When he dragged himself into the room, after finally finding the building Erik spoke of, he was dead tired and hungry enough to eat a whole goat.

  “You smell,” Erik said as he showed Vidar around.

  Vidar didn’t dignify that comment with a reply as he walked around, his eyes wide. Two separate tiny bedrooms were placed wall to wall with a larger sitting room where a table and some chairs were placed in one corner.

  “There’s so much room,” Vidar said after finally taking it all in.

  “We were lucky to get it,” Erik said, pointing to Sven sitting by the table, half-asleep. “He ran here to haggle, and good thing he did, ’cause everything in the entire city is taken now.”

  “Because of the burned-down buildings,” Vidar said.

  Erik nodded. “Yep.”

  “How much am I paying for this?”

  When Erik told him, Vidar choked and sputtered. “Sven haggled, you said?”

  “The silver you gave Siv was enough for a week. We can make more coin in that time, no?”

  “Where’s Siv?”

  Erik shrugged. “She left. Didn’t exactly tell us where she was going.”

  “It’s late.”

  “She’s a big girl. I did try to go with her, but she wouldn’t let me.”

  “Probably out looking for her sister,” Sven mumbled over by the table.

  “Food?” Vidar asked.

  Erik pointed to the table again. A kenaz rune fastened to the wall chased the darkness away, and Vidar put one of the sowilo runes from his coat on the table. It was near empty, so he rejuvenated it just enough to provide some measure of warmth through the night, losing most of his sensation in his left arm. He needed to craft proper runes again so he could use them without spending so much essence.

  The stew, a mishmash of vegetables and bits of fish, was cold, but he didn’t care. Attacking the food like it’d insulted him, Vidar spoke around bites. “Tomorrow, you two need to find me some wood.”

  He held out his hands, making a circle with his fingers. “About this thick. Find some tools and saw the wood into discs. Siv will show you and make sure you’re doing it right. Also, we need something to make grooves in the wood with, so find a tool for that.”

  “Like a grooving plane?” Sven asked.

  Vidar downed another mouthful of stew. “I don’t know what that is, but make sure the grooves can be narrow. We’ll use them to make lines.” He pointed at the rune on the table, careful not to get too close. “Like the ones on this.”

  Sven nodded.

  Erik sighed, his voice betraying what he thought of their prospect of fulfilling Vidar’s request. “That it?”

  “Paint and brushes, small ones,” Vidar said, ignoring the sullenness.

  “And what will you do?”

  Vidar cleaned out his bowl, then headed to one of the bedrooms, turning to give his reply before slamming the door shut. “What I do is none of your concern. You work for me now, boys.”

  Sleep grabbed him immediately, and by the time he woke, it was already light out. Erik and Sven were gone, but Siv sat by the table, dark rings under her eyes. A few pieces of bread sat beside the spent sowilo rune.

  “No luck in finding your sister?”

  Her red eyes teared up a little, but she angrily wiped at them as she shook her head.

  “Ida will come to her senses if we just give her some time, I’m sure,” he said, grabbing some food and a mug of water to wash it down. “Do you want to learn how to craft runes?”

  A shadow of fear swept past her face but was quickly chased away by a look of determination. Siv nodded, then removed a book from the cloth bag Vidar used for bread.

  He grabbed it and glanced up at Siv, then back at the text on the cover. Even now, the letters shuddered and drifted in all directions. Concentrating on each letter in turn, he cobbled together its meaning.

  “It’s good that you want to learn your letters. We’ll find you a tutor once my purse is a little fatter. You should teach me those signs of yours too, so we can talk.”

  She nodded and made a sound of agreement.

  Vidar looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. “The damage to your throat. Is that what’s keeping you from talking?”

  Siv shrank back a little and fidgeted, then finally shook her head.

  Not wanting to pry further, Vidar brought out the supplies he’d taken from Yallander’s house of learning before burning it to the ground. Most of the paper was dry.

  “This is a kenaz rune,” he said, drawing the lines. “It provides light.”

  Vidar showed her the sowilo rune as well, then paused a moment and finally drew the lines required for the algiz rune.

  “This last one we don’t craft to sell, understand? They’re only for us.”

  Siv nodded, but the question was obvious on her face.

  “It is for protection. Once we’ve crafted a few, you can give one to Ida if you want, but no one else. Algiz is unknown, and I aim to keep it a secret for as long as possible, or until I find the best way of making silver off of it. Gold, even.”

  She drew the algiz rune without complaint.

  Siv’s small hand was steady and her lines straight. Even the angles appeared correct after a very small number of iterations. She was a natural.

  “You’re good at this,” he muttered. “You’ll be better than me soon.”

