edge of the fjord.
Close water.
Good to know.
He was carried outside for the first time around what he estimated was three weeks post-birth.
Bj?rn did the honors.
Which meant Eirik got a front-row seat from somewhere near the man’s collarbone.
Járnvik.
Small.
He had expected small. Still, expectation and reality were two different animals.
Maybe fifteen buildings in view. Rough log construction. Sod roofs browned by the season. A muddy central path winding along what was clearly a fjord inlet. Mountains rose on every side like old, patient walls.
Deep fjord country.
The light had that northern quality—long and low and gold-edged, every shadow stretched thin across the ground.
He was looking at something that could have stepped straight out of a textbook on early medieval settlement patterns.
Except this one smelled like fish and woodsmoke.
And he lived here now.
…alright.
Workable.
A large man approached along the path—larger even than Bj?rn—with a red beard that had clearly become a long-term personal commitment.
He clapped Bj?rn on the shoulder with enough enthusiasm to shift bone and greeted him warmly, then leaned in to inspect the baby with open approval.
The tone translated cleanly even before the words did.
Good size.
Eirik accepted the compliment graciously.
Then Sigrid stepped into the doorway.
The red-bearded man stopped mid-sentence.
Not subtly.
It was the clean hitch of someone whose attention had just been yanked sideways without permission.
He turned.
Blinking once.
Expression shifting into something halfway between respect and the faint unease of a man remembering a story he’d been told once and hoped not to test personally.
From his position against Bj?rn’s chest, Eirik observed all of this with serene detachment.
Pure field work.
No involvement.
None whatsoever.
Bj?rn noticed too.
But he reacted like a man who had seen this play out before and already made peace with it.
Calm.
Level.
Unbothered.
He said something brief to his wife. She answered just as briefly, tone mild and entirely unimpressed by the situation.
The red-bearded man recovered, offered Bj?rn a respectful farewell, and made a polite retreat down the path.
Bj?rn watched him go with the long-suffering patience of someone who had stopped being surprised by the world some years ago.
For the record, Eirik thought, I am not processing any implications here. This is strictly observational. Historical interest only.
Bj?rn glanced down at him then, sharp-eyed, like he’d caught something in the baby’s focus.
He said something that landed, roughly, as:
You saw that, didn’t you.
Eirik, being three weeks old, declined to comment.
Bj?rn huffed a quiet laugh anyway and carried him back inside.
The weeks turned.
His vision sharpened in steady increments—blur giving way to shape, shape to detail, until one morning the world finally snapped into clean focus like a lens settling into place.
It was, he decided, an excellent upgrade.
He spent most of that day staring around the house with intense professional interest.
On day thirty-eight, the Wyrd chimed.
? Ding ?
? Rúna: Ancestral Tongue — Level Up (Lv. 1 → Lv. 2) ?
Passive scaffolding: Active
Comprehension of spoken Járnheimr vernacular: 12%
Acquisition rate: ×6 above baseline
Note: Comprehension does not equal production.
You cannot speak yet. This is a biological constraint, not a system limitation.
The Wyrd acknowledges your frustration.
He had several thoughts about the Wyrd’s tone.
Tragically, he was still incapable of sharing them.
Twelve percent comprehension was better than it sounded.
One word in eight.
Not sentences yet—but footholds.
Bj?rn. Confirmed.
Eirik. Obviously.
Sigrid emerged quickly through repetition.
He picked up words for fire, water, cold, the fjord itself, and an expanding cluster around Bj?rn’s work.
Garrison.
Rotations.
Perimeter.
Warrior.
More specifically—
Huscarl.
The title carried weight when others used it.
And it fit.
Fit the hands.
Fit the posture.
Fit the quiet readiness Bj?rn carried even when he was just crossing the room.
Eirik began experimenting with movement.
This was… humbling.
The distance between intention and execution was frankly offensive for someone who had once run clean routes at full speed while tracking a thrown ball.
Now?
He could:
track faces
occasionally bat his hand in the general direction of things
Every success felt wildly out of proportion to the achievement.
Still.
Progress was progress.
The first evening he successfully grabbed Bj?rn’s beard, the man immediately called Sigrid over like he’d just witnessed a minor miracle.
Demonstrated it three times.
With enthusiasm.
Sigrid watched.
Nodded once.
And said something that Ethan’s twelve-percent comprehension rendered as:
Yes. He’s been doing that.
Bj?rn looked at her.
Then at the baby.
Then back at her.
His expression said, very clearly:
I am never winning another argument in this house.
Eirik, privately, agreed.
Three months old.
Twelve percent comprehension.
Two Blár (Uncommon) skills.
Inflated core stats.
Minimal motor control.
Growing understanding of a small frontier outpost at the edge of the mapped world.
He had started from worse positions.
He was going to be fine.
Outside, the long northern summer was finally tipping toward the dark half of the year. Járnvik shifted with it—wood stacking, fish smoking, stores being counted.
Bj?rn rotated through dawn watch and came home carrying the sharp cold smell of the fjord on his clothes.
Eirik fell asleep to that smell more than once, tucked against Sigrid while she worked with quiet, unhurried care.
Sometimes he thought about Hardangerfjord.
About the version of Ethan Cole who had stood there with absolutely no idea what was coming.
He let the thought rest for a moment.
Felt the weight of it.
Then set it down carefully.
He was going to need his hands free.
There was a lot of work ahead.