It did not take long for Siege to learn that in Ithaca, time was irrelevant.
The bells and announcements were formalities.
Life in the fortress moved not by time, but by toll. You woke when a boot hit your side. You trained until you collapsed. You slept when your body gave out. Routines formed not by schedule, but by repetition, until the days bled into each other.
The training field smelled of straw, sweat, and blood. Always blood.
Siege stood shoulder to shoulder with the other recruits—farmers' sons, criminals, forgotten bastards of minor lords—all bound by the same fate: to serve, to die, to feed the dragon.
They swung dull iron swords at lifeless straw men, but no blow ever seemed to land quite right. They were taught form without finesse, brutality without artistry.
"Again!" barked Instructor Halgrim, a man seemingly forged of hate. His eyes were grey, colder than steel, and he carried a club for encouragement. It hit many backs that day.
Siege hated it all. The repetition. The sweat. The idiotic grins of the boys pretending they were warriors. But most of all, he hated how slow his left side was now. The missing arm was a weight of absence—a phantom limb that still ached.
He had already barely trained his body back home, but now he had to re-learn everything. He could not parry. He could not shield. His balance was wrong. Every sword stroke pulled him off-center.
He adjusted, of course. He always did. He learned to step into his swings. He learned to dodge instead of block. He trained in the dead hours, after the others slept, mimicking sword strokes in the dark like a madman rehearsing vengeance.
Soon, the instructors noticed. Not with praise—never praise—but with narrowed eyes and a few words grunted in approval.
"He's stubborn," Halgrim muttered to another. "Might just live long enough to regret it."
They introduced drills. Combat pits. Endurance tests that served no purpose. Siege passed most of them—not with ease, but with grit. When others vomited, he kept moving. When others fell, he stood.
On the sixth day, they brought out live targets.
A prisoner from the lower cells—filthy, starved, but given a weapon. "Your training begins now," Halgrim said.
Siege hesitated. The boy opposite him was barely fifteen. Shaking, eyes wide, barefoot. They had tossed a blade in his hands like it would somehow make him a man.
The boy lunged, shrieking. Siege stepped aside and struck him across the head with the flat of his sword. The boy dropped. Halgrim walked up and, without a word, bashed the boy's skull in with his club.
"Do not hesitate again."
There was no lesson in honor. No glory. Only the certainty of death and the cruelty of delay.
---
One evening, after drills, Siege wandered behind the main hall. The moon was low and fat in the sky—yellow.
Hew was amazed when he first saw it.
After all, the moon on current day Earth was just a cluster of distant fragments orbiting the planet.
Suddenly, he heard the chant of old hymns, strange syllables carried on the wind. He followed the sound warily.
Beyond the training grounds was a pit, wide and circular surrounded by archaic runes, dug deep into the earth. No torches lit its rim. No guards watched it. And yet, Siege knew it was not forgotten.
Something moved down there.
It was subtle at first—a shift of air, a smell of charred bone and dirty water. But then he saw it: two eyes, faintly luminescent like dying coals, staring up from the abyss.
Siege did not flinch. He stared back.
The moment lasted only seconds, but something passed between them. A recognition. A promise.
Then the eyes blinked, and the darkness swallowed them whole.
He returned to his dorm without a word.
---
The next day, Siege was summoned by name.
No one ever called names in Ithaca. Orders were barked. Recruits were just numbers to fill space. Yet his was spoken aloud.
Siege was led through the lower levels of the fortress—beneath the kitchens, beyond the armories, down steps that sloped unnaturally, as if carved not by man but by the burrowing of some great worm. The air grew colder. The torches dimmer.
At the end of the corridor stood a massive stone door etched with old runes—Elder Futhark, twisted and re-shaped. Even the moss avoided them.
An old man waited beside it, draped in robes like midnight mist, his beard stained with ash and soot.
"You saw it," the man rasped, voice dry as frostbite.
Siege nodded. He didn't need to ask what.
"It stirs again. As it always does when new blood spills on the training fields. Most look away. You did not."
"What is it?"
The man exhaled like a dying fire. "The whisperer beneath Ithaca. The Wyrm. The corpse-eater. Some call it Níðhöggr—though it is not truly him, only a fragment. A fang broken from his mouth, cast down when the gods still walked the earth."
Though he didn't remember everything from his short lived school day, the name sparked a recollection in Siege.
Siege's brow furrowed. "The one gnaws on the world-tree?"
"Aye," the man said. "And this… this is what gnaws at us."
He gestured to the door.
"It does not sleep. It waits. It dreams of rot, and the end of breath. It calls in the night—not with words, but with need. Those who listen too long go mad. Others vanish."
Siege remained silent.
"When the true Níðhöggr stirs at Ragnarök, this fragment will rise first—to herald it. A harbinger. A warning. A trial."
"Why is it here?"
"Because this fortress was built upon an old root. The branch of the world-tree that reached too far. It was severed, but what fed upon it remained. So we bind it, and we train."
Siege's voice was steady. "Will it escape?"
The old man smiled grimly. "All chains break. Even those forged by the gods."
Siege turned to leave. But the man's voice stopped him once more.
"Most men break when they fight their first true monster. Not brigands. Not wolves. But something ancient. "
Siege looked over his shoulder. "Then let it break me."
The man's laugh was not kind. It echoed in the stones.
"Then perhaps you'll be the one to descend when the time comes."
---
That night, Siege dreamed of fire—but not warmth. It was cold, blue fire, coiling like serpents around a throne made of bone. A voice spoke, but not in words. In grief. In rage. In promises too old to be lies.
He woke to the sound of the morning bell, drenched in sweat, the sword he slept with --despite saying he wasn't scared-- still clutched in his one good hand.
Training resumed.
And deep beneath the fortress of Ithaca, something smiled in the dark.