Queen of Fire & Blood

Chapter One

~BRIA~

Go for hike through a Fjord, her father had said. Do some soul searching. Bria scoffed as her foot slipped on the mossy ground for the hundredth time. Easy for him to say, he was warm and dry in his office back in Oslo.

As she got her feet underneath her, she couldn't help but wonder what her mother was doing. They had been inseparable at one point. But then Bria had dropped out of college and things went down-hill from there.

Whoever said that a person's early twenties were their golden years was a liar and she would like to have a conversation with them.

Climbing higher, her thighs burned and her breaths came out in pants; the rugged path up the hill abruptly evened out. The trees dropped away to reveal a relatively flat surface, and the view was, well, breathtaking.

The Fjord sat far below, its deep blue waters reflecting the sky and clouds like the surface of a mirror. Hills and mountains reached high for the heavens; the bright greens of the trees and the gray of the rock shown in the sunlight. Not for the first time that day, Bria was thankful for a mostly sunny day and not rain, like the forecast had predicted. It wasn't every day that a hike through a Norwegian forest wasn't dampened by rain.

Maybe her father's idea wasn't so bad after all. If there was any place that could help someone do some soul searching, it was overlooking an ancient Fjord.

Deciding this was the perfect place to sit and rest, maybe unpack the food she had brought along, Bria turned her back on the Fjord. A flat rock sat just by the edge of the forest and it would be perfect to set her food on. Walking over, Bria was about to set her backpack down on the rock when she noticed carvings in the stone. Looking closer it was obvious what they were — they were runes, the old language of the Norsemen.

Bria knew a little too much about the history of the Vikings, of the men of the north. Her father, a man who loved his heritage, had taught her young. She could recall having a set of wooden dice with runes on them, sitting on her toy shelf right alongside her wooden alphabet set.

The runes on this rock were familiar to her, even if she couldn't remember what they meant. Kneeling beside the stone, setting her bag onto the damp earth beside her, Bria brushed leaves and dirt off the symbols. She wished her father had come along with her. He would know what the runes said.

Her fingers traced over rune after rune before stopping on the last one; it looked like an 'x' with two lines on either side of it. A long forgotten lesson from her dad pinched at her mind. Trying to grasp at the memory, the meaning of the rune just out of her reach, she touched it with her fingers.

Hope. The rune meant hope, that much she was sure.

Sitting back on her calves, letting her hands slide across the stone and into her lap, Bria looked over the cliff at the Fjord beyond. She knew Viking ruins were found all over Norway, but she hadn't ever found any herself. They were usually kept at protected sites or museums. Strange that this rock would be there, at the top of a hiking path, and not found by anyone before.

With a shrug, Bria stood and brushed dirt off her jeans. Whatever the runes said, she wasn't about to use them as a table for her food. She reached down to grab her bag, to find somewhere else to rest, when something cracked behind her.

Spinning around, she expected to see a person walking up the path, but there was no one. It must have been an animal of some kind. Shaking her head, she went back to looking for a log to sit on.

The sound happened again, this time louder. It wasn't the sound of a twig snapping. It was harsher than that, more metallic.

Hours later, Bria would ask herself why she turned back to the stone; why she felt the need to walk over and look at it and watch a crack form between the runes. But for whatever reason, she did just that.