MGS: Beyond Ragnarok LARP

08/04/2026

Winter Story The Finale

The crowd fell quiet in waves.
She came through the gathered Folkvargr like the point of a spear, broad-shouldered, furious, every inch the Karl. Mud on her boots. Axe at her side. Hair half-loosened from sheer panic. The expression of a woman who had spent week following rumours of divine stupidity across half her lands and had now, at last, found the source.
She stopped in the tavern doorway.
Looked at Modi being dragged by a boar.
Looked at Baldur holding a lamp over a pile of nets and sailors.
Looked at Torr on the floor with a boar standing victoriously on him.
Looked at the other two boars drinking from the spill.
Then she inhaled. No one spoke. One of the boars hiccupped. When Eerika did speak, her voice cut clean across the room.
“What,” she said, “have you three done.”
Modi, still gripping one hind leg, said, “It started itself.”
Baldur said, “In fairness, the boars were already drunk.”
Torr, from under the triumphant animal on his chest, said, “This one may be my best friend now.”
Eerika shut her eyes.
When she opened them again, they carried the full force of divine wrath.
“In one week,” she said, counting on her fingers with the calmness of someone one breath away from homicide, “you broke furniture in Eio, started a tavern brawl in Toft, stole a boat in Hofslond, insulted the sacred bees of Grenivik and now I find you wrestling drunk pigs in Mosfell.”
No one dared correct “boars” versus “pigs.”
Eerika pointed.
“Brother. Drop the pig.”
Modi released it instantly.
“You. Put down the lamp.”
Baldur set it back in place with exquisite care.
“And you Uncle,” she said to Torr, “get up.”
“The boar is sitting on me.”
“I noticed.”
There was a pause. Then Eerika stepped forward, seized the victorious boar by the scruff with one hand and the ear with the other, and bodily hauled it off Torr.
The whole tavern watched in reverent silence. Even the boars seemed impressed. Torr sat up slowly, staring at her like he had never been as proud of her strength.
“By thunder,” Modi whispered.
Eerika rounded on him. “Do not ‘by thunder’ me. You are the thunder.”
Torr opened his mouth.
She lifted one finger. He shut it.
Baldur tried a soothing smile. “Karl Eerika, I assure you—”
“No,” she snapped, pointing at him. “You do not get to smile at me as if this is charming. It is not charming. You are covered in bee stings.”
Baldur stopped smiling.
Modi cleared his throat. “In our defence—”
“I have no interest in your defence.”
“We meant no harm.”
“And yet harm happened anyway”.
She paced once before them, like a mother at the end of all patience and the beginning of consequences.
“You are gods,” she said, low and dangerous, “which means you should know better. And if you do not know better, then by all the sleeping ones, I will teach you. The Folkvargr are not a stage for your foolishness. These are my people. Their halls, their hives, their boats, their towns. They work, bleed, and survive, and then you arrive like overexcited lads on festival day with less sense than a drunk goat.”
The silence was magnificent.
Eerika turned on her uncle first. “Uncle”
Torr straightened. “Yes, Eerika.”
“You are not allowed on boats.”
He nodded.
“You are not allowed near bees.”
He nodded again.
She swung toward Modi. “Brother.”
Modi stood like a chastened mountain.
“No dares.”
He blinked. “No dares?”
“No dares. Not one. I do not care if someone says you cannot punch a cliff into a better shape. You will walk away. Don’t you dare walk away whistling either.”
“That seems specific.”
“Because I know you.”
Then she faced Baldur.
Baldur looked, for the first time all night, like a man genuinely worried.
“You,” she said, “stop encouraging them.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
“I only said perhaps—”
“You said ‘another round’ in three different settlements.”
Baldur lowered his eyes. “That is fair.”
“Yes, it is.”
She folded her arms.
“And now,” she said, with dreadful finality, “I have a warzone to mend.”
Eerika pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed the sigh of someone who had become, unwillingly, mother to three ancient idiots.
“Go sleep it off,” she said. “Somewhere quiet. Somewhere solid. Somewhere without wheels, livestock, musical instruments, sacred sites, bees, cliffs, bridges, barrels, or access to public life.”
The three gods nodded. They began to walk away.
Then Eerika’s voice cracked out one final time:
“And if I hear so much as a whisper of a second pub crawl, I will personally put all three of you on kitchen duty in Eio for a month.” Modi stopped dead. Baldur looked horrified.
Torr turned slowly. “The peeling?”
“The peeling,” said Eerika.
No threat in all the Nine Realms had ever sounded so severe to Torr.
Behind them, the Folkvargr into relieved laughter, then louder laughter, then full, roaring mirth as the sheer absurdity. Even Eerika, after a long moment, let out one sharp unwilling laugh. Only one.
And that, in the end, was how the great pub crawl of Modi, Baldur, and Torr passed into local saga, not as a triumphant feast of divine revelry, but as a cautionary tale told in taverns from Eio to Mosfell, usually by someone who added,
“This is why we revere our gods, what down to earth good fun it was”.
Which, by all accounts, was exactly what the three gods set out to do.