  Her smile shone so brilliantly that you’d think she’d never received a compliment before in her life.

  “I’m going out to rejuvenate some runes while you work on that. Rejuvenate means giving your essence to a rune. It’s what gives the rune its power.”

  She bit her lower lip and pointed at herself.

  He shook his head. “No. You stay here. If the two knuckleheads return with the materials and tools I requested, you can get started crafting runes off those designs. Just the symbols themselves, mind you. Don’t try rejuvenating them.”

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  Siv opened her mouth in a grin and made a sound that resembled a gurgling chuckle before putting her hands over her mouth, her face going red.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Vidar said. “If you laugh, you laugh. No need to be embarrassed.”

  Her hands dropped, and she nodded.

  Before leaving, Vidar dropped a silver coin on the table for food, then rejuvenated the sowilo rune. The room was free of drafts, but whoever owned the building did not care to heat it. A little warmth would go a long way when making runes, he figured.

  Outside, he peered up at the sky, shielding his eyes from the sun. No dragon as far as the eye could reach, and the sunlight actually provided a little warmth. Perhaps spring wasn’t so far off, after all.

  Finding people with coin to spare for runes proved a challenge, but a few kenaz runes for a family and a heat rune for an older gentleman living alone provided him with enough food to last him through the mission he was planning down into the darkest corners of the sewers. The tingling sensation in his arm didn’t bother him anymore, and he soon recovered.

  After returning to a few of his clients from farther uptown, he even came away with some silver coins and a handful of coppers.

  As he went into a shop to purchase a lantern and an assortment of candles and firesticks to light them, he felt a nagging sensation at the back of his neck. When he turned, the street was empty. Still, he made sure the stakra rune was ready to be used, since he’d forgotten to rejuvenate the algiz runes, and kept one hand near his knife. Even if it meant spending a little extra, he purchased a bag he could carry on his back to keep his hands free. After another glance out into the street and still no one out there with an air of suspicion around them, he left the shop.

  Vidar considered paying Alvarn another visit but decided it was too far out of his way, especially after taking so much time to gather supplies. It was time to descend into that same stairway where he met Lytir, the one where he saw the dead creature.

  Heading over there, he wondered at the vagrant’s words and the change in personality. There’d been truth to his words before, with his caution of staying away from his room. It’d been burned to the ground. With everything Vidar had seen since being tossed out of his father’s house, a clairvoyant madman didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

  That feeling of being watched returned and this time, when he spun on his heel, Vidar thought he saw a flicker of movement. He waited, but it did not return. To be safe, he ran and turned the corner, then entered one of the small passageways so common in Andersburg. There, he waited again.

  Nothing.

  Grinding his teeth with annoyance, he left his hideout and sidestepped a cart trundling down the street with sweaty men pulling and pushing it along. The pungent stink of fish from it was overpowering, and Vidar turned again to get out of the fetid cloud. He made it almost all the way to his intended destination, the hatch, before getting that nagging sensation again, like his senses were telling him to run. Fed up with not knowing, he pulled his knife and shouted.

  “Come on, then!”

  The streets weren’t exactly empty and everyone gave him a wide berth. A young child carried by her mother began to cry.

  Vidar winced and resheathed the knife. “Sorry.”

  The mother hurried away with her daughter without giving him a second glance.

  A few vagrants begged for money, but he thought one of them glanced in his direction a little too often. Coming the other way, a guardsman walked in a line straight for Vidar, and to his right, a dark-clad figure stood in an alleyway.

  Vidar blinked. No, it wasn’t a man wearing dark clothes. It looked like a shadow without a man to go with it. He frowned and stepped forward. This prompted the shadow to retreat. Vidar followed to the lip of the alley. Empty, with no sign of anyone or anything. Strange, since it ended just a few strides in with an unclimbable wall. His thoughts drifted to that night when he practiced crafting runes on a stone wall. Something like that passed by then too, and Embla’s troupe muttered of shadows claiming children who’d wandered out by themselves.

  Vidar scoffed, a children’s tale, but couldn’t help but keep an eye on other alleys to see if it reappeared. The guardsman walked past without bothering him, but Vidar couldn’t stop being suspicious of everyone he passed.

  “Stupid thieves’ guild,” he muttered. “Stupid Jarl.”

  When he approached the street with the entrance hatch, he turned on his heel one final time and went around the nearest building to approach from the other side. At one moment, he thought he heard steps hurrying to follow. He considered waiting in ambush, but found himself fleeing instead. Whoever it was, and no matter their intentions, Vidar was certain he wanted nothing to do with them.

