1.8.7 - Freya

The eighth rune came home, the door drank eight gods' worth of power, and the countdown wasn't ticking toward the ritual. It was ticking toward you.

Gunnar and Riven crossed into the last chamber first. Two stone figures waited at the far end, twenty-five feet apart, facing each other, wearing the same carved face. The moment the pair crossed the threshold, the eyes opened. It went the distance. The wardens hit like falling masonry and closed their own wounds by merging into a single towering shape, a pair of eyes burning bright enough to lock a man's knees in place before the fists ever landed. Gunnar and Riven traded ground for ground with it until the last blow fell and the amber light finally guttered out.

Beyond the wardens' hall, the passage opened into the sanctum, and for the first time since the temple split them, all four stood in the same room. A fountain at the centre, water untouched in a hundred years. An altar beyond it, and on the altar, the eighth rune, warm before anyone had touched it. One by one, they put their hands to the water. Something answered. A blessing settled over both pairs, the sense of a partner's opening becoming visible the instant it appeared, the kind of thing you feel more than you're told. Then Gunnar lifted the rune off the altar and the Pilgrimage of the Eight was, at last, complete.

It was on the walk out that Riven's bow announced itself. A shot went true, clean past anything luck could explain, and the wood in his hands answered back. Winter's Vigil was gone, and had been for a while without any of them quite naming it. What Tyr gave back in its place introduced itself plainly: dark, close-grained hardwood, runes carved edge to edge without a shadow between them. Tyr's Measure, if the wood had a name to give.

They surfaced through the portal into Brynja's cellar, dusty and temple-worn, and told her only as much as they chose to. Brynja paid out a hundred gold for the trouble and gave them the run of the Hollow Coin's back rooms for the night, no charge, no questions asked past the ones she'd already swallowed. One night burned there. One remained.

The next morning they carried all eight runes down to the sealed door and set them into their places, meaning to unlock the way through before the ritual inside could finish. Power moved through the carvings like current filling a battery, ran the length of the door, and was consumed. Only then did the shape of it come clear. The door and the ritual had never been two separate things racing toward two separate ends. The eight runes that opened the way through were the exact divine power the Chosen needed to bring Hannah back, and the countdown had never been a clock on the ritual. It was the Speaker's own prediction, made months back, of the day the party would finally finish the Pilgrimage and hand it over. Unlocking the door and completing the ritual were the same act.

The stone drank the last of it and opened onto a ruin. Black corruption spread like boils across desecrated elven stonework, and huddled among it, the oldest of the Chosen and their newest converts knelt around a stone slab gone black with use. Ygritte lay across it. Dead. And rising out of her, unfolding, was something with hooked curved claws, wings like a bat's stretched wide, feet twisting into an eagle's talons, and a tail long and red tipped in black, curling up behind it like a scorpion's sting.

Remember For Next Time

• The door and the ritual were the same thing. You went down to unlock the way through before the Chosen could finish. The runes that opened the door were also the divine power the ritual needed. Opening it completed it.
• The Pilgrimage is complete. All eight runes are claimed, and the sealed door beneath Hammerfall is open, its charge already spent.
• Freya's Blessing: a gift from the fountain, given to both pairs. Fighting alongside a partner now hits harder.
• Tyr's Measure: the bow that came back in Winter's Vigil's place, carved edge to edge in Tyr's own runes.
• Ygritte is dead, and something else has taken her place on the black stone.
• The party is level 8.

Where We Are

The door is open, the sanctuary beyond it desecrated, and Hannah is rising in front of them, powered by the very thing they carried down to stop her. There is nowhere left to go but through this.