We hope you all enjoyed a bit of a silly winter story this time around. We can't wait to see you all this weekend!

Photo by Kayleigh Dolphin

07/04/2026

Winter Story Part 6

By the time they staggered into Mosfell days later, word had outrun them. This was the trouble with pub crawls in the Folkvargr lands, the lands might be broad, but news travelled faster than drunk gods on borrowed carts.
Mosfell’s sailors were ready. When the three arrived at the harbour tavern, braced by sea wind and bad decisions, they found a sign hanging over the door:
NO AXES. NO BOATS. NO BEE WHISTLING.
Torr read it and looked personally attacked. Modi laughed so hard he had to lean on a wall. Baldur said, with the patience of someone who had seen the night unfold in stages of worsening prophecy, “That does seem ominously specific.”
Inside, the tavern was loud, salt-worn and full of shipbuilders and sailors who had decided in advance that if the gods wanted trouble, trouble would at least buy a round first.
And for a little while, it was almost lovely.
Mosfell knew how to drink properly songs in call-and-response, fish stew, elbows on tables, the creak of ropes outside, stories of the estuary and the wider sea. Baldur sang first, voice clear and bright as a bell over dark water. The whole hall hushed. Then joined in. Modi slammed the table on the beat. Torr bellowed the chorus half a note off and twice as loud as everyone else. It became glorious. Then the bets started.
Could Modi outdrink a sailor from Mosfell?
Yes.
Could Baldur charm old Runa, the sharpest-tongued widow on the docks, into admitting he was handsome?
Also yes, though only because she said, “Aye, but don’t let it go to your head.”
Could Torr hammer a nail straight into a beam with one hit?
Yes.
That was when the first boar wandered in. No one knew whose boar it was. This was not unusual in Mosfell. Harbour towns developed their own relationship with rules and one of those rules was that occasionally a pig simply belonged to the moment. This one was enormous, brindled, and quite clearly drunk.
It had somehow got its snout into a split cask outside and now came weaving through the tavern doorway with the dreamy confidence of a creature who had seen the face of fermented destiny and liked it. The entire hall fell silent. The boar blinked at them. Then a second boar shouldered in behind it. This one was smaller, angrier and so deeply committed to its intoxication that it walked sideways for several steps before correcting course and crashing into a stool.
Torr stood up at once.
Baldur said, “No.”
Modi said, “Yes.”
Torr muttered, “Oh, for pity’s sake.” Used to the drunken boar issues of the Folkvargr.
The big boar trotted toward the hearth, snorting happily. The smaller one made for the tables with the reckless purpose of a raider seeing silver.
“Do not encourage them,” Baldur warned.
“I’m not encouraging them,” said Modi, already holding out a crust of bread. “I’m making diplomatic contact.”
The boar bit his whole hand.
Modi yelped.
The tavern erupted.
Torr, delighted beyond all reason, spread his arms and boomed, “BEHOLD. FEAST YOU BEASTS.”
The smaller boar rammed into a bench, bounced off it and shot between a sailor’s legs. Tankards flew. A woman vaulted onto a table with her drink still perfectly level. Baldur tried to intercept the larger boar with the soothing grace he usually reserved for frightened horses and emotionally unstable heroes.
“Easy now,” he murmured.
The boar burped mead into his tunic.
Modi, half laughing and half offended, declared, “They’re challenging us.”
“They are pigs,” snapped Baldur.
“Drunken pigs.”
“That does not make this better.”
Torr crouched and slapped his knees. “Come here, magnificent little warrior.”
