· · · ? · · ·
In his previous life, Ethan Cole had played organized football from age twelve through his sophomore year of college. This meant he had attended a small lifetime’s worth of structured practice. Film. Playbooks. Route trees. Coaches yelling about angles like geometry could be screamed into your bones.
Járnvik’s children played a game called—so far as Eirik could determine—hit the other children until they fall down and then run somewhere.
The rules, if rules existed, were not written anywhere.
He joined on a Tuesday in early summer because Leif appeared at his door and announced they were doing it now, and Leif’s way of announcing things had a strange gravity. Not doing the thing took more effort than doing it.
The other children were Astrid, two boys from garrison households named óli and Finn (both roughly Leif’s size and twice his loudness), and a younger girl named Brynja who seemed to be there because she had followed her brother and nobody had successfully sent her away yet.
The first five minutes were enlightening.
There was no boundary Eirik could identify. No teams, except for the brief and shifting alliances formed by whoever had just been hit. At one point óli shoulder-checked Leif, Leif hit him back, and then they were briefly on the same side until Astrid came in from nowhere and changed the whole problem.
Brynja—four and fearless in the way only the very young could be—ran straight through the chaos at random intervals, shrieking like she was winning a war.
Eirik watched for thirty seconds from the edge, because watching was as natural to him as breathing.
There are no set plays, he thought. No positions. No line. Leif just took a pinecone to the face and laughed like it was a compliment. This is complete chaos. This is… fun.
He went in.
And he was good at it.
Not just because of old instincts—though reading bodies in motion translated beautifully—but because Járnvik was his ground. He knew where roots hid. Where the mud swallowed ankles. Where the slope tried to trick you if you cut too tight.
He knew Astrid always came in hard on the first hit.
He knew Leif looked like he was going right until he didn’t.
By the end of the afternoon, everyone was muddy, Finn had a bruise shaped like somebody’s elbow, and óli wore his split lip like a medal.
Eirik came away with two conclusions.
First: organized sport had eventually become work. Something he had loved, then something he had endured, then something he had walked away from. This—this was play. Real play. The kind that stayed play the whole time.
Second: Leif was unnervingly good at it, and somehow that fit him perfectly.
“How are you so fast?” Eirik asked on the walk back.
“I’m not fast,” Leif said. “I just go where people aren’t.”
“That’s being fast.”
“No,” Leif insisted. “Fast is running quickly. I run normal. I just pick the place where the other person isn’t yet.”
Eirik turned that over all the way home and decided Leif had described Ferd in the most Leif way possible and would never realize it.
· · · ? · · ·
The round started, like most things in Eirik’s life did, without anyone formally deciding it had started.
He wandered.
Járnvik was small enough that you couldn’t truly vanish in it—twenty-odd buildings, a handful of paths, and a community with the collective eyesight of a hawk. Everyone knew everyone else’s child. If you were missing, you were missing loudly.
So Eirik could move through the village in the mornings like he owned it, and in a way, he did. He learned it the way you learned a place by living inside it: not as a map, but as a set of familiar smells and sounds and faces.
Gunnar’s smithy was the first regular stop.
Astrid’s father was a big man—shorter than Bj?rn, but built like a door you’d have to negotiate with. His arms looked permanent. His hands looked like they had been forged instead of grown.
Conversation in a smithy happened in small windows between strikes.
Eirik learned to arrive with patience.
He sat on the stone just inside the door and watched.
Sometimes he asked questions. Gunnar answered in the same way he did everything else: plain, direct, like the truth didn’t need decoration to be worth hearing.
“What’s the difference between working it hot and working it cold?” Eirik asked one morning.
Gunnar set down the hammer. Picked it up. Set it down again, like the question had made him pause long enough to remember he had hands.
“Hot moves,” he said. “Cold shapes.”
“Moves like—opens up?”
“Opens up. Takes the mark. Cold just locks what’s already there.” He tapped the blade on the anvil. “You put the character in while it’s hot.”
