The Great Wolf lay bound upon Lyngvi, the forsaken isle set in the heart of the black lake Amsvartnir, where no god set foot and no man drew breath. Twilight lay eternal there—no dawn to promise, no stars to reckon by—only air thick with frost, iron, and stone made wet by age.
Gleipnir held him: light as deceit, strong as fate.
He was Fenrir—anomaly among the Aesir, born of gods and named for ending. The Devourer. Yet the ribbon’s bite was nothing beside the greater weight: the silence that pressed upon him without pause or mercy. An absence that howled without sound.
Through the veil of mist, his gaze reached beyond his prison, drawn to the high slopes where snow lay unbroken. There, a pack of gray wolves slept in the open cold, bodies woven together into a single breathing thing. Their fur rose and fell as one. Warmth passed between them. Steam lifted from their nostrils like offerings.
One rolled to its back before the pack’s leader, throat bared in wordless vow. The alpha bent low, tongue brushing the bared throat—not to claim, not to wound, but to bind. Thus the old knowing passed between them: teeth were made to stop when trust was given.
Fenrir felt his own throat draw tight.
He had never known such law. Never the press of fur in greeting, nor the chorus of breath and voice that marked belonging. He was named to swallow the sun, yet he starved for the simplest truth written in blood: when a brother bares the throat, the jaws remember mercy.
His sight turned then, away from the snow and the wolves who slept as one, and fell upon the realms of men.
They gathered beneath false suns, sealed within walled dens. Though they sat close, they were divided—each alone, each ringed by glow. Their hands moved ceaselessly over smooth surfaces. No scent passed between them. No warmth.
Fenrir leaned into their world, seeking the shape of kinship.
What he found was a young one folded into herself, tears falling unheard as unseen multitudes clawed at her with words. They could not smell her fear. They could not feel the tremor in her flesh. No signal rose to warn their teeth. The wounds they dealt bled nothing that reached them. Distance had unbound their restraint.
Elsewhere, another shaped poison in the dark, each mark laid down to ruin a life never faced. Signs of approval gathered thickly around him, and he fed upon them—sated by a kill that left no blood on his jaws, no taste of iron on his tongue.
“The throat teaches mercy before the mind learns words,” Fenrir rumbled into the mist. “When it is bared, the teeth are bound. This is the Law of Blood.”
But these men had broken the law without knowing its name. They had learned to bite without tasting, to wound without the old warnings carried on breath and fear.
The Great Wolf did not feel terror, nor rage, nor the hunger the gods had named him for.
He felt pity.
Bound upon his isle, forged about with impossibilities, Fenrir beheld these scattered kin who named themselves civilized and saw no brotherhood in them.
“The Anomalous Predator,” he growled, the sound rolling like distant thunder across the black lake. “I am bound by Gleipnir, woven of impossibility and miracles. Yet you are unbound. You freely strike from the shadows so your jaws never learn restraint. You spill blood that you never taste. And so your teeth never loosen.”