The smaller boar came there. At speed. It hit Torr square in the thigh and sent him backward through a chair. The chair gave way with a crack. Torr, flat on his back amid splinters, stared upward in total astonishment.
“I respect him,” he said.
At this point the boars, having discovered the dropped cups, entered a new and terrible stage of their evening. They became merry. The larger one shoved its snout into an abandoned ale bucket, came up dripping foam, sneezed violently, and bolted toward the open door. The smaller one saw movement, assumed betrayal, and charged after it. Unfortunately, this path took it across the musicians’ corner, under a trestle table, over a fisherman’s foot, and directly into Modi’s knees.
Modi toppled forward, grabbed the edge of the trestle to save himself, and instead pulled the whole thing down. Bread, fish bones, mugs and one extremely offended candleholder scattered across the floor.
The bigger boar squealed in triumph and leapt onto the fallen tabletop.
“Why,” Baldur demanded of the universe, “is it agile?”
The answer came when the tabletop slid. The boar rode it halfway across the hall like a king on a ship’s deck, slammed into the barrel stack by the wall, and knocked loose a small cask. Mead spilled. The smaller boar shrieked with joy and skidded into it, legs splaying wildly as if the floor itself had become an enemy. Three sailors cheered. Someone started taking bets.
Torr got back up, saw the smaller boar sliding through the puddle, and shouted, “It’s doing battle with the sea!”
“It is in a tavern!” Baldur shouted back.
Outside, things got worse. Because the smell of spilled mead had drawn more animals from somewhere up the lane. A third boar appeared in the doorway. Then a fourth.
Not wild boars. Village boars. Broad-backed, mud-flecked, ill-tempered creatures who had evidently spent the evening raiding brewing waste and had now come to join their countrymen in lawless celebration.
Modi whispered, awestruck, “Reinforcements.”
The four boars plunged into the hall. One went for the fish stew. One went for Torr.
One collided with a bench so hard it bounced backward and became confused at its own existence. The last one found the swinging lamp rope and bit it.
The lamp descended.
Everyone yelled.
Baldur lunged and caught it just before it smashed, holding it above his head while sidestepping a boar with all the radiant dignity of a sun god forced into barn work. Modi tried to herd two of them toward the door and only succeeded in joining the stampede. Torr grabbed one around the middle and immediately discovered that drunken boars were both stronger and slipperier than prophecy suggested. The beast wriggled free, leaving Torr clutching nothing but mud, bristles, and wounded pride.
Then came the true disaster. The biggest boar saw its reflection in a polished shield hanging on a post. It froze. It snorted. It squared up.
“No,” Baldur said, still holding the lamp.
“Yes,” breathed Modi, unable not to admire commitment.
The boar charged. It hit the shield. The shield came off the post. The post lurched. The beam above it groaned. A whole rack of drying nets slithered down over half the room, trapping two sailors, one captain, Torr’s left arm, and one boar who took this as a personal insult and began spinning like a possessed barrel.
The tavern dissolved into total chaos.
A musician was on the bar. Someone else was under it. Modi had one boar by the hind legs and was being dragged in a circle. Torr was roaring with laughter under a net while another boar stood on his stomach in triumph. Baldur, hair half-fallen loose, lamp still somehow unspilled, shouted, “Stop enjoying this!”
“I can’t!” Modi yelled back.
And that was the moment in a flash of blue light, stepping through an iridescent shimmer, Karl Eerika arrived.