Eirik sat with that.
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Then: “Is cultivation like that?”
Gunnar stared at him for a long moment, the way men did when deciding whether a child had said something clever or whether they needed more sleep.
“At least this,” Gunnar said finally. “Metal doesn’t argue.”
He went back to work.
Eirik watched the fire.
There was always ?nd in fire—low and steady, like a breathing thing. He couldn’t use that yet. But he could feel it, and that was the beginning of most roads.
? Ding ?
? RúNA ACQUIRED ?
Rúna: Material Sense (Lv. 1) [ Grár — Common ]
You can feel the ?nd-signature of worked materials—metal, wood, stone—and begin to read their nature by sense rather than sight alone.
S?fnun: + (gained)
The forge taught you without meaning to.
· · · ? · · ·
The shrine was the second stop—though Eirik hadn’t planned it, and wasn’t entirely sure when it became a habit.
It started with questions.
Questions about the Wyrd. About grades. About the old runes at the base of the shrine walls. About why the world seemed layered like an old story told over itself.
Haldis answered questions the way she did everything else: sparingly, but truly.
She didn’t answer every question. She had a sense for which ones would plant weeds.
But she answered enough that Eirik kept coming back.
“The runes on the corner posts,” he said one morning, sitting on the low bench while she worked in the back. “The ones I can’t read yet. What system are they?”
Haldis didn’t stop working. “Which system do you think?”
“They’re not Járnvik script. The ones I can read are. The older ones—different hand. Different bones.”
“Good,” she said. “And?”
“It means the shrine is older than the village. Someone built this before Járnvik knew it was going to exist.”
Haldis finally turned, those eyes like cold water over stone.
“You’re four.”
“Almost,” Eirik said, because he was.
She studied him for a long moment, then said, “Come back the third morning of each week. I’ll have something for you.”
? Ding ?
? RúNA ACQUIRED ?
Rúna: Rune-Reader (Lv. 1) [ Grár — Common ]
You can recognize and begin to interpret rune-script in the common Járnvik hand—and identify the older shrine-work as a distinct writing system.
S?fnun: + (gained)
Knowledge carved in stone waits for someone to return and read it.
· · · ? · · ·
The kitchen incident happened because Eirik’s hands itched to try.
Not because the garrison needed saving from starvation.
Frida—the garrison cook—didn’t get sick often, and when she did, the garrison’s backup solutions were… blunt. Edible in the way bark was edible if you were desperate.
But on one autumn afternoon, Eirik followed Leif into the hall because the smell coming out of the kitchen was interesting. Not wrong, exactly. Just… uncertain.
There was a pot simmering. Root vegetables. Something like broth.
An older garrison man—Sigurd, óli’s father—stood over it with the look of a man trying to win a fight against food.
Eirik drifted closer.
Sigurd stirred once, tasted, grimaced like the soup had insulted his ancestors, and muttered something about how Frida was clearly a sorceress.
Eirik stood at the edge of the hearth and watched.
Then—quietly, carefully—he began doing what he always did when something in front of him wanted improving.
Not taking over.
Just… nudging.
He cracked a pinch of dried herb between his fingers and let the scent rise. He recognized it from his mother’s shelf. He didn’t have the perfect word for it yet, but he knew what it did.
He pointed.
Sigurd frowned. “What?”
“That,” Eirik said, and then—because speaking was still sometimes like wrestling a net—he added, “Small. Not much. Make it better.”
Leif leaned in. “He means it tastes like socks.”
“It does not taste like socks,” Sigurd snapped automatically, which meant it absolutely tasted like socks.
Eirik offered the herb. Sigurd stared at it suspiciously.
Then, because Sigurd was a garrison man and garrison men would rather die than admit they needed help from a child, he took it anyway, tossed in a pinch, stirred, tasted again—
—and paused.
