chapter twelve
bjorn
Heresy - Nine Inch Nails
I t’s over.
The last scream tore itself from a throat two offerings ago, lost to the choking air. The final axe has long since found its mark, buried in bone and silence. Even the moans—once curling around the torchlight like smoke—have dwindled into stillness, leaving only the thick, smothering weight of what’s been done.
The tent no longer groans under the weight of its occupants, but it does not forget. It breathes in what remains. The stench of it clings to the canvas: blood and semen, smoke and rot, scorched flesh and spilled liquor. Death lives here now.
Not quietly or peacefully.
But proudly, like a beast with a full belly stretched out in the wreckage of its hunt.
Blood gathers at my feet, sluggish and dark. It coats the soles of my boots, the handle of my axe, the carved runes along my chest where it’s dried into a second skin. Bits of bone glint beneath the muck, and a half-severed hand twitches once before going still. The firelight flickers low along the edges of the canvas above me, but the heat remains, smoldering. It feels earned.
I stand alone in the center ring, though the dead surround me. Mangled bodies splay across the floor—some curled into themselves like they died afraid, others stretched out like offerings, split open in supplication. A few still breathe, though shallowly. A cough here, a sob there, and somewhere in the dark, a guest whispers a prayer not meant for me, or my gods. It makes my skin tighten. This is no place for their god.
I lift my head and inhale slowly through my nose. Iron. Smoke. Blood thick enough to chew. The scent sinks into my lungs and lodges behind my ribs like a memory. I let it sit there, heavy and sacred.
“You’ve taken what was owed,” I murmur. “May your bellies be full in the golden hall, your thirst drowned in blood and smoke.”
And why shouldn’t they be?
Odin. Tyr. Skadi. Hel.
They were given everything I promised them. Flesh. Fire. Agony. Surrender. I carved their will into the skin of the living. I painted the ground red and let the echoes carry their names skyward. And they answered, not with words, but with presence. With weight.
I look up toward the ceiling of soot-stained canvas and remember.
Norway.
Just ten winters past. I was seventeen—raw muscle and colder intent, fire coiled low in my belly before I knew what to call it. My father knew, though. He said I bore the mark of the gods. That kind of fire isn’t free. It burns everything.
We didn’t honor Disting in chapels. Ours was held in the woods behind the cabin, where the snow swallowed your breath and the pines whispered your sins. No velvet, no altar. Just a tree stump worn down to bone, a pit full of soot, and the forest watching like it had seen it all before.
My brothers pinned the lamb. I made the cut. Its blood steamed in the air, hot against the cold. My mother, barefoot in the snow, dragged it across our cheeks with fingers that never shook. She didn’t chant. She whispered—low and slow—like the gods were listening, like they needed her voice to find us.
We burned resin. Bones. A wooden comb passed down from someone with frost in his beard and violence in his name. We fasted. We drank. We fucked in the snow like wolves, breath sharp in our lungs, moans eaten by the black sky overhead.
We didn’t perform for anyone.
We remembered.
That’s what Disting is. A reckoning, not a spectacle. The gods don’t want praise. They want sacrifice. And tonight, they were answered.
Lux gave that to me. Not just the stage. The trust. The reverence. He let me pull the old ways into this circus of sinners and saints, flame and bone—and the gods came. I felt them.
I sink to one knee. The stone is slick beneath me, sticky with blood and ash, something soft brushing against my shin—skin, maybe. A breast. A face. I don’t look down. Every inch of this ground is sacred now.
I grip my axe, press its haft into the blood-wet floor, and bow my head into it.
This is worship.
“Odin, All-father. Watcher of gallows. Caller of ravens. Tyr, one-handed judge, who bleeds for balance and binds oaths with pain. Skadi, huntress of the frost, steel-hearted and sharp-eyed, Hel, quiet queen of the forgotten, cloaked in ash and bone—Tonight, you were honored. You were fed.”
The tent doesn’t answer. But the weight shifts. Not silence—never that. Something heavier. Reverent. It hums in my bones, thick as blood, deep as root.
Behind me, I hear them.
Giselle’s laughter dances through the carnage—light, cracked, wicked. Like wind chimes made of femurs. She hums something sweet and foul, soaked in someone else’s ruin, bones clattering in her hair like trophies. My Valkyrie. My fucking masterpiece.
Ma petite mort.
She killed for them tonight. For me. Slit a man open like a gift and rode him to the brink before turning his final breath into an offering. She straddled him like he was a throne and she was born wearing a crown of knives. The gods watched, ravenous. But so did I.
And I saw more than they did.
The way her eyes found mine through the blood. The way she smiled—not at him, but at me. The way her body sang with devotion while she made art from agony. That wasn’t just sacrifice.
That was mine.
She whispered my name with blood still drying between her thighs. And later, when she gave herself to me—panting, trembling, soaked in the ruin we created—I felt her worship. Felt her squeeze down on me like she needed it, like I was carved into her bones.
Because I am.
I felt her come apart beneath me, crying out for her god. For me .
And I want it again.
I want her again.
Not just her body—her mind, her soul, her madness. Every wicked inch. Every shattered thought.
She pleased the gods tonight.
But she pleased me more.
And they may have fed, they may be sated, but I am not.
She is my little death.
Mine to hold. Mine to break. Mine to rebuild again in my image.
And I’ll never let her forget it.
Alaska pants nearby, crawling through blood like a wolf come home to feast. Johnny drags something behind him—a ribcage or a spine, hard to tell anymore—with a grin wide as madness. He croons to her, soft and deranged. Indie leans into Lux, her whip slack at her side, face streaked in soot and blood. A fresh scar splits her lip. Lux brushes a curl of ash-matted hair from her cheek and says nothing for once. Just watches. Like the king he swears he isn’t, ruling over a court of killers.
None of them speak.
But I know they feel it. The aftershock. The gods’ breath still clinging to the air.
This wasn’t a show.
This was a sermon.
I rise, slow and deliberate, dragging my axe through the gore like a censer through temple smoke. The runes carved into its handle glint with something holy—wet with breath, blood, and belief.
Around me, the dead twitch. One gasps, dragging his last prayer from torn lungs. Another claws at the dirt, fingers snapping before he collapses.
Some went screaming. Others in bliss. But all of them died with purpose.
They died for the gods.
I dip two fingers into the blood at my chest—slick, still warm—and trace the final rune across my heart. Not for vengeance. Not for slaughter.
For thanks.
A bindrune for endings.
A promise. A marker. A whispered reminder in the dark— Your names were spoken here .
I close my eyes and inhale the ruin.
The gods don’t sleep.
And what we did tonight?
They will remember.