Final Part Coming Tomorrow.....

06/04/2026

CATERING FOR E1

We’re pleased to let all our players know that Atlas Catering will be with us at this weekend’s event serving food throughout the day.

Here’s what will be available:

Breakfast
Sausage Sandwich/Barm - £6.00
Bacon Sandwich/Barm - £6.00
Waffles with cream & fruit – £5.00

Lunch
Loaded Jacket potatoes – £10.00

Dinner
Loaded dogs – £8.00 + £2.00 for any topping
Burgers – £8.00 + £2.00 for any topping
Loaded Shawarma Wedges – £10.00

There will also be vegan and vegetarian options available.

We cant wait to see you this coming weekend!

Here at Atlas On Set we set the standard for all TV, film, commercial and corporate location catering

06/04/2026

Winter Story Part 5

By dawn two days later they had reached Grenivik. This was where the pub crawl stopped being merely stupid and became historical.
Grenivik was famous for flowers, mead and bees so beloved they were all but Folkvargr in their own right. The Folkvargr there spoke to them with whistles and clicks, treated them with respect and understood perfectly well that one should never, ever interfere with the hives while drunk.
Modi, Baldur, and Torr arrived drunk enough to think themselves subtle. The mead at Grenivik was exquisite, given it was from Eerikas private reserve, Torr had spoken to the brewers and knowing who he was to Eerika, had told a few white lies to get them the good stuff. Fragrant, varied, golden and amber and deep bronze, infused with herbs and blossoms. Baldur nearly wept at the craftsmanship. Modi declared it a triumph of mortal civilisation. Torr drank three cups and attempted to compliment the beekeeper by bowing so deeply he headbutted a hanging ladle.
The beekeeper, a lean woman with the pitiless gaze of someone who had been stung less often than she’d deserved and knew it, poured carefully and said, “Mind yourselves around the hives.”
“Of course,” said Baldur.
“Obviously,” said Modi.
Torr, who had always been fascinated by the bee whistles, said, “Can we talk to them?”
The beekeeper stared. “No.”
“Just once?”
“No.”
“I have a gift with creatures.”
From somewhere behind them, a local muttered, “Aye, usually the gift is trauma.”
Torr put a hand over his heart. “I am wounded.”
“You will be if you go near the hives.”
This should have ended it.
Instead Modi, who had the reckless confidence of a man used to science with Modi mishaps, said, “How hard can whistling be?”
The hall went silent. Even Baldur looked alarmed.
The beekeeper said, very slowly, “Do. Not.”
Modi had already begun his latest experiment.
What followed was, according to later witnesses, not remotely close to any proper bee call. It sounded instead like a peacock trying to seduce a kettle. For one glorious second nothing happened. Then the air changed. From outside came a buzzing hum like distant war drums.
The beekeeper closed her eyes. “Oh, my war god.”
The door burst inward as a thick golden cloud of bees swarmed through the entryway with the offended unity of a tiny airborne army. Everyone in the hall moved at once. Folkvargr ducked under tables. A musician flung his lyre over his head and dove into a grain bin. Modi shouted, “Stand firm!”
Three bees hit him in the face. Torr flailed a bench over his head. Baldur, trying to be soothing, spread his hands and said, “Lovely friends! Noble little— aaah! not the ear, not the ear!”
Someone screamed, “They’re in the ale!”
Someone else screamed, “They’ve chosen violence!”
Outside, more bees had descended on the flower carts. A mule broke loose. Two barrels toppled. One lid came off a cask, and a stream of mead ran into the yard, attracting yet more bees, who became at once drunk, furious, and difficult to negotiate with.
This was not even the worst part.
The worst part was Torr deciding to reason with them. Standing in the middle of the yard, with bees in his beard and dignity long departed, he raised both hands and attempted a whistle of peace, something he had heard in passing in his earlier visits to Grenivik. It came out loud enough to startle a horse. The horse kicked a handcart. The cart rolled downhill. Into a decorative display of casks. Which collapsed into the outer fence of a small flower enclosure. Which released another wave of aggravated bees.
Baldur, fleeing with extraordinary grace for a man being pursued by approximately five hundred airborne stings, vaulted the fence, landed in a trough, slipped, and took Modi down with him. Torr tried to haul them both up and accidentally hoisted the trough instead, tipping all three gods backwards into a patch of medicinal herbs.
By the time the beekeeper’s apprentices restored order, Modi’s lip was swollen, Torr’s hair was full of petals and one bee who refused to leave, and Baldur had reached a level of luminous, stung indignation never before recorded in myth. The beekeeper stood over them with folded arms.
“Did I,” she asked, “say not to talk to the bees?”
No one answered.
“Did I perhaps,” she continued, “specifically say no?”
Baldur sat up, dripping and noble. “In fairness—”
“In fairness,” she said, “you are all banned from whistling in Grenivik for the rest of recorded time.”
Torr raised one finger. A bee stung it. He lowered it again.

Part 6 Coming Tomorrow ......

