Korrak’s boots crunched through the brittle frost, leaving deep imprints in the snow-packed road as he descended into the ruins of Eldrun. The air was thick with the stink of charred wood, frozen rot, and something worse—the bitter scent of old sorcery.

  The village was dead.

  It had not been empty long—perhaps a fortnight since Velros’s magic had peeled the life from these streets. Once, Eldrun had been a place of trade, its artisans renowned for carving statues of the old gods from the black stone of the Cairn Peaks. But no longer. Now, the carved figures that had once stood proudly at the town gates had melted into unnatural shapes, their faces contorted in silent, eternal screams.

  Even the gods themselves had not been spared.

  Korrak exhaled, watching his breath curl into the night air.

  Velros had done this.

  And Velros had something that belonged to him.

  The Gjallarbrand—his birthright, his ancestors' sword. It had been lost to his bloodline for generations, locked away in temples, stolen by kings, hidden in the vaults of cowards. Until Velros took it.

  Not for greed. Not for battle. But for something worse.

  For ritual.

  Korrak had followed the warlock’s trail across a dying land, through villages left in ruin, fields salted by unnatural fire, rivers turned black with decay. And at every turn, the signs were the same. The bones of the dead twisted, stretched, reshaped as if their bodies had tried to flee from their own flesh.

  But here, in Eldrun, something was different.

  The bodies had not been claimed by the abyss.

  They had been left as warnings.

  Korrak stepped over the frozen husk of a man who had died on his knees, hands clasped in prayer. His mouth was sewn shut with thin strands of his own sinew. His eyes had been plucked from his skull.

  A chill—not from the cold—settled into Korrak’s bones.

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  Velros’s magic did not just kill.

  It mocked.

  He tightened his grip on his sword’s hilt and pressed on.

  The inn stood at the heart of Eldrun, a blackened husk where warmth and ale had once flowed freely. Its sign—a carving of a boar in mid-charge—was half-melted, its wooden surface twisted into a grotesque face, its tusks elongated like fangs.

  Something waited inside.

  Korrak felt it before he saw it. A pressure in the air. Like standing too close to the edge of a crumbling cliff, feeling the weight of the fall pull at his body.

  He pushed the door open.

  The stench hit him first.

  The smell of stale blood, old sweat, and the faint, sickly sweetness of something rotting in the walls.

  The hearth was cold. The tables overturned. A dark stain marred the wooden floor where someone had died in violence.

  And in the farthest corner, beneath the lingering shadows, a man sat alone.

  He was wrapped in layers of stained wool, his frame too thin, his fingers twitching against the rim of his wooden cup. His **shadow stretched wrong—too long, too thick, curling against the corners of the room like something waiting to be **let free.

  Korrak stepped forward.

  The man did not look up.

  But the shadow flinched.

  Korrak did not reach for his sword. Not yet. He did not need to. His presence alone was enough to shift the air in the room, thickening the silence, weighing it down like a blade pressed against the man’s throat.

  Finally, the man raised his gaze. His eyes were too bright, too wide. Fear coiled behind them, but there was something else, too.

  Amusement.

  “You came,” the man murmured. His voice was cracked, dry, like something long buried beneath the earth.

  Korrak lowered himself into the chair across from him. He did not blink.

  “You serve Velros.”

  A slow, deliberate sip of ale. The man’s lips twitched. “Don’t we all?”

  Korrak ignored the game. “Where is he?”

  The man exhaled through his nose, fingers drumming against the table. The shadows twitched.

  “North,” he said finally. “Past the ruins of Helm’s Reach.”

  The answer was too easy. Too quick. A lie, or at least half a truth.

  Korrak let the silence stretch. He leaned forward, the weight of his stare pressing into the man’s chest like a knife.

  The fingers stopped twitching.

  The man swallowed. His eyes darted toward the door, toward the night beyond. As if something was watching from the dark.

  Then, his voice lower now: “He’s looking for something beneath the temple.”

  Korrak’s muscles tensed.

  The Gjallarbrand.

  He knew, then, that Velros was not simply hiding it. He was using it.

  And if the warlock had finally found the sword’s true purpose…

  There was no more time.

  Korrak stood. The chair creaked under the sudden shift in weight. The man flinched, the shadows curling tighter around him.

  “If you lied,” Korrak said, voice cold as the frost outside, “I’ll come back for you.”

  The man’s lips twitched again. Not quite a smile. Not quite fear.

  “Then I hope you die at Helm’s Reach, barbarian.”

  Korrak turned and stepped out into the night, his silhouette swallowed by the dark.

  The wind howled, carrying the whispers of the Whispering Wood beyond, where twisted trees waited, and things older than men still lingered.

  He was close now.

  The Gjallarbrand was waiting.

  And Korrak would kill anyone who stood in his way.