The garrison training yard was a rectangle of packed earth behind the largest of Járnvik’s permanent structures — a long hall that served as barracks, meeting room, and storage depending on the season and the need.
The yard had a weapons rack along the eastern wall, a series of striking posts worn smooth at head and chest height, and a rope-and-post perimeter that existed less to define the space than to communicate that the space was taken seriously. Someone had carved runes into the four corner posts. Eirik could read about a third of them.
He took it all in from his father’s shoulders on a cold morning in early spring, the settlement’s first real thaw turning the path outside to mud but leaving the packed training earth surprisingly solid — years of cultivation ?nd ground into it, his father explained. The yard smelled faintly sharp, almost like air after lightning.
Interesting.
The garrison’s other members were already there when they arrived. Seven men and two women, ranging from perhaps twenty to perhaps fifty, moving through warm-ups with the easy competence of people who had done this long enough that their bodies remembered even when their minds wandered.
One of the younger guards straightened a little when Bj?rn stepped into the yard — not stiff, not formal, just the automatic adjustment of someone very aware of who the senior blade in the room was.
Huscarl, Eirik thought. Yeah. That tracked.
Ulf was there, of course — thick through the neck and built like a man who trusted shields more than speed. Ragna worked through spear drills off to the side, her stance still a little tighter than it had been before the bite. Still recovering, then. Two younger guards — twins, maybe — were already breathing hard.
Járnvik’s finest.
They noticed Bj?rn’s arrival. They noticed Eirik too — the brief recalibration, eyes tracking and then politely not tracking. They were trying to make it unremarkable.
Eirik noticed the effort and decided he liked them better for it.
Bj?rn set him down at the yard’s edge and crouched to eye level.
“Watch,” he said in the teaching voice. “Then try. Then watch again. That’s how it goes.”
“What am I trying?” Eirik asked.
Bj?rn stood and walked to the center of the yard. He planted his feet at shoulder width and simply… settled.
Then he breathed out.
It wasn’t dramatic. If you didn’t know what to look for, you might have missed it. But Eirik felt the shift immediately — ?nd drawing down, weight sinking, something about the air around Bj?rn growing heavier and more present.
The two nearest guards drifted half a step back without seeming to notice they’d done it.
Then Bj?rn moved.
Not fast — this was clearly slowed for demonstration — but even slowed, it was different. Three steps that should have been six. No wasted motion. No extra weight. His fist met the training post with a dull, heavy sound that didn’t match a normal human strike.
The post moved.
It was sunk two feet into the ground.
The post moved.
Eirik felt something in his chest lean forward.
Not the Wyrd.
Him.
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Oh, he wanted to learn that.
Bj?rn returned to his starting position and looked mildly pleased with himself.
“Stance first,” he said. “Everything comes from the stance. Skills come later. First you build the body that can carry them.”
That… made a lot of sense, actually.
Eirik pushed himself to his feet and walked to the center of the yard. He was seventeen months old and roughly knee-high on his father.
The garrison maintained heroic levels of professionalism.
Bj?rn adjusted his feet by fractions — toe angle, weight distribution, hips — with the patient hands of someone who understood that at this age, teaching was mostly physical.
Then he stepped back.
“Breathe out. Pull your ?nd down. Like we practiced.”
Eirik exhaled and reached for the warmth in his sternum.
Down.
Toward his feet.
Toward the ground.
For a moment — just a moment — something clicked.
The earth beneath him stopped feeling like just dirt and started feeling… present. Connected. Like his weight actually meant something to it.
It lasted maybe three seconds.
Then it slipped.
But it had been there.
Three seconds.
Pathetic.
…also the best thing he’d done all week.
? Ding ?
? Ding ?
? RúNA ACQUIRED ?
Rúna: Earthroot (Lv. 1) [ Grár — Common ]
You can briefly anchor your ?nd-current into the ground, improving balance and stance stability.
Duration: ~3 seconds (current)
S?fnun: + (gained)
The earth is patient. You are not—yet.
? The Wyrd Stirs ?
? ACHIEVEMENT EARNED ?
First Steps [ Grár — Common ]
Achieved deliberate ?nd-grounding before age two under direct cultivation instruction.
Effect: Minor increase to early balance learning rate
S?fnun: + (bonus)
The foundation is everything.
Bj?rn watched him for a long moment after the notification faded. The look wasn’t surprise exactly.
More like… recalculating.
Then the corner of his mouth ticked upward.
“Again,” he said.
Bj?rn left for the first time in the third week of spring.
He prepared for three days beforehand — quiet, methodical work folded into the normal rhythm of the house. Eirik paid attention the way he always did when his father started moving with purpose.
This wasn’t a normal perimeter run.
The pack was too big.
The weapon choices were wrong for routine garrison work.
And then Bj?rn opened the locked chest beneath the sleeping alcove.
Eirik had known something lived in there. The ?nd density had given that away weeks ago. But seeing it was different.
A sword.
Long. Two-handed. Plain in the way only very expensive steel got to be plain. The grip had been rewrapped so many times the original leather was long gone.
Bj?rn held it the way you hold something your body remembers better than your mind does.
Then he packed it away without comment.
Two versions of my father, Eirik thought.
The one Járnvik sees.
The one that goes out that door.
On the third morning Bj?rn crouched in the doorway.
“I’ll be gone until summer,” he said. “You look after your mother.”
“Where are you going?”
Bj?rn considered that.
“Culling run.”
“Past the mapped territories?”
A shorter pause.
“Some.”
The healer’s house became Eirik’s morning territory after that.
It was the most ?nd-thick building in Járnvik outside the shrine. Herbs, salves, treated cloth — years of careful work had left the whole place humming faintly at the edges of his senses.
Sigrid moved through it with the calm confidence of someone who had done this work a long time.
Most of what she treated was ordinary — split hands, fevers, strained joints. She handled all of it smoothly, efficiently, nothing wasted.
Except once.
Ragna came in pale and tight-jawed, supported between two guards. Something out past the patrol lines had bitten deep — deep enough that even Eirik, with toddler anatomy knowledge, knew it was bad.
Sigrid looked at the wound for three seconds.
Then she told the others to wait outside.
Both hands hovered over the injury.
The room shifted.
Eirik felt the ?nd move — not surge, not flare — but gather. Focus. Draw inward with quiet purpose.
Four minutes later, the wound was closed.
Not slowed.
Not assisted.
Closed.
Ragna stared at her own arm like it had personally betrayed her understanding of the world.
Sigrid wrapped the dressing neatly.
“This didn’t require anything remarkable,” her tone said very clearly. “You will all behave accordingly.”
Ragna did not look convinced.
After she left, Sigrid flexed her fingers once — small, absent — like it had cost her more than she planned to admit.
Then her gaze slid to Eirik, and her mouth softened just a fraction.
“Come,” she said. “Midday meal.”
He wasn’t actually hungry.
…but he went anyway.
Bj?rn returned in early summer.
Tired.
Not injured — Eirik checked immediately — but run down in that deep way that came from long work near the edge of your limits.
There was also a pouch at his belt.
It clinked wrong.
Dense. Heavy. Not-from-here.
Eirik didn’t know what was inside yet.
But he was very, very interested.
He was seventeen months old.
He had:
two Blár skills
two Grár skills
a growing cultivation base
and a rapidly expanding list of questions about his parents
The Wyrd was patient.
Eirik was learning to be.
He could wait.