05/04/2026

Winter Story Part 4

By the time they reached Hofslond, the moon was up and silvering Lake Nacken. Under other circumstances it would have been beautiful, the water dark as glass, the forests whispering, the little lights of the village warm against the night. Under these circumstances, it was beautiful in the way that a polished stair is beautiful just before someone tumbles down it. Hofslond had a lakeside mead hall with wide porches, fresh fish, soft lanterns, and a clientele who preferred stories, song, and not being yelled at by thunderous men from the gods side of things. Baldur thrived instantly.
Within moments he was seated by the fire, being handed grilled fish by smiling villagers and asked for tales of the old days. He told stories with gentle hands and easy laughter, and the hall leaned toward him like flowers toward light.
Modi tried to do the same, but his version of “a story” quickly became “and then I leapt off the roof with two wolves and a spear,” which impressed half the hall and alarmed the other half. Torr got distracted by the lake, remembering the times he had brought Eerika here as a young girl to learn to swim and sail. Now, any sensible person standing by Lake Nacken at night, in a land overflowing with tales about strange things in the water, would have looked respectfully from shore and kept both feet on land.
Torr was not any sensible person.
“Boat,” he said.
Modi turned. “What?”
“I need a boat.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Baldur looked up from his admirers. “Absolutely not.”
Torr squinted at the water. “It’s calling to me.”
“The lake is not calling to you,” said Baldur.
Torr frowned. “It might be.”
“What is it saying?” asked Modi, already too interested.
Torr listened solemnly. “I think… ‘Torr, prove you can row standing up.’”
Baldur put his face in his hands. Ten minutes later the three of them were in a fishing boat they absolutely had not been given permission to touch. It started well, in the sense that it had not yet capsized. Modi took one oar. Baldur took the other. Torr stood in the middle like a war monument and announced himself “captain of water.”
“Sit down,” hissed Baldur.
“I am made for this.”
“You are made of this boat sinking.”
“Do you not trust me?”
“No one with functioning memory trusts you.”
They pushed out.
Immediately Modi rowed too hard on one side. Baldur corrected on the other. The boat spun in a circle. Torr spread his arms for balance, which only made him look like a weathervane built by violence.
“See?” he shouted. “Perfectly steady!”
At that exact moment something large moved under the boat.
All three froze.
The water bulged once, smooth and vast.
A ripple rolled out into moonlight.
Torr whispered, “What was that?”
From shore, a fisherman cupped his hands and bellowed, “IF IT WAKES UP, YOU’RE PAYING FOR EVERY BOAT IN THIS VILLAGE!”
That did not clarify matters.
Modi panicked first, which for Modi looked exactly like enthusiasm.
“ROW!”
“I am rowing!”
“ROW BETTER!”
“YOU ROW BETTER!”
Baldur, still somehow the prettiest person in crisis, hissed, “Stop shouting! If there’s really something beneath us”
The boat lurched. Torr tried to sit down too fast. Instead, he sat on Baldur. Baldur lost an oar. Modi laughed so hard he dropped the other one.
The boat drifted sideways into a dock post with a crack loud enough to wake half of Hofslond and perhaps mercifully, frighten whatever thing had been considering them from below.
They were dragged ashore by three furious fisherfolk, one old grandmother with terrifying forearms and a teenager who kept saying, in a voice of complete disbelief, “Are those actually gods?”
Torr, sopping wet to the knees, said with dignity, “We were conducting a blessing.”
The grandmother smacked him with a net and sent them to bed in one of the tavern rooms. But it was no matter, Torr was excited to take his two companions to meet the bees of Grenivik.
Part 5 coming tomorrow...

