This story takes place in the Jotun Hall of Kaldhall, the fortress where Jarl Kael rules, and where Runa is sent to be his bride. Discover the full epic in The Jotun Bride (coming soon).
1
Deep within the fourth ward, below the prisons, the miner’s picks rang steady.
The seam ran rich, dark as old blood where the lamplight caught it. Iron ore, dense and heavy, the kind that made the smiths grin and the steward’s ledgers balance.
Hrymfótr had worked this depth for as long as he could remember. His six legs braced against the stone, his frost-veined hands gripping the pick like an extension of his body. He knew the weight of the tool, the angle that made stone crack clean instead of shatter. Knew how to breathe the thick air without gasping, how to taste the dust and know if the mine would hold or break.
Strike. The pick bit deep. Pause. A slow sigh of cold air. Strike. The ore split, flakes glittering in the lamp’s weak glow like shattered stars.
Others worked nearby.
Gjálpandi, no mouth, screams through its skin. The mountain answers, shows where to mine.
Grimmgrýtr, blind and four-legged, gnawing at the stone with teeth like chisels.
Kvíðskorinn, his many mouths whispering in tongues no one understood.
A cough echoed from the dark. It came from Daufhjarta, hollow-chested and cold, testing the ore with his lifeless touch. The sound ricocheted, flattened by the weight of stone above. A mile of mountain pressing down. Maybe more. No one measured this deep. You felt it in your spine instead, a slow, grinding ache that mixed with the rhythm of picks and breath.
Hrymfótr didn’t think. He knew. Shoulder, hip, the swing that drove the point home without wasting breath. The ore split clean, dark and glistening. Good. It would be picked up. Another day survived. Another night earned.
A faint, new smell permeated the cave. His skin prickled, his breath fogging in the lamplight. The others felt it too. Grimmgrýtr stopped gnawing. Gjálpandi paused mid-scream. Even Kvíðskorinn’s shuddering stilled, his many mouths falling silent.
It was not a bad smell, in so far as no smell is really bad, only different. But it was not the rotten-egg stink of gas pockets. This was different. Warmer. The kind of warm that had no source, no reason. Like standing too close to someone in a small room.
Hrymfótr paused.
The lamp flickered.
Oil enough for hours. Wick trimmed this morning. He adjusted it anyway, fingers careful around the hot glass. The flame steadied. The shadows pulled back to their corners. Tool marks on the walls, the dark hole of the tunnel leading deeper, ore flakes on the ground waiting to be hauled up.
Everything normal. Everything the same as yesterday, the day before, the thousand days before that.
Except the warmth.
He bent again. Fit the pick’s point into a crack that promised depth. Leaned weight into it. The stone resisted, then gave. A sudden shift that sent chips scattering. One piece struck the lamp. The flame guttered. Darkness rushed in, absolute, then pulled back as the wick caught again.
In that half-second of black, something moved.
Something passing between the flame and the air. A whisper that slid through the cracks like smoke, like a finger tracing the edge of a wound. It wasn’t a voice. It was the sound of stone remembering how to speak.
The mountain wasn’t shifting.
It was turning its head.
His heart hammered. Hands tight on the pick’s handle, knuckles aching. Breathing too fast. Stop, slow it down. The lamp burned steady. The tunnel remained. Stone above, stone below. The pick. The ore.
Nothing had happened.
Nothing.
Hrymfótr spat dust and bent again to work. Three more strikes, and the seam opened wider. Darker here, the iron richer. This would make the haulers curse. Heavy baskets meant slow climbing. But the steward would smile and her eyes would be filled with smoke. That meant an extra ration.
The pick struck deep.
The sound was wrong.
It was not the ring of metal on stone nor the crack of fracture. A dull thud, as if the mountain had swallowed the blow instead of answering it. He pulled the pick free. The point came away clean. No dust, no flakes. The stone where it had struck was smooth. Polished.
No. No, that made no sense. This was a new seam. No one had worked here before.
The warmth thickened.
