InsaneJournal

The others could not wait to twist the blades, to hear Horik scream (Borg, for all his faults, had barely gasped as his blood spilled over his wife's skull. He would be dining in Valhalla for sure. Good Vikings were not always Good Men, and Good Men were not...). But not Floki. A small smile - the kind that said Things didn't have to be this way - a gentle, almost tender hand on the dead man's cheek, and he had left the Lothbroks to their slaughter. Behind him he could hear Ragnar's triumphant roar and beneath it something else - a dull, wet thud. He almost winced. Almost.

He kept walking.

The mist rose off the water, thick and white, rolling in over Kattegat and swirling around him. The Gods were watching. Were they pleased? Would they smile on Ragnar - King Ragnar, he corrected himself - or no? What of Ironsides? Of the Boneless child, or the one with the Dragon in his eye? Of little Ubbe, who he had rashly scared with tales of Loki and the serp- He should not be thinking of the Lothbroks now, he reprimanded himself. His thoughts should have been of his own family - of Helga, and Angrboda, on whom the Gods could not help but smile. They had always had his loyalty...

His knee collided with something hard, and unexpected, and he stumbled, cursing loudly in Old Norse, his hand lighting on... stone? 

Floki was not a fan of stone.

Wood, now, that was a different matter; wood lived, it grew, it sang like a well-pleasured woman beneath his fingers. The nine worlds themselves hung upon the branches of Odin's Gallows, did they not? The Gods held court within its branches, and sometimes – if he was very still, and silent, or if he surrendered himself utterly to his work – sometimes he thought he could hear them whispering through the trees to him. But stone was cold, and silent.

This place, whenever it was (because it wasn't Kattegat, he knew that much), was strange. The stone beneath his fingers was dark and square, its surface smooth and shiny. Strange runes marked it and its many brothers, a family – no, a village! - of small monoliths stretching out around him as he knelt in the grass. The air was chill and crisp, the ground rimed with frost. Beyond the wall he could hear a strange, low rumbling – not waves, he knew that much; thunder perhaps?

Stone may have been silent but right now? Right now Floki could swear he heard the Gods laughing, and – throwing his head back, and grinning at the darkening sky - he laughed with them.