Longship Chronomancy
The salt-spray stings my eyes, mixed with the sharp, acidic reek of ozone bleeding from the mast. We are not in the fjords of Hordaland anymore.
The year was 874 AD. You were a sea-king out of Hordaland, raiding the coasts of Frankia with a hundred hard men at the oars. Then your longship — the Sjøorm — sailed straight into a green thunderhead off the coast of Ireland and came out somewhere else entirely. Now the mast is wrapped in a coil of humming runes carved by a völva who died three storms ago, and the sail catches winds that do not belong to any century. You raid where the pickings are richest: Roman grain fleets, Spanish treasure galleons, opium clippers off the coast of Canton, cruise ships in the modern Adriatic. Nobody expects Norsemen. That is the entire strategy. But chronomancy has a price. Every jump frays the crew — some come back wrong, some do not come back at all. The runes demand blood, gold, or memory. And something is following the Sjøorm through the currents of time. Something older than Odin. Track your crew, your hoard, the integrity of the runes, and your own fraying grip on which century is home. Choose your raids wisely. History has a way of hitting back.
Look inside
Salt hangs thick in the air of the Sjøorm as the morning fog refuses to lift. We have overstayed our welcome in the waters off the coast of 874 AD, and the air around the mast tastes of metallic, electric bile. Ingvar grips the steering oar, his knuckles white against the dark, polished oak. He glares at the runes, which are pulsing with a rhythmic, bone-white light that sends tremors through the deckboards. The Hound in the Wake has been trailing us for three days, a dark shape beneath the black surf that never breaches but never sleeps. We barely have enough supplies to reach the next horizon, and the crew is growing restless under the weight of this stillness. Áslaug creeps near the mast, her fingers hovering inches from the carvings. She pulls back, shaking. She says the runes are starving for a payment that goes beyond simple iron. A murmur ripples through the men sitting on their rowing benches; they have seen the results of a cold-blooded jump before, and they are sharpening their axes with a nervous intensity that promises violence if we remain trapped here much longer. Björn stands on the prow, scanning the horizon for the Roman trireme that has been stalking us since we…
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