It was not quite heat. But the air felt full, the way it does before a storm, when the sky presses down and breath tastes of copper. The warmth came from somewhere else. There, everywhere, but not there.
He turned, slowly, toward the tunnel entrance. The lamp’s glow reached maybe ten paces. Beyond that, just black. Solid. The kind of dark that didn’t just hide things. It was things. It had weight.
“Kvíðskorinn?“ Hrymfótr’s voice came out hoarse. Sounded more like a bark. Kvith-sko-rihn
Silence.
No. Not the absence of answer. The absence of sound.
The gnawing had stopped. He listened. Nothing. Not even breath. Grimmgrýtr never stopped. His teeth ground stone even in sleep. There were no screams from Gjálpandi, no hollow coughing from Daufhjarta.
When? How long since the sounds stopped? Hrymfótr tried to remember. Couldn’t. Time had slipped without notice. But now, stillness. The kind that came before collapse, or after death.
“GRIMM? GJALP?»
The shout echoed. Once. Twice. Then the mountain ate it. The sound didn’t fade. It stopped, cut clean as a severed rope.
His chest went tight. Wrong. This was wrong. Leave. Now. Up the tunnel, toward the shaft, toward the bells and voices and air. Move.
One step toward the tunnel entrance.
Then he heard a whisper.
Stone sliding against stone, the way a giant’s palm might brush across a table. Except the table was the world, and the palm was the mountain itself, shifting its weight after centuries of stillness.
The tunnel entrance narrowed.
No. Impossible. He stared. The opening had been wide enough to crouch through. Now it was smaller. The stone had simply moved, flowing like cold honey, closing the gap to half its width.
His hands shook. The pick clattered to the ground. Didn’t matter. No tool would dig through that. Not in time. Not ever.
The lamp’s flame shrank.
Not dying. The wick still burned, oil still fed it. But the air itself seemed to thicken around the fire, pressing it down. The light pulled back. The shadows swelled. He turned, wild, scanning the walls.
There. A crack. Narrow, low to the ground, barely visible. It hadn’t been there before. He was certain. This was a worked tunnel, every span accounted for. No side passages. No hidden gaps.
But the crack breathed.
The warmth. It flowed from it. Not scorching nor even uncomfortable. Just warm. The warmth of skin. The warmth of something alive.
He lowered himself so all of his six knees pointed up. Head low. Crawled to the crack. Pressed a palm against the stone beside it. Solid. Cold. Dead.
Pressed a palm to the crack itself.
More heat. Warmer. Like hand on skin, not rock.
It breathed. He knew what that meant. And yet—
The tunnel entrance behind him was sealed. The lamp dying. The others gone. And the crack exhaled.
It opened for him, and within he saw not rock, but a soft throat. Wet. The walls glistened, slick with moisture that had no name. Wet, but not water. Slimy, but not oil. Something thicker. Warmer.
It made a new sound now. A wet shifting, soft tissue against soft tissue. Like a mouth without teeth, swallowing without chewing.
There was no choice. There had never been a choice.
He crawled in.
And deep within he heard the beating of drums. Slow. Deep.
Yet not drums. Pressure. A slow, deep throb that vibrated through the throat, through his knees, through the marrow of his bones.
The lamp went out.
The dark didn’t rush in.
It was already there.
It had been waiting, pressed up against the edges of the light.
Waiting for the flame to falter so it could step forward.
Hrymfótr’s breathed slowly. The pick was behind, out of reach. The tunnel mouth sealed. The mouth still open behind him.
And somewhere, deep inside, deeper than any shaft had ever reached, something breathed.
Not far below. Not distant.
Right beneath him.
The throat was taking him there.
2
The flesh pressed close.
It was soft and yielding. His legs sank into the ground as he moved. It was like moving through a soft mud, slick beneath his palms as he crawled. The passage contracted around him, squeezing, then releasing. Slow. Deliberate. The throat was swallowing.