04/04/2026

Winter Story Part 3

Toft was a mining town, hard as iron and plain as a hammer. The Folkvargr there liked things straightforward, honest labour, solid walls, good drink, no nonsense. Which is precisely why the arrival of Modi, Baldur, and Torr counted as an act of war. They entered Toft’s tavern at the hour when miners wanted silence, stew, and ale. Modi kicked the door open too hard. Baldur apologised before the door had even finished swinging. Torr ducked through the frame and immediately hit his head on a hanging antler.
A miner looked up from his mug. “You three look like trouble.”
Modi grinned. “Only the interesting sort.”
“You’re loud.”
“We bring revelry.”
“You bring concussions.”
Torr, rubbing his head, leaned in and whispered with the force of a thunderclap, “Do you have the dark beer?”
The tavern did have dark beer.
This was unfortunate.
Toft’s brew was deep, bitter, strong, and honest enough to strip paint from shields. Modi adored it at once. Torr declared it “a drink you could build bridges with.” Baldur, who had the polished taste of someone favoured by beauty and spring light, took one polite sip and looked briefly betrayed by reality. Still, he persevered. Because Baldur, for all his grace, had one fatal flaw, after the third drink, he became encouraging. And a cheerful Baldur encouraging other people’s bad ideas was more dangerous than Torr with a thunder mood.
“Another round,” Baldur said, smiling brightly.
The miners roared approval.
“Another contest,” said Modi.
The miners roared louder.
Torr leaned over the table. “What sort?”
The miner opposite him grinned slowly. “Balance.”
Now, balance in Toft did not mean philosophical moderation or emotional resilience. It meant standing on an upturned barrel while holding a full tankard and enduring increasingly rude attempts to make you fall over.
Modi went first and lasted admirably until Baldur, trying to be supportive, called, “Relax your shoulders!” at which point Modi turned to explain why his shoulders were a gift to warfare and promptly fell backwards into a tray of onions.
Torr went second and remained atop the barrel for almost a full minute, unmoving, vast, serene until someone shouted, “Bet you can’t do it one-legged!”
Torr, who had never in his life responded appropriately to a dare, lifted one foot and immediately crashed through a table. Baldur went last. The entire tavern expected him to fail. Instead, he stood on the barrel as if he’d been born there, one hand behind his back, one holding the tankard aloft, smiling in unearthly poise while miners circled him, threw nutshells, heckled his parentage, insulted his hair, and accused him of cheating by being divinely symmetrical. Baldur beamed. Then Torr, inspired and deeply drunk, shouted, “Dance on it!” Baldur tried. The barrel shot out from under him like a launched log.
He landed on Modi. Modi landed on a miner. The miner landed through a card table. The card table upended into the hearth. Nothing caught fire, but six men lost their drinks, one woman lost a winning hand, and somebody’s pet ferret escaped into the rafters.
By the time the gods were politely, firmly, and very physically escorted out of Toft, Torr had acquired a helmet he insisted was a prize, Modi had one boot missing, and Baldur was still apologising to a woman whose knitting had somehow ended up nailed to a wall.
The divine pub crawl marches on to Hofslond.
Part 4 coming tomorrow...

03/04/2026

Winter Story Part 2

It began, as all terrible divine ideas do, with confidence. Not wisdom. Not planning. Certainly not permission.
Confidence.
The evening sun hung gold over Eio, touching the roofs in soft fire, while the Folkvargr went about their business with the rough, practical dignity of people who had survived Ragnarok and expected to survive whatever came next as well. Two guards stood by the path discussing whether Boat Bjorn was banned from attempting “sky sailing” again.
And into this perfectly normal scene came three gods with the expressions of men who had just invented disaster.
Modi strode first, chest out, all swagger and booming laughter, as if the world itself had challenged him to a drinking contest and he had taken it personally. Baldur followed in clean golden grace, smiling the sort of smile that made innkeepers forgive unpaid tabs before he’d even ordered. Torr came last, broad-shouldered, red-cheeked, carrying the dangerous air of someone who looked like he ought to be the sensible one and absolutely was not.
They halted outside the tavern in Eio. Modi slapped both palms together.
“Right,” he declared, as though unveiling a military campaign. “We shall honour the Folkvargr.”
Baldur tilted his head. “By blessing their shrines?”
“No.”
“By praising their resilience?”
“No.”
Torr brightened. “By sampling every mead hall in the lands until one of us sees the ancestors?”
Modi pointed at him. “Exactly.”
Baldur’s expression shifted into the beatific calm of a man who knew this was a bad idea but had been outvoted by idiots. “A cultural exchange.”
“A sacred duty,” said Torr.
“A pub crawl,” said Modi.
That settled it.
The first tavern welcomed them the way all Folkvargr taverns welcomed strangers with caution, politeness, and a subtle readiness to hit them with a stool if needed.
The innkeeper, a woman built like she could lift a boar one-handed, eyed them from behind a polished wooden bar.
“You ask before entering,” she reminded them.
Baldur immediately offered proper courtesy, hand open, voice warm. “Thank you. May we come in peace?”
Modi, not to be outdone, tried to imitate the local custom by dramatically offering the hilt of his dagger with such force that he nearly jabbed Torr in the stomach.
Torr, meanwhile, had misunderstood entirely and offered the innkeeper an entire axe. There was a long pause.
The innkeeper looked at Baldur. “You can come in.”
She looked at Modi. “You can try not to break anything.”
Then she looked at Torr and said, “No.”
Torr blinked. “No?”
“No axes in my mead hall.”
“It’s ceremonial.”
“It’s enormous.”
“It’s festive.”
“It stays outside.”
Torr sighed like a wronged mountain and leaned the axe by the door, where it looked like a threat to architecture. Inside, they were served the local drink. Honeyed mead. Strong. Golden. Deep enough to convince a man he had always been right. Modi drank first and slammed the tankard down.
“Excellent,” he said.
Baldur drank and smiled. “Delicate. Floral. Excellent finish.”
Torr drank, stared into the distance for a moment, then said, “I can hear colours.”
The tavern approved. Within fifteen minutes Modi had arm-wrestled three guards, lost to a shrine aide, and started a song that had six verses, none of which rhymed. Baldur had somehow become the centre of a circle of laughing locals listening to him retell a story about a fish, a priest, and a misunderstanding involving a goat. Torr had discovered the tavern cat and was in tears because “she is shaped like weather.” The crawl should have ended there.
Instead, Modi stood on a bench and shouted, “To Toft!”
The whole tavern shouted back, “No!”
But they were gods, and gods hear “no” as “go louder.”

