The wind combed low across the pack ice, dry snow hissing into drifts that reformed as fast as they broke. Somewhere under that hiss was another sound, wet and dragging, and it was getting closer.
What Crawled From the Ice
It came from the direction of the Einherjar, low against the snow, pulling itself forward on limbs that were not quite legs. A pale, ridged thing, tentacled where a face should be, hauling its own weight across the ice with the patient single-mindedness of something that had already decided how this ended, except that it hadn't, not really. It was already dying. Something had gotten to it first, and it was crawling anyway, on momentum alone.
It was wrong before it was anything else. The party recognized the shape from the tracks in Midgard, from the smoking rat in the Runevault trap, from every quiet unease since the Lamentor's sea burial. An Intellect Devourer, dragging itself across open ice in broad daylight, as if it no longer cared whether it was seen.
Punko reached for a spell to finish it at range. What came out of his hands was not that spell. The magic bent sideways the way it sometimes does with him, and vines erupted from the ice underfoot and wound tight around his own legs, rooting him in place while the devourer kept dragging itself closer. He fought the vines. The vines were winning.
It did not reach him regardless. One clean strike from the rest of the party ended the crawling, and the ice took the rest. Punko stayed rooted a while longer, working himself free of his own spellwork in the settling quiet.
Pufflin Colours
The Einherjar sat locked in the pack ice ahead, its Goliath lines still unmistakable beneath a coat of frost, Grimfeather banners snapping stiff from the rigging. Figures moved on the ice at the ship's bow, small against the hull, chipping at something with tools too crude for the work. The party had barely closed half the distance when the first warning came, sharp and unambiguous: come no closer, or be treated as an enemy.
The proof followed the words. Along the deck rail, a line of cannons swung to bear, and from their mouths came puffins, armored and entirely undeterred by having just been fired out of a cannon, landing in the snow in neat combat rows. Behind them, more of the Grimfeather tribe took up position along the hull, readying for a fight they clearly expected to win.
The party tried reason first. They had killed an Intellect Devourer not an hour before, they said, and could prove it. The Grimfeather line did not lower a single weapon.
The Giant That Wasn't
Quertex went for the deck instead of a weapon, drew a single card without knowing what it held, and turned it face out toward the ship. Whatever came through the card was whatever came through the card. He spoke the word that woke it and left the rest to luck.
Luck produced a fire giant, unfolding onto the ice a short way off, easily twice the height of the ship's mast, radiating a heat that fogged the air around it. It did not move. It did not need to. It simply stood there, planted at the party's back like a threat already delivered, while the Grimfeather line took its measure. A ripple went through them, wings half-spread, weapons lowering by inches. Somewhere along the line, a helmet tipped back to take in the whole height of the thing, and a name went through the ranks in a tone reserved for gods: Odin. As far as the Pufflins knew, there was only the one kind of giant that stood that tall, and it wore one face.
The reverence held for a long time. The Grimfeather line stayed lowered, murmuring among themselves, some clearly arguing for surrender on the spot. It was the giant's stillness that finally wore the illusion down, not any sudden flash of insight. Long minutes of watching a god stand in one place, never shifting his weight, never breathing, his shadow never quite matching the light, before the doubt finally won out over the awe. The god became a picture again, thinned, flickered, and was gone, and the cannons were still loaded, and now the pufflins were insulted as well as armed.
Champion Noot Noot
Krukk Thickbeak did not order the charge the fire giant's collapse should have earned. Instead he asked each of them, in turn, to name a flaw of their own. Nobody explained why. The party answered anyway, one after another, and each answer seemed to satisfy something in him a little more than the last.
Whatever the test had been for, they had passed it. Krukk lowered whatever he had been about to raise, and offered something else instead: one fighter against one fighter, and let that decide it, rather than a field full of armored puffins against a party that had just tried to lie to them with a fire giant.
The Grimfeather tribe put forward their champion. Noot Noot stepped to the front of the line with the unhurried confidence of something that had never once lost this argument, small, armored, and entirely serious about it.