Hrymfótr’s breath came shallow. The air was thick, humid, salt, and sweet like blood left too long in the sun. Each inhale coated his throat, his lungs. He coughed. The sound vanished into the wet walls, absorbed before it could echo.
He saw nothing. The lamp was gone, left behind at the mouth. But the darkness here was different. Not empty. Not cold. It pressed, warm and close, the way a hand presses against a face. Smothering without violence.
He crawled deeper.
His six legs splayed wide for balance, knees sinking slightly into the soft floor. The surface gave beneath him. A slick wetness that felt like slime. Yielding. Alive. Each movement left an impression that slowly filled back in, the flesh remembering its shape. The slick wetness nevertheless made progress easier.
The throb grew stronger.
It vibrated like drums, or like a heartbeat, but was neither. It was the pulse of the mountain’s body, moving through the walls, through the floor, through him. It synced with his own heart, first matching it, then pulling it. Slower. Deeper. His chest tightened. He tried to breathe faster, to resist, but the rhythm was too strong. His body obeyed.
The passage narrowed.
Hrymfótr pressed forward, shoulders scraping the walls. The flesh clung to him, warm and slick, pulling at his clothes. Not hostile. Not hungry. Just close. The way a lover presses against you in sleep, unconscious intimacy.
Except this was not sleep. And this was not love.
The walls breathed.
In. The passage tightened, squeezing him forward. Out. The passage relaxed, releasing just enough to let him move. In. Out. The mountain’s breath, translated into pressure, into motion. He was not crawling. He was being moved. Gently. Patiently. Deeper.
He didn’t try to progress anymore. He tried to stop.
Braced his hands against the walls, legs locked. The flesh yielded beneath his palms, warm and pliant. Stillness. Then the walls contracted. Insistent. Inevitable. The pressure built, gentle as a mother’s hand on a child’s back, guiding them forward. Inexorable.
He slid forward, pulled by the slow tide of the throat’s spasms. The walls embraced him, slick and warm, and carried him deeper into the dark.
A sound rose from below.
Above the wet shifting of the throat, above the throb of the pulse came a voice. It didn’t say aynthing. It wasn’t language. It was a tone. Low and resonant, a hum that vibrated through the stone-that-was-not-stone, through the flesh-that-was-not-flesh, through the air itself.
And he thought he recognized it.
Hrymfótr’s frost-veined hands trembled against the walls. The hum continued, patient and vast, the sound of something enormous stirring in the deep. Noticing him.
The mountain knew he was here.
The passage opened.
Sudden. The walls pulled back, the floor dropped away. Hrymfótr tumbled forward, legs scrambling for purchase, and fell into warmth.
Thick. Viscous. It caught him, slowed his fall, lowered him gently like hands cradling an egg. The warmth wrapped around him, seeped through his clothes, touched his skin. Not burning, not freezing. Enveloping.
He hung suspended in the dark.
The walls were distant now. He could feel them. Vast, curved, enclosing. A chamber? No. Not a chamber. A cavity. He was inside something. Chest? Belly? Core?. The throb surrounded him, louder now, no longer felt through stone but through the thick air itself. Thud. Thud. Thud.
The mountain’s heart.
Not below him. Around him. He was inside it.
The hum grew louder.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating through the viscous warmth, through his bones. A Presence. The mountain was not speaking. It was breathing him in, tasting him, learning him. The way a tongue explores a morsel before swallowing.
Hrymfótr opened his mouth to scream.
The warmth flowed in.
Filling.
It poured down his throat, into his lungs, warm and thick and alive. He gagged. Thrashed. His legs kicked against nothing. But the warmth kept coming, kept filling, until his chest was full and his breath was not his own.
The throb synced with his heart.
Not pulling now. Not guiding. Replacing. His heart beat once. The mountain’s pulse answered. His heart beat again. Slower, matching. Then his heart stopped.
For one endless moment. Stillness.
Then the mountain’s pulse pushed.
His heart beat again. Not of its own will. Not by his command. But because the mountain told it to. The rhythm resumed. Slow, deep, vast. His blood moved. His lungs filled. His body lived.
