Ragnar grew too fast.
Within weeks, he stood without falling, bare feet pressing into the earth as if the ground itself steadied him. His eyes did not wander like a child's—they watched. Fires leaned away from him. Dogs whimpered and refused to enter the hall. Warriors who had faced Dark Lords found their hands tightening on spear shafts when the infant looked their way.
The clan elders spoke in whispers.
"This is not growth," one muttered. "It is remembering."
Far beneath the world, in the Hollow Earth where light was wrong and shadows breathed, Lilith screamed.
She felt it like a blade twisting inside her—a pulse, ancient and violent, echoing through blood and curse alike. The barbarian's line had not ended with him. It had continued, refined, concentrated.
A successor.
Her fury coiled into focus.
That night, as the clan slept, the wind died.
In the darkness of Ragnar's chamber, the shadows peeled away from the walls and became her—not in flesh, but in shape. Lilith split herself, her form unraveling into two great serpents, pale and slick as moonlit bone, eyes burning with abyssal hunger.
They slid across the floor without sound.
The child slept.
The serpents struck.
Tiny hands snapped upward.
Ragnar did not scream.
He grabbed them.
The snakes thrashed, coils crushing stone, fangs snapping inches from his face—but the child's grip did not loosen. His fingers clenched with impossible strength, veins darkening, eyes opening fully at last.
He pulled.
The serpents tore apart with wet, echoing cracks. Their bodies split, shredded, reduced to twitching ruin in his grasp. A shockwave burst through the chamber, snuffing every flame in the hall.
Deep below, Lilith collapsed.
Blood—black and smoking—poured from her as she screamed again, this time in terror. She had been wounded by an infant. Something ancient inside her had been broken, torn beyond easy mending.
She fled.
Downward. Deeper. Back into the Hollow Earth where broken gods hid and wounds could fester without witnesses. There, she coiled around old altars and cursed stones, clutching herself together, hatred fermenting into something colder.
"If I cannot break the line," she whispered to the dark, "I will outlast it."
Above, Ragnar slept again, unmarked, unafraid.
The clan would remember that night as an omen.
Lilith would remember it as the moment she learned the truth:
The storm was no longer coming.
It had already arrived.