thanh.nguyenhoang.1403@gmail.com
Stories
168
Chapters
1,512
Words
3.2 M
Comments
0
Reading
11 d, 4 h
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FREYA The sterile hum of the fluorescent lights shatters into a roar. One second, my gloved thumb is tracing the serrated edge of a broken iron sword on the stainless steel examination table in the York Archaeological Trust's basement. The artifact is cold, brittle, and crusted with a thousand years of oxidized soil. My hand slips. The jagged edge bites through the nitrile glove, slicing deep into the meat of my palm. The next second, the stainless steel table vanishes. The white walls dissolve into…-
23.5 K • Completed
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ASTRID I do not wait for the stranger to answer. The iron spearhead is still vibrating in the thatch, inches from her leg. If she hesitates, she dies, and the year of life I just burned to give her my balance is wasted. I seize the thick, boiled-wool fabric of her strange black tunic and heave her backward. We slide down the steep pitch of the longhouse roof. The rain is a sheet of freezing needles, slicking the rotting thatch beneath our boots. Below us, the alley is a narrow trench of churning black…
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23.5 K • Completed
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FREYA The heat inside the forge hits like a physical blow, a dense wall of roasting air that smells of crushed charcoal, oxidized iron, and ancient sweat. Einar is a mountain of a man with a beard stained yellow by smoke. When Astrid spoke to him in rapid, hushed Norse, he didn't ask questions. He looked at the fresh blood dripping from Astrid's palm, looked at my strange black clothes, and pointed to a low, heavy timber door at the back of the shop. A storeroom. Now, the heavy oak door is bolted from…
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23.5 K • Completed
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ASTRID The heavy oak door of the storeroom shudders as Gunnar’s men begin tearing through the outer forge. Einar’s voice rings out over the crash of overturning anvils—a steady, unyielding roar denying any knowledge of the witch. He is buying us seconds. The heat between Freya and me—the sudden, terrifying proximity that just a moment ago felt like gravity—shatters. I grab her by the shoulder, my fingers digging into the boiled wool of her strange tunic. The henbane and foxglove are still…
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23.5 K • Completed
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FREYA "Dr. Lin. Step away from the anomaly." The voice from the speaker is flat, synthesized, and utterly terrifying. It belongs to the sterile corridors of the York Archaeological Trust, to the men in tailored suits who threatened my funding, to a reality twelve centuries away. Yet the green recording light of the CCTV camera pulses directly onto the mud of the ninth-century riverbank. Astrid does not understand the English words, but she understands the tone of a hunter who has cornered its…
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23.5 K • Completed
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FREYA The bowstrings creak like snapping timber in the fog. I am staring up at the carved dragon prow of the longship, the lethal iron tips of half a dozen arrows pointed directly down into our skiff. Beside me, Astrid is collapsed on the wet floorboards, her muscles completely devoid of the kinetic framework that made her a warrior. The Ehwaz rune on my palm throbs, heavy with the data she gave me on the burning roof. I am holding her hours, her years, her violence. "I have the witch!" the…
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23.5 K • Completed
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FREYA The dark of the longship’s hold is absolute. I am sitting in freezing bilge water that smells of rotting timber and river silt, my knees pulled tightly to my chest. Above me, the heavy thud of Torsten’s men moving across the deck vibrates through the oak planks. Every shift of the hull drives a dull, radiating ache deep into my bones. It is not just the cold. It is the timeline extracting its toll. I press my right hand—the hand bearing the aged, silvered scar I took from Astrid—against…
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23.5 K • Completed
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FREYA The burning roof of the forge screams as the main timber support splinters, a deafening crack that vibrates straight through the soles of my boots. A wall of roaring, pitch-black smoke separates us from the river, trapping Astrid and me in a ring of hostile steel and blistering heat. Jarl Gunnar steps through the flames, a nightmare of boiled leather and chainmail, his executioner’s axe catching the violent orange light. He is not looking at Torsten’s routed men, dying in the mud outside. He is…
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23.5 K • Completed
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The apocalyptic blue fire did not roar. It shrieked. The sound was the collected, pressurized agony of a slaughtered generation, finally unleashed from the shattered iron capacitor of the crown. The shockwave expanded in the cramped subterranean vault, a wall of absolute, freezing kinetic force meant to vaporize the stone, the steel, and the four of us with it. I did not have my pouches. I did not have my silver dust. I had my own blood, pouring down my jaw from the torn fissures of my ruined face, and…-
20.7 K • Completed
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Vienne’s callused fingers uncoiled from my wrists, and gravity swallowed me whole. There was no warning. No preamble. One second I was balanced precariously on the high-wire platform, suspended two hundred feet above the glittering, iron-laced expanse of the carnival square. The next, there was only the brutal, rushing roar of empty air. The wind tore at the heavy emerald silk of my dress, whipping it upward into a violent canopy. Below me, the Belle Époque city spun in a sickening blur of gaslight…
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20.7 K • Completed
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