But the life was not his own.
Hrymfótr hung in the warmth, his body moving to a rhythm not his own, his breath flowing to a will not his own. And in the silence, he understood.
He was not trapped.
He was not dying.
He was being kept.
The mountain had found him. Tasted him. And it had decided:
This one is mine.
From somewhere a new sound rose.
Not in his ears. In his bones. Carved into the marrow by the mountain’s voice, a name that was not a name, a command that was not a command. It resonated through the warmth, through the walls, through the hollows of his skull.
The mountain was not asking.
It was claiming.
And Hrymfótr, suspended in the dark warmth of its body, his heart beating to its rhythm, his breath drawn by its will—
—could not refuse.
Silence.
Then the walls contracted.
It embraced him.
He was no longer Hrymfótr the miner. He was part of the living mountain.
3
The steward descended alone.
Lamp in one hand, ledger in the other. She wore battle armor, pressed tight against her curves, restricting her movements.
She walked slowly past the prisons. Heard the shouting and the screams. Felt nothing. Headed for the mines.
The shaft narrowed as she went deeper, past the worked seams, past the places where miners still swung picks and hauled ore. Down here, the air thickened. Warmth rose from below, salt-sweet and humid.
One name. One miner who had not returned. Kvíðskorinn had bore witness. So had two others, in their own way. The report said one of them screamed. A quick scribble said it was normal.
This was not what she was here for. But she noted the missing miner’s name. He was one of the older ones. One of the jotun races they had no name for. She read the entry. Hrymfótr. Not stone, smoke, fire or ice. Six legs, one head, two eyes, two arms, extra set of teeth. Hairless, strong. Worked on the newest seam.
She set the ledger and the lamp down on a flat rock.
It was down this tunnel, she thought.
She raised a hand to the wall next to it. She felt it yield. Softened under palm. Slick Warm. The mountain’s throat. She flicked her tongue. Wanted to taste it. But the stone did not open for her. It simply showed her.
She had gone in there once. No fear. No revulsion. The walls had contracted around her, wet and close, and she matched the rhythm. In. Out. Her breath synced with the mountain’s pulse. The flesh had pressed against her, guiding her deeper, and she let it. The mountain knew her. She had tasted it. It had tasted her.
She picked up the ledger and the lamp again.
If the mountain had something for her, it would not be here. She went to the one of the birthing chambers.
Warmth surrounded her there, thick and viscous, the air dense as oil. She could barely see. There was just faint phosphorescence in the walls. The floor was soft, giving, alive. And in the center, three shapes.
Curled. Wet. Breathing.
The steward approached the first.
It twitched as she neared. Unfolding slowly, limbs peeling away from its torso. Too many joints. Arms that bent wrong, elbows reversed. Skin mottled. Half frost-pale, half ash-dark, neither fully one nor the other. Eyes opened. Four of them. Unblinking. Clouded.
It made a wet clicking sound, tongue against palate, rhythm without meaning.
The steward knelt. Touched its face. The skin was cold on one side, hot on the other. The eyes tracked her hand but did not see. Empty. Reactive but not aware.
She stood. Reached for the thing’s head, gripped it between both hands. Felt the skull’s shape. Too soft, bone not yet hardened.
Twisted.
The neck snapped clean. The body jerked once, then stilled. The eyes remained open, staring at nothing.
The steward released it. Let it slump to the floor. The mountain would reabsorb it. Reclaim the material. Try again.
Unusable, she noted.
She moved to the second.
This one was larger. Compact. Two-limbed, stone-skin stretched tight over dense muscle. It stirred as she approached, rolling onto its hands. No, not hands, something between hands and rock, clawed and hard. Its face was barely recognizable. Nose flattened, mouth too wide, teeth jutting at wrong angles.
But the eyes.
The eyes were sharp.
It looked at her. Not empty. Not clouded. Aware. It tilted its head, watching her, and made a sound, low, questioning. Almost language.
