Valkyries Calling
Chapter 108: The Gilded Serpent

Chapter 108: The Gilded Serpent

The longships came at dawn.

No banners flew. No horns sounded. Only the sound of thick lacquered hulls scraping against the shale banks, and the deep, slow beat of a single war drum; measured, like a heartbeat.

Nokomis stood on the ridge above the inlet, flanked by three of her archers and a Norse shield-bearer at her side.

She said nothing at first.

She didn’t need to.

The prow of the leading ship bore a shape she was all too familiar with.

It was the gilded Draconic figure of Fafnir, its maw opened wide, and in its gullet lay a fearsome weapon capable of spewing forth Surtr’s flames.

And beneath that head, tall and terrible, stood the man she had once followed across the sea.

Vetrúlfr.

His signature hooded hide of an arctic wolf crowned an iron ocular helm beneath its terror.

His cloak was not regal, but ragged with sea spray and soot. His boots still wet from the ocean crossing.

Behind him, a hundred and twenty-five war-hardened Norse climbed ashore; silent, ordered, wearing the fatigue of men who had come not to raid, but to end something.

And yet… his eyes went to her first.

Not the village. Not the trees. Not the smoke-wisps curling from distant fires.

Her.

She descended the ridge slowly, each step measured, her bow still slung over one shoulder, her face half-painted in ochre and blood.

A warrior’s welcome. A ghost of her people’s old rites.

When she finally stood before him, there was no embrace.

Only silence.

He looked down at her; his height a mountain, his presence a storm.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

She narrowed her eyes slightly. “And you still stink of sea salt and arrogance.”

He smiled, just faintly. “Some things are harder to wash out.”

Her tone was low. “You came.”

“You called.”

A pause. Long enough for the Norse behind him to begin disembarking fully, forming perimeter lines without orders. They knew their king.

The native warriors behind Nokomis held their bows low, uncertain. They had never seen such a monstrous ship nor so many men wearing the hides of fearsome predators before.

This was no raiding band; this was something far greater. But despite the dread in those sullen eyes, the tension did not break until she finally spoke again.

“I was not sure you would. Why would you? You have a kingdom to answer to now, and I am not a part of it….”

“My loyalty lies with my word,” he answered. “And I gave it to you.”

Another beat of silence.

She looked at the ships; three more on the horizon, each filled with warriors. Her expression did not soften, but something in her breath shifted. The ache behind her sternum eased.

He had come.

With iron and fire, he had come.

“The Thule are striking by night,” she said, her voice becoming a commander’s. “We’ve lost two villages. I’ve held the line with thirteen Norsemen and two dozen archers. But they’re massing. And they’re learning.”

“Then they die,” Vetrúlfr said simply.

Nokomis looked at him for a long moment.

“I need you to understand something. These are not just raiders. These are the last sons of Greenland’s broken tribes—mad with hunger, driven not by honor but extinction. They will fight until the last breath. And you made them this way….”

Vetrúlfr stepped forward, voice low and clear.

“Then I suppose it is time I finished the job I started a year ago…. This land will be their grave.”

She didn’t smile. But she looked away, to the pine ridges beyond, and exhaled through her nose.

“You’ll speak to the village elders?” she asked.

“I will speak,” he said, “but only you will be heard.”

She looked up again.

His eyes had not changed. Still the color of storm-swollen ice. Still quiet in the way only men of deep fury could be.

But there was something else there now.

Not dominion.

Respect.

He did not see her as a thrall.

Not anymore.

Later, in the cedar long hall of her tribe

The firepit crackled. Oil-lamps guttered in carved skulls. Elders sat cross-legged on woven mats. Warriors leaned on bone-shafted spears. Children peeked from doorways.

And at the center, Nokomis stood; flanked by her people on one side, and the White Wolf of the North on the other.

Two worlds. One purpose.

And the Thule were about to learn what that looked like.

—

Deep within the Vinland interior.

The wind tasted like copper.

A warrior named Qaavik crouched in the reeds, his breath shallow, his eyes scanning the black mirror of the river.

Whether he was Saqqaq, or Dorset it no longer mattered. They were all one people, of the same land, in the same circumstances: Exile.

But the shifting of the winds felt wrong. Something terrible had followed them to this new land.

He had felt it long before he saw it.

The old women called it tarningneq; the shadow that falls before death. The thing that haunts the soul before the blade ever touches flesh.

It was the same feeling he had the night the longhouses of his ancestors burned in Greenland, when the pale giants came with flame and howling iron.

Now it had returned.

Behind him, his cousin Qilak emerged from the brush, silent as the seals they once hunted.

“There’s a ship,” he whispered.

Qaavik said nothing.

Qilak crouched beside him, his face smeared in ash and whale oil, nose wrinkling.

“Not like the others. Not traders. Not explorers. Their hulls are deep. Their shields wide. And they bear the heads of monsters and beasts alike. The golden serpent adorns the largest of them”

Qaavik’s throat tightened.

The serpent….

The golden one. It marked the ship that the White Wolf sailed.

“They’ve come,” he murmured, almost to himself.

“We fled the ice to escape them,” Qilak said bitterly. “And they crossed the world to chase us.”

Qaavik’s jaw clenched. He remembered the screams in the frost; the way steel parted bone like hide. The Norse were not gods. They bled like men.

But they bled after you were dead.

“Have they landed?” he asked.

Qilak nodded grimly. “By the mouth of the river. There were more behind them, too. Three ships, maybe four.”

Qaavik stood slowly, his sinew-wrapped spear in hand, carved with totems of bear and moon.

“We must warn the others.”

“They won’t believe it,” Qilak said. “Not until they see it.”

“Then they will die as our kin died. Screaming beneath axes.”

They moved through the underbrush like shadows, reeds whispering behind them.

As they passed the burned-out remains of a fishing village, still blackened from their last raid, Qaavik paused.

He looked at the soot-scrawled bones.

They had taken this land as wolves take from foxes. But something worse was coming now.

Not just warriors.

Not men of greed or conquest.

But him.

The pale giant who walked with winter on his shoulders. The one they could not kill. The one who burned Greenland like a funeral pyre and left no graves.

Qaavik looked north, toward the rivers and the pine ridge beyond.

There was no moon that night.

But he saw the faintest glow; signal fires.

And then… the sound.

Drums.

Low, distant, steady. Like a heartbeat.

Qaavik’s blood turned to ice.

“They are here,” he said.

Qilak made the sign against spirits with one hand.

“Then we die here, too.”

Qaavik didn’t respond.

He gripped his spear tighter.

If death had followed them across the sea, then so be it.

But this time, the wolves would pay in blood.