He didn’t smile. Sigurd wasn’t built like that.
But he took a second spoonful.
Then he grunted, like he’d discovered a tool that wasn’t stupid.
“What’s it called?” Sigurd asked.
Eirik hesitated.
He hadn’t named it.
He was four.
“It’s… soup,” he said.
Sigurd stared at him, then took another bite. “Make that again,” he said, which in Járnvik language meant: this was good and I hate that I’m acknowledging it.
Bj?rn arrived later, took one bite, and said nothing at all.
Which meant he approved.
Sigrid heard about it at home and fixed Eirik with a look that was half warning, half fondness.
“You weren’t stirring pots alone, were you?”
“No,” Eirik said quickly. “I just… helped.”
Her eyes narrowed, but the corner of her mouth softened. “Good. Help is allowed.”
? Ding ?
? RúNA ACQUIRED ?
Rúna: Cook (Lv. 1) [ Grár — Common ]
You can improve food with instinct, restraint, and the sense to leave well enough alone.
S?fnun: + (gained)
This is rarer than it sounds.
· · · ? · · ·
The merge didn’t happen immediately.
The merge happened because curiosity always came back around.
On a frost-morning—white rooftops, breath visible—Eirik ended up at the shrine with Haldis working in the back.
The Wyrd-stone sat in the center like it always had: quiet, warm, older than the room holding it.
Eirik stood before it and felt that familiar thickness in the air, as if the world was listening harder here.
He thought: merge.
Cook and Material Sense.
Two small patterns in him, both built on attention.
Both built on learning what things were by being close to them.
They slid toward each other—not forced, not yanked—just finding a shared shape and deciding to become one.
? The Wyrd Stirs ?
? SKILL MERGE COMPLETE ?
Cook (Lv. 1) + Material Sense (Lv. 1) → Appraiser’s Touch (Lv. 1) [ Grár — Common ]
You can sense the rough quality of mundane materials and ingredients: freshness, flaws, density, and the imprint of how something was made.
Passive: Identify (basic)
S?fnun: + (merge bonus)
The Wyrd notes: an odd path. Not an invalid one.
He stood a moment after the warmth settled, feeling the new skill sit into him like a small tool placed in the right slot.
Haldis appeared in the doorway, looked at him, then at the stone, then back at him.
“Merge?” she asked.
Eirik nodded. “Cook and Material Sense.”
A pause. “And?”
“Appraiser’s Touch.”
Her expression shifted—subtle, but real.
Like someone adjusting how far ahead they were looking.
“Come back Thursday,” she said. “I have different things to teach you than I thought.”
Eirik walked home through the frost-bright village, and everything felt slightly clearer around the edges—not louder, not dramatic. Just… more readable.
Rí was on the front step when he returned, because Rí existed wherever she was not supposed to be.
She held up a fistful of frost-whitened grass like she’d discovered treasure.
“Eirik,” she announced. “Look.”
“I see it,” he said.
“It’s cold.”
“It is.”
“Why?”
He sat beside her and picked up a leaf glazed in white. His new sense didn’t have much to say about frost—water and cold were simple things—but his hand warmed it anyway, and the edge melted.
Rí watched like she was witnessing magic.
“Frost is what happens when the air gets cold enough that the water stops moving and settles,” Eirik said. “Your warmth wakes it back up.”
Rí considered this gravely.
Then she leaned forward and breathed on the leaf.
A tiny melt.
A bead of water.
Her eyes went wide.
“I did it,” she whispered.
“You did.”
Rí beamed like she’d just invented fire, then sprinted inside yelling about frost at the top of her lungs.
Eirik stayed on the step a moment longer, looking at the village.
Four years old.
The round had started without anyone calling it a round—just a curious child wandering, asking, watching, trying.
And the world paying him back in the only currency the Wyrd respected:
attention.
effort.
showing up.
He stood.
Went to the yard.
And practiced his Earthroot until his legs shook.