The steward crouched. Held out a hand. The thing sniffed it. Hesitated. Then pressed its forehead against her palm, a gesture of submission.
She smiled.
“Gromr,” she said.
The thing that she called Gromr shuddered at the name. Its mouth worked, trying to repeat it. The sound came out garbled, wet, but close. Ver-mmm. Vermmm-unn.
Good.
She reached for the cloth folded at her belt. Wrapped it around Gromr’s shoulders. The creature did not resist. It leaned into her touch, seeking warmth, seeking direction.
She stood. Gromr stood with her, unsteady, but obedient.
Usable.
The third shape lay still.
The steward approached slowly. It was the largest. Tall, long-limbed, frost-veined and smoke-dark. Beautiful, almost. Symmetrical. Eight limbs, two arms, six legs. A face that still held traces of what it had been. Hrymfótr’s face, stretched and smoothed, the features softened but recognizable.
It did not move.
She knelt. Pressed her fingers to its throat. No pulse. Pressed her palm to its chest. No breath. The mountain had taken too much. The body was whole, but the life was gone.
Or.
She leaned closer. Watched the chest. Waited.
Nothing.
Then, there. A faint rise. Slow. Too slow. Once every thirty heartbeats, maybe more. Not breath. Not quite. But movement. The body still lived, but barely. Suspended. Waiting.
The steward’s eyes narrowed.
She reached out. Slapped the thing’s face. Hard.
No response.
Slapped again. Harder.
Nothing.
The body did not stir.
Defective.
She stood. Looked down at it. Such a waste. The mountain had shaped it so carefully. Every limb proportioned. Every feature refined. But the spark. The awareness. The will, lost somewhere in the digestion. The mountain had taken Hrymfótr apart and put him back together, but the thing that made him him had dissolved in the process.
A body without a pilot. Meat without mind.
She reached down. Gripped the thing’s ankle. Dragged it toward the edge of the chamber, where the floor sloped down into a darker hollow. The walls there pulsed, hungrier than the rest. She rolled the body into the hollow.
The walls contracted. Slowly. Gently. The body sank into the flesh. The mountain reclaiming it.
The steward turned back to Gromr. The creature watched her, eyes bright, waiting.
She gestured. Follow.
Gromr obeyed. Crawled after her as she moved out of the chamber. Behind them, the first body, neck snapped, eyes still open, began to sink as well. The mountain breathed, and the chamber floor rippled, drawing the failures back into itself.
The steward crawled through the chamber opening, almost a throat in it’s own right, Gromr behind her, the walls contracting in rhythm. The mountain released them, the passage widening as they climbed. Warmth gave way to cold. Wet stone gave way to dry. She emerged into the worked tunnels, lamp retrieved, ledger tucked under her arm.
Gromr stumbled after her, blinking in the lamplight, six legs unsteady on solid ground.
The other miners—those still working, still themselves—did not look. They heard the footsteps. The wet sound of something new breathing. They kept their heads down. Kept swinging their picks.
They knew.
Some of them would be next.
Back in her chamber in the upper floor of Kaldhall, the steward set the lamp on her desk. Gromr crouched by the door, still wrapped in cloth, watching her with those sharp, obedient eyes.
She opened the ledger. Dipped her quill. Wrote in the precise, measured hand that had recorded a thousand offerings, a thousand harvests:
Retrieved: one Stone-Born, frost-veined. Responsive. Strength adequate. Awareness intact. Designated: Gromr (Ram).
She paused. Considered. Added:
Discarded: two. Defective awareness. Defective vitality (breath failure). Returned to source. Material reclaimed.
She closed the book. Set the quill aside. Looked at Gromr.
The creature stared back. Waiting for her command. Waiting for her purpose.
She smiled.
“Stand.”
Gromr stood. Unsteady, but trying.
“Kneel.”
Gromr knelt. Head bowed. Submissive.
Good.
She crossed to him. Placed a hand on his head. Felt the warmth of his skin, the density of his skull. Strong. Useful.
“You are mine,” she said. Her voice low, steady