Nithgrea stepped forward to answer. Yumi, small and foxform, rode the whole fight draped across her shoulders like a living scarf, tail flicking at the exact moments that mattered, a second set of eyes and a second set of teeth when Noot Noot pressed too close. At the edge of the ring, Tinnitus worked his own angle, humming something under his breath and easing a little extra steel into Nithgrea's swings with a look of total innocence, as if a one-on-one duel had ever been only one-on-one where he was concerned.
It was not the easy thing it should have been. Partway through, Champion Noot Noot struck with a light that had no business coming out of a puffin, a burst of radiant force driven into the blow the way Nithgrea drove her own smites home, except the source behind it answered to some other name entirely. It landed hard. Nithgrea staggered, found her feet, and finished the fight anyway, closer to falling than she let it show. Champion Noot Noot went down first, and the Grimfeather line, true to its word, lowered its spears.
The Toll of These Waters
Aboard the Einherjar, the party found the rest of the story. A cage had been lashed to the top deck, and inside it sat a knot of Goliath crew, watching the deck below them without much hope of changing anything about their situation. The rest of the crew were out on the ice at the bow, under guard, still chipping without tools suited to the job at the pack ice locking the hull in place. Captain Garth Eeld stood apart from both groups, unbound but clearly not free to leave.
The terms that ended it were simple. The Pufflins would release the Goliath crew, cage and ice detail both, in exchange for one recognition: these waters belonged to the Grimfeather tribe now, and any ship crossing them would pay toll for the privilege.
Garth Eeld agreed to carry the terms to the Jarl herself, gathered what remained of her crew, and set off overland toward Midgard, leaving the Einherjar behind entirely, ceded to the tribe that had taken it.
Not all of the crew went with her. Odie Jöhn stayed behind, volunteering to guide the party onward, and made this offer at some length in a dense, rolling burr that nobody present could actually parse. He gestured south, toward the World Tree, with total confidence that this had communicated everything necessary. It had.
Before the party left the ship, the Pufflins explained why the pile of dead stacked openly on the ice beside the hull was there for anyone to see. It was the same question the party had already answered at the fire giant's collapse: name a flaw of your own. Something in the possession refused the words, every time, without fail. By that method the Pufflins had found several of the crew already carrying passengers, and had not hidden what came next. The rest of the Goliaths had watched it happen and still did not understand what they'd been looking at.
On the mast, half-buried under frost, the party found old runes cut deep into the wood, the kind that once carried power through a hull the way blood carries warmth through a body. Whatever had fed them had run dry. The runes sat cold and dark, keeping their shape and nothing else.
Good Weather Coming
They left the ship to the Pufflins and struck out south with Odie Jöhn at the front, still narrating the terrain in his own private dialect. Somewhere along the frost line, a small round shape watched them pass from atop a snowbank, whiskered and unbothered, and did not run.
A Fjellkat. Fair weather coming, if the old sign still held. Overhead, for the first time in days, the grey had a seam of pale light in it.
They smelled smoke and heard music before they saw anything at all - laughter layered over drums over something like bells, carried on air that had gone strangely warm. It grew as they closed the distance, unmistakable, a whole gathering's worth of sound.
Then the trees opened onto the World Tree itself, vast beyond scale, and the sound simply stopped being there. No fire. No crowd. Just Loki, alone at the roots, bound in iron gone the same weathered grey as the wood behind him. He looked up slowly, the look of someone rehearsing weakness for an audience he had been expecting for some time.
Whatever passed between him and the party in that first exchange, it satisfied him. The chains, it turned out, had cost him nothing to wear, and cost him nothing to stop wearing. He rose out of them the way a costume comes off, and the clearing filled in around him all at once, as if a held breath had simply been let go: a centaur with a horn at its brow, small ink-dark shapes that moved like rodents and watched like something older, a shelled thing with a bowl of water balanced on its head, a round tumbling puff of a creature, a Fjellkat curled fat and pleased by a fire that had apparently been burning the whole time, a striped shape mid-refill on its own cup, a hooded, umbrella-toting figure that had been standing at the tree line since before anyone arrived. All the sound they'd heard on the way in, made suddenly visible.
Loki spread his arms, chains already forgotten at his feet, and welcomed them to the party they hadn't been invited to.