Part 3 coming tomorrow...

02/04/2026

Winter Story Part 1

Before it became a disaster, it was a mystery.
The winter wind moved thin and cold over the old stones, the ritual henge stood in its ring of age black pillars, each carved deep with runes that had outlasted kings, storms and the end of the world itself. In winter light the place should have felt deadened, hushed under frost and silence. Instead it crackled.
There was a charge in the air around the stones now, a dry prickle along the skin, as though a storm had lost its way and taken to walking in circles between the pillars. The runes seemed to hold it, pass it, murmur it from one stone to the next. Now and then a faint thread of pale light would move across the carved grooves, slipping from one standing stone to another so quickly the eye almost doubted it. It was not lightning. It was not fire. It was something subtle and wrong. A sense that the henge was awake, in a manner it had not been before and was quietly doing something no one had asked it to do.
Most troubling of all was Hagalaz.
The rune had gone brighter. Not blazing, not enough for any dramatic fool to point and shout prophecy, but brighter all the same. A cold, steady shine sat in its grooves now, stronger than it had any right to be in the dim days of winter. Some said it was only the new lights set around the henge making tricks of shadow and contrast. Others said that explanation would have been more comforting if the brightness had not persisted when the lamps were out. Nobody knew why it had changed. Nobody knew whether it meant anything. And nobody, which was perhaps worst of all, could agree on whether the charge in the air had started before the brightening or after.
Modi had seen it happen.
Not the first moment, not some grand revelation with the heavens splitting above the stones, but enough. He had been there at dawn hauling timber for repairs because Karl Eerika, in one of her many acts of practical tyranny, had decided that “if you’ve enough strength to boast, you’ve enough strength to carry something useful.” So he had spent half the week doing winter chores across Eio and its outskirts, chopping frozen wood, shifting stores, clearing paths, mending fences, hauling stone, and being told at regular intervals that divine status did not excuse poor stacking technique.
It was while he was hauling the wood that he had paused by the henge and felt the hairs rise on his arms.
The runes had hummed.
Not audibly, not quite, but in the bones. A sensation like distant thunder trapped under the skin. He had watched a pale charge skitter along one carved line, leap to the next stone and vanish into Hagalaz, which answered with a low gleam from within the groove itself. Modi had stared for a long moment, as the air around the ring sharpened and tightened, alive with the feeling of held breath.
He did what any thoughtful and responsible divine guardian would have done in that moment.
He reported none of it properly, muttered that the henge was being unsettling on purpose and decided he needed to be somewhere else immediately. Eerika, naturally, had taken the opposite view.
“If the henge is acting strange,” she had said with the terrible calm of someone assigning work, “then I want extra watch on it, the paths cleared, the lamps filled, the stores checked, and the snow trench by the east stones dug out before sunset.”
Modi had stared at her in disbelief. “That is not fewer chores. That is more chores.”
“Yes,” Eerika had said.
“I am a god.”
“And yet there is still snow in the trench.”
That had been the end of the discussion.
By sunset Modi had made a decision, if the henge was going to crackle ominously, Hagalaz was going to glow for reasons no one understood and Eerika was going to respond by inventing ever more offensive forms of winter labour, then the only sane course of action was immediate strategic absence.
Which was how he went looking for Baldur and Torr with the expression of a man about to improve his evening. That’s how it all began......

Part 2 coming tomorrow.