  New snow covered the hatch, and he hurriedly cleared it. A satisfying click unlocked the hatch and Vidar slid down. The sound of running boots returned, closer this time, as he closed the hatch and locked it. Holding his breath and keeping completely silent for a moment, he didn’t hear a thing through all that thick metal.

  If he’d been followed, his pursuers now knew of his access to the underground system. Vidar didn’t like that. He didn’t like it one bit.

  A kenaz rune lit the way for the first few minutes, but soon began flickering. Vidar stepped back and unpacked his lantern and candles. It gave off a laughable flickering light in comparison to what he was used to, but it was better than nothing. Essence would slowly drain from the runes he carried with him despite them not being triggered, he figured, but Vidar brought them all, anyway. Best bring all his available tools, not knowing what he’d come face-to-face with.

  As he entered the offshoot corridor, essence began leaving his body, starting with the bottoms of his feet. It was a slow, gradual thing, but Vidar ran as fast as he dared, not wanting to spend one second longer than necessary in that dark, horrible place. There, he found who he assumed was Bjorn. A young urchin fitting the boy’s description, along with a lantern looking very much like his own. Vidar spent a solemn minute over the boy but was then forced to continue. Staying any longer meant he might share the boy’s fate. If he lost full use of his legs, that was it. He’d never get back out.

  The corridor continued on uninterrupted and eventually ended with a wall blocking his path and a ladder heading down.

  “Just like I thought,” Vidar told the quiet darkness.

  Descending, he got the sense he was entering some vast chamber. The lantern lit up the ladder and the wall behind it, nothing else. No matter how far out he leaned, holding his laughable light away from the wall, it revealed nothing.

  The sound of rushing water plunging into a huge basin soon reached his ears as he continued the endless climb down. This was the right place. It was far off and somewhere to his left, but he was sure of the source of the sound. That meant the hole in the wall would be somewhere over there as well, but in the darkness, he saw no sign of it.

  More importantly, that meant the beast was somewhere below in this enormous underground chamber. Other than the sound of rushing water and his own heartbeat, he didn’t hear a thing. With hands tiring from the climb and hands and feet both tingling from that constant drain on his essence, Vidar grew weary.

  When Vidar finally made it down to the bottom, his fingers were numb and both hands tingled like they were half-asleep. The drain of essence on his legs and feet was worse, but he was at no risk of collapsing just yet. His first instinct was to skirt the wall, to walk around the room and get a sense of its scope and layout, but he didn’t have the time for it. Instead, he made a rough estimate of where the dead thing he’d seen would be located, based on the sound of the water, and then walked straight into the darkness.

  A sense of unease washed over him as the ladder was eaten up by the darkness behind him. This was not a place where he was meant to set foot. No one was supposed to be down here, and Vidar got the sense that the darkness was judging him, that the walls were watching his every step. A speck of light in the endless darkness. That was all he was.

  The lantern was almost useless, giving only the faintest glimmer of the floor and his own clothes. Reaching out, he could touch the darkness beyond the lantern’s reach. It was like his hand disappeared in some inky ooze. He shuddered and walked faster and with purpose. If he remained here much longer, Vidar wasn’t sure the essence in his limbs would be enough to carry him back to the surface.

  A thought occurred to him, and he fumbled for one of the warmth runes. Sensing the circle within, he judged the essence to be at about a third of its capacity. Remembering that night not so long ago, when he drew a rune’s essence into himself, he closed his eyes and reversed the rejuvenation process.

  Last time he attempted the same thing, it made him sick. Now, with so much essence drained out of him, the process energized Vidar.

  After continuing on for a little while, Vidar spotted something on the floor. Going to his knees to get a better look, he saw a white-painted symbol. A rare and expensive color. It was about the size of his own hand, and a thin painted line snaked away and disappeared into the darkness, beyond the reach of the lantern. The rune was known to him. It was the same one he’d found with Alvarn, the one they had yet to learn the use of.

  Vidar followed the white line. Another one soon appeared, and then another. All of them were that same, unknown rune. Finding a few more, Vidar realized they were sending him around in a circle. He guessed that if he kept following the white, painted line, he would eventually make his way back around to the first one.

  Holding up the lantern toward the middle of the supposed circle revealed nothing. Still, Vidar thought he knew what he’d find. Rather than following the line, he turned in toward the circle’s center.

  Vidar gasped as something appeared in the darkness. Tall and white, like pillars reaching impossibly far above him. Bones. Enormous bones. So many of them. Placed in a neat order. No. That wasn’t it. No human hands arranged these. A skeleton. The remains of something out of legend.

  He’d found his dead dragon.

  The Shattered Realm is now stubbed on Royal Road. You can download the whole thing for free during the next 7 days. Link in the video below or the fiction page linked here. // Oskar