Chapter 5: The Forge of the North
The transition from the sun-drenched marble of Alexandria to the jagged, frost-bitten edges of Northern Europe was more than a change in geography. For Cassian, it was a change in frequency. The Roman Empire was a cacophony of ambition and noise; the North was a world of visceral silence, broken only by the crack of freezing timber and the howl of wolves that sounded like the voices of the dead.
By the year 500 AD, Cassian had become a ghost in the ice. He had spent two centuries wandering the Rhine and the Danube, eventually crossing the Baltic into the lands that would one day be Scandinavia. He was no longer the man who had fallen into Qetsiyah's camp. He was nearly six hundred years old, and the "Weight" had evolved.
Cassian's physical presence had reached a state of terrifying density. He found that if he didn't focus on his "lightness," he would sink into soft earth up to his ankles. When he slept, he had to lie on bedrock; wooden floors would groan and splinter beneath him over the course of a night.
His strength was no longer just about muscle. It was as if the gravity of the planet had a special, intimate relationship with him. He could leap across chasms, not because he was light, but because his legs could exert enough force to launch his incredible mass like a cannonball. Conversely, he could stand in the middle of a frozen river and let the spring breakup of massive ice floes crash against him; the ice would shatter into powder, while he remained unmoved, a boulder in the stream of time.
He settled in a valley near a deep fjord, a place where the mountains leaned in as if to whisper to the sea. He built a forge. Not because he needed the coin, but because the heat of the hearth and the rhythmic strike of the hammer were the only things that matched the slow, heavy throb of his own heart.
The local tribes—the Northmen who would eventually become the Vikings—called him Aethelgard, the Unchanging. They viewed him with a mixture of religious terror and desperate hope. In a world where men died at thirty of infection or the sword, a man who had seen four generations of their chieftains grow old and die was nothing short of a god.
"Aethelgard," a young warrior named Bjorn called out, standing at the entrance of the soot-stained forge. He was shivering, his furs matted with sleet. "The frost-witches are coming from the peaks. They demand a tribute of iron and blood."
Cassian didn't look up from the anvil. He was hammering a piece of bog iron, not with a tool, but with the side of his fist. Each strike sounded like a mountain cracking. The iron didn't just bend; it surrendered, flowing into the shape of a blade as if it were soft wax.
"I am a smith, Bjorn," Cassian said, his voice deep and resonant, vibrating the very air in the small hut. "Not a king. Tell your witches that the iron belongs to the earth."
"They say you have the blood of the giants," the boy persisted, his eyes wide. "They say you stood in the path of the Great Bear and it broke its claws on your chest."
Cassian sighed. It was true. A year ago, a rogue bear had attacked the settlement. Cassian had simply stood there, letting the beast exhaust itself against his ribs. The bear had eventually wandered off, confused and toothless.
"I have no blood for them," Cassian said. "Now leave. The heat of this forge is too much for your lungs."
The "witches" Bjorn spoke of were not like the Travelers of the Mediterranean. These were the Völva—seers who drew their power from the "Great Tree" and the spirits of the cold. They had sensed the anomaly in the valley for decades. To them, Cassian was a "World-Knot," a place where the threads of Fate had become tangled and impossibly thick.
That night, they came.
Three women, draped in the pelts of white foxes, their eyes painted with charcoal and animal fat, entered the forge. The temperature inside was sweltering—enough to make a normal man faint—but Cassian sat in the center of it, his skin glistening like polished obsidian.
"The Unchanging One," the eldest witch, Gunnora, whispered. She held a staff of rowan wood carved with runes that seemed to bleed blue light. "We have looked into the Well of Urd, and we see no reflection of you. You have no shadow in the spirit world."
Cassian stood up. He was a head taller than the tallest Norseman, his body a symphony of dense, functional power. "That's because I'm not a spirit, Gunnora. I'm a fact."
"You are a thief," the second witch Glenda hissed. "You draw the strength of the earth into yourself. The mountains grow brittle because you grow strong. The winters grow longer because you hoard the warmth of the sun."
Cassian frowned. He hadn't considered that. Was his growth parasitic? Was he an ecological disaster in human form?
"I don't choose to grow," Cassian said. "I simply exist. If your magic is weak, do not blame the stone for being hard."
Gunnora raised her staff. "We will see how hard the stone is when the spirit is stripped away!"
She began a chant in a language that sounded like grinding ice. The other two joined in, their voices weaving a "Seidr" spell—a curse of the soul. They weren't attacking his body; they were trying to pull his life-force out of his physical shell, to cast him into the freezing winds of the afterlife.
Cassian felt the tug. It was a strange, cold sensation at the base of his spine. For a moment, his vision blurred. He saw the "Other Side"—the grey, misty purgatory Qetsiyah had created six centuries ago. He saw the billions of souls trapped there, a churning sea of despair.
Then, the "Weight" reacted.
It was like a massive anchor being dropped into a shallow pond. Cassian's soul didn't leave his body; instead, the spell imploded. The sheer density of his existence acted as a gravitational well. Instead of him being pulled into the spirit world, the spirit world was being pulled into him.
The witches screamed. The blue light of the staff turned a violent, bruised purple. The air in the forge began to spin in a localized cyclone, drawing in the coals and the tools.
"Stop!" Gunnora cried, her skin beginning to pale as her own life-force was siphoned into the void of Cassian's presence.
