Page 100 of The Viking in the Vault
“It looks like a manta ray!” she breathes.
She presses close to me, her lips finally curving into a dazzling smile. Another creature glides over us, larger this time, with glowing fins and an undulating motion that casts prisms of light across the tunnel walls. The walls resonate just slightly, the creature’s call echoing around us like wind through the trees.
Elena wraps her arm around mine. “Are you sure it’s safe?”
I smile.
“Yes…and beautiful.”
She has no idea my eyes aren’t fixed on the ocean, but onher. On the wonder written across her features, the depth of her curiosity.
She has no idea how deeply I adore her.
Fenrik barks and takes off again, his claws clicking lightly against the frostglass path. We follow until we find a set of stairs spiraling upward through the ice…around and around,light shining overhead. Elena’s steps quicken, her breath fogging as the incline increases—and I finally insist on picking her up to hoist her onto my shoulders. She lets out a startled yelp but clings to my antlers with a laugh, her boots knocking against my chest.
“Ragnar!” she scolds. “You can’t just scoop me up like that! Or…you can, I guess, but please ask next time?”
I chuckle. “I make no promises when your sounds of surprise are so very sweet.”
I scent her arousal spike at those mere words, and I feel a rumble of satisfaction deep in my chest.
“I guess if you say it like that…”
She settles on my shoulders, soft and warm even in all her layers, then her hands weave into my hair at the base of my antlers. Her touch is reverent, steadying—I could carry her forever.
The staircase curves around a wide shaft of glowing ice, veins of pale gold catching and refracting from the ambient light from above. It grows brighter with each turn, until I finally see it.
A landing.
Then, a breath later, we’re stepping into the open air.
I reach up to help Elena down, and she slides from my shoulders with a stunned exhale. The cavern we’ve emerged into is massive, crystalline walls arching high overhead like a cathedral of ice. Shafts of sunlight filter through the fractured glacier, catching in the icicles above, and snow falls in soft spirals beyond the cavern’s opening, which looks out onto a turquoise, sunlit sea dotted with icebergs.
But even the cavern’s beauty is not enough to steal the breath from my lungs…not when I see what the cavern holds.
A circle of makeshift tents, fires burning among them. Skoll in the customary dress of my people millennia ago, antlersbedecked in gold and jewels, some broken. And wedged into the ice at the edge of the water…my ship.
Stormcaller.
She is tilted on her side, Skoll ironwood and Borean frostglass twisted around her hull, a gaping wound in the side showing where the vessel received its mortal wound. She should not be here, yet here she is regardless—glorious even in her ruin, half-buried in the glacier’s embrace, as if the ice itself had mourned her fall and preserved her out of reverence. At her mast is the visage of Yrsa, surrounded by lightning, the goddess that sheperded us across the galaxy…that brought me home to my fenvarra.
Elena steps closer to me, her hand slipping into mine. “Ragnar…is that it?”
I nod, unable to speak.
She had carried us into battle, into exile, into dreams of other worlds where the Boreans held no sway. And this ship…in a twisted, bizarre way, she delivered us to what we prayed for.
The last time I saw her, we were losing altitude. Fire in the engines. Ice in our lungs.
Cryopods sealing shut one by one, Fenrik whining in my ear before we both passed into oblivion.
“I don’t think they’ve seen us yet,” Elena whispers. “Do you…do you need a minute?”
I scan the encampment for any other crypods that appear to have malfunctioned, but I don’t see a single one. Syf’s pod must have been the outlier; everyone else is here, whole. My friends, brethren…
Here.
Alive.
