Logan knelt down beside the tiny figure that lay curled up in the covers of her bed. The sliver of moonlight that manage to creep in through the window gave the girl's pale cheeks an ivory glow.

“I'm sorry, Marla,” he whispered, knowing how sad she must have been that he had once again failed to return home before she went to bed. Her Nan was fit to burst with rage at Logan, and in truth, he couldn't blame her one whit. “Soon,” he promised, swallowing tears. “Soon I'll find a safe place and I'll be there for you again.” The child shifted in her sleep, grumbling, but by the time she settled again, her father was already gone.

–-

Logan hit the ground with a soft grunt, moving swiftly away from the house. Exhaustion clogged every last pour of his being, weighing down his skin so that it practically sagged off of his bones. Sleep was only a distant memory now, driven off by the ever-present and all-encompassing threats that dominated his every waking moment.

The weary ranger stepped onto market street, passing the fishmonger's stall. The pungent smell of the cornucopia of salted herring and canned fish evoked a sour bile at the back of his throat. He turned northward, trudging through the filth on the road, brooding as he fought off sleep he knew wouldn’t offer real relief.

“Damn, Magne, why did you have to live so bloody far?” he huffed to himself. A ghost of a smile graced his lips as he remembered one of the dwarf’s many ridiculous rants about the ills of living too close to the sea and why they had chosen one of the northernmost homes in town. Turning right at a familiar corner, he passed the butcher shop. A board was nailed over empty windows, roughly carved with jagged runes: ‘Closed for business’ it proclaimed.

“Feck all!” Logan hissed as the sign drew his eye from the street, causing his heel to land in a slurry of nightsoil. He paused at a vegetable cart that would normally be laden with tubers, scraping refuse from his boot with a carved sign offering fifty silver a piece for ‘lizard crests’. When his hazy eyes focused on the runes, Logan sneered. This town was quickly coming to a boil, and with Halvard Marsh unchecked it was more important than ever to get Marla away from here before it became a battleground. But therein lay the current conundrum, which had him cautiously meandering to the north end of town.

It was sheer desperation that drove him to fetch the spare key from its hiding place beneath an ornate altar to Freyr. Logan tipped the fertility idol backward and retrieved the sturdy black piece of iron. Of all the places in town that might contain the clues he needed, his old friend’s library was the best chance at both finding the answers and of remaining undetected while doing so.

All of this, because Marsh had driven him into a corner, and the only way out was madness. Emma’s folk were firmly entrenched in Njörvenn and unwilling to leave. Logan was the last of his bloodline still alive. He’d been warned off of asking his old contacts for help. With no substantial connections in any other nearby towns, the simple truth was that there was no place they could go. They had nothing and no one in their corner, and the game was rigged against them.

So if there were no answers among the realms of men, then he would turn to the gods. That crimson spirit had gone out of her way to protect the children from… it. The shiver that ran through Logan had nothing to do with the temperature inside the dusty, abandoned home. Perhaps it could be bargained with. He ignored the stinging in his eyes as he passed keepsakes and story pieces from his friend’s life, and came into the library. With a heavy sigh, he placed his lucky coin on a hardwood table and searched the shelves.

“Where to begin…” he murmured. With no clue what the thing in the bayou might actually BE, he chose every text he saw concerning spirits. Three massive stacks of tomes later, he realized he would need to be more specific. There were simply too many varieties of entities to be contended with. Ghosts, Fae, Elementals, Djinn, Demons, a myriad of denizens of the astral…

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“Right…” he whispered to himself. “Okay Logan, narrow it down. What do you know?” It was protective of children, for one. He reached for a text and paused. Actually, it had gone out of its way to protect HIM as well, not just the littles. Benevolent then? Maybe? He shelved the texts on demons and the undead. Over the following hours, he whittled down the possibilities.

It fought indirectly, without physically touching the enemy. That shelved most celestials. It was utterly silent, which ruled out Djinn and most of the Fae. It could animate and command trees. It appeared to be a large human woman. It seemed to hold a special loathing for aberrations like the mouther. It looked like it was made of carved jasper. Each detail allowed him to slowly narrow the search via process of elimination.

The sky was beginning to turn paler shades of blue by the time he was left with only a few books before him. It was within the delicate pages of a book called “The Rights of Hárr”.