Cassian slammed his foot down. The shockwave was controlled—a focused burst of kinetic energy that shattered the floorboards and snapped the witches' connection to their magic. The three women were thrown back against the stone walls, gasping for air.
The forge went silent. The "Weight" settled, but Cassian felt a new layer of power. He had just absorbed the "Seidr" of three powerful witches. He felt a strange, cold clarity in his mind. He could now "see" the ley lines of the earth, the veins of power that ran through the mountains like nerves.
"Get out," Cassian said, his voice no longer human. It sounded like the earth itself speaking. "And tell your sisters: I am not a god to be worshipped, and I am not a spirit to be bound. I am the mountain. If you strike me, you only break your own hands."
Despite his desire for solitude, Cassian couldn't help but form bonds. There was a woman, Sigrid, the daughter of the chieftain. She didn't fear him. She brought him bread and ale, and she talked to him about the stars. She reminded him of Livia, though she was harder, forged by the North.
He didn't marry her. He knew better now. But he watched over her.
In the year 536 AD, the sun vanished.
A massive volcanic eruption in the distant West—unbeknownst to the people of Europe—threw so much ash into the atmosphere that the world went dark for eighteen months. It was the "Fimbulwinter" of Norse myth. The crops failed. The livestock died in the fields. The Great Famine began.
Cassian watched the tribe he had protected for fifty years begin to wither. He could kill a hundred raiders. He could stop a witch's curse. But he could not feed a thousand people.
He used his strength to move boulders and dam rivers to keep the village from flooding during the erratic thaws. He hunted in the deep snows, bringing back elk and bear that no other man could track. But it wasn't enough.
One by one, the people he knew died. He saw Sigrid grow gaunt, her eyes losing their spark.
"Why don't you save us, Aethelgard?" she asked one night, huddled by the forge's fire. The forge was the only warm place left in the valley. "You have the power of the gods. Make the sun come back."
"I can't, Sigrid," Cassian said, his heart breaking in a way he thought he had outgrown. He looked at his hands—hands that could crush diamonds, but couldn't create a single grain of wheat. "I am a weapon for a war that isn't happening. I am the end of things, not the beginning."
Sigrid died in the spring, not of hunger, but of the plague that followed the famine. Cassian carried her body to the highest peak of the mountain. He didn't build a cairn of small stones. He tore a slab of granite from the mountain's peak and laid it over her, a tombstone that would last until the world ended.
The 6th century was a dark age in every sense of the word. Cassian realized that the more he stayed in one place, the more his presence became a focal point for tragedy. He was a beacon for magic and a witness to suffering.
He left the valley. He walked through the dark forests of Germania, watching the rise of the Merovingians and the spread of a new religion from the South—the Cross. He saw the old gods fade into whispers, but he remained.
By the time he reached the year 750 AD, Cassian was a different being. He had learned to "compress" his presence. He could now walk on a wooden floor without it breaking, but it required a constant, conscious effort—like a man trying to walk on eggshells while wearing a suit of lead.
His power had reached a new stage. He no longer just grew stronger with time; he grew stronger with Knowledge. Every language he learned, every secret he pried from the earth, every life he watched flicker out added to the "Density" of his mind. He began to realize that he was becoming a psychic powerhouse. If he closed his eyes, he could feel the thoughts of every living thing for ten miles—a dull, frantic hum of hunger, lust, and fear.
He sought out the hidden places—the caves where the old magic still lingered. He met "The Travelers of the North," a nomadic group of witches who had survived the purges. From them, he learned the secret of the "Blood-Link."
"You are looking for someone," a blind Seer told him in a cave beneath the Alps.
"I'm looking for a reason to stay," Cassian replied.
"The Reason is being born in a village by the Great Sea," the Seer whispered. "A woman of the South and a man of the North. They will create a family of monsters. And you, the First Monster, will be their shadow."
Cassian headed North again, but this time toward the coast of Norway. He was now over 900 years old. He felt like he was made of the very iron core of the world.
He arrived in a small, thriving settlement. He took up the trade of a shipbuilder. His hands, which had once carved Roman marble and Norse iron, now shaped the great oaken longships of the Vikings. He worked with a speed and precision that made the other shipwrights cross themselves.
Then, one day in the late 10th century, a family arrived.
They were different. The father, Mikael, was a man of such intense, focused violence that the air seemed to burn around him. The mother, Esther, carried a scent of ancient, powerful magic—the same "Traveler" scent Cassian had smelled a millennium ago in Greece.
And there were the children.
Cassian stood on the docks as they disembarked. He saw the quiet Finn, the noble Elijah, the mischievous Kol, the playful Rebekah, and the boy with the restless, hungry eyes—Niklaus.
As Klaus passed Cassian, the boy stopped. He looked up at the "shipbuilder," his brow furrowing. Klaus was a child, but he had the instincts of a wolf.
"You look like the mountains," Klaus said, his voice small but clear saying what justcomes to mind likea child he is.
Cassian looked down at the boy who would one day be the most feared creature on earth. Cassian smiled, a slow, heavy expression.
"The mountains were here before you, little one," Cassian said. "And they will be here long after."
Cassian felt a tremor in the earth. The "Weight" within him surged. The cycle was beginning. The 1,000-year wait was over. The era of the Vampire was about to collide with the era of the Titan.