The illuminated text highlighted an old Skaldic verse in one corner, decorated with a gray-cloaked figure and a dwarf sitting before a fireplace.

“The fifteenth spell…” Logan half slurred, blinking hard to stay awake. The story detailed an exchange between the Allfather and an ancient dwarven smith, whose songs taught Óðinn to work the most precious of metals into a tool to strengthen the gods. The tale was vague, but it was the subsequent chapter that drew him in.

The fifteenth spell of Óðinn, the forging of a soul. Logan's eyes began to dart all over the page, adrenaline briefly pushing aside his exhaustion.

‘The metal of the soul’, ‘gleams like polished crystal’, ‘Bane of the eldritch’, this was it!!

“Crafted of one of the einherjar, these guardians act as a bulwark between Miðgarð and the forces of Niflheim…” he breathed reading aloud. Turning the page he saw a horrific illustration, with a warrior spirit holding his shield aloft against a massive, armored, winged insect; whose eyeless head writhed with countless antennae. The warrior’s feet were planted firmly in the grass of a lush meadow, while the horror descended from a backdrop of frozen spires in a shadowed wasteland.

Neither living nor dead, these constructs shape the ambient flows of seiðr within their domain. The inherent order and structure of life were inimical to many denizens of those far realms. So by granting these souls a pale shadow of the gods’ own gift of creation, the very stuff of life

could be woven and reinforced into a shield. A person, reduced down to a tool that helped keep the Elder Beings from gaining a foothold in Miðgarð.

Another beautifully illustrated banner showed the process by which the one-eyed god ground and honed a polished blade in whose polished reflection a shield-maiden could be seen. Sparks of memory and self, sanded away to make something more hard and rigid. Logan's brow furrowed as he read. Óðinn was well known as a somewhat ruthless pragmatist, even among his more reverent devotees. Even so, this seemed a particularly cruel fate. A conviction in which he became more resolute with each passing paragraph.

The book detailed multiple accounts of encounters with these beings. There was one known as Loadstone Deeps which was discovered in an iron mine. For over a century, it was considered a guardian spirit for the miners, protecting them from the beasts of the Underdark. Then the mine was finally stripped bare, and work finally ceased. Over the century that followed, the mine became the focal point of many local legends and horror stories until an aged dwarf, who remembered the guardian, returned there to speak with it. What the old priest discovered was a shade of the former guardian, driven half mad from hunger and isolation.

Redwold was a benevolent orchard, whose fruits kept the locals healthy and strong through countless unnatural winters. Until foresters took too greedily from its trees. Now it was known as Legwold; an impassable den of monstrous spiders. The Aerie was a peak known for its giant eagles and magical rams. The people who lived in its shadow had coexisted with it peacefully for nearly five centuries, offering it the eggs of various birds in return for protection from the monsters that were once said to descend from the night skies and snatch up the unwary. A shipping passage to the south, once known as Njörd’s Hoff, is now called Blackwater for all the lives it's claimed in the name of suppressing threats from the depths.

Over and over the same tales circled, like a playwright who wrote a singular classic and now found all their stories following the same, increasingly tired, formula. The beings were crafted by the One-Eyed God for a singular purpose. Those who were well-fed and tended to with respect could remain powerful allies and defenders for centuries. While those who were abandoned, or taken advantage of, would eventually succumb to hunger and take what they needed by force to continue to combat the darkness.

They were like machines… Ones crafted out of a formerly living person with the singular intention of being used as a barricade against an enemy so foul that it almost hurt his head just to look at the image on the page. People, made into tools.

“Good gods…” he said tremulously, turning back to the start of the chapter. Many songs extolled the glory of fighting in Ragnarök as a part of the forces of Valhǫll. But this? Logan wouldn't wish the fate of becoming one of Óðinn’s ‘Dungeons’ even on his enemies. Part of him longed to find a way to help whatever poor soul had been maimed like this, but he knew that was beyond his ilk. Right now he had to focus on what was within his power.

Dungeons could be bargained with and, if well-fed, could be phenomenally powerful protectors. Desperate and insane as it might be, it was likely his best option to keep Marla safe.

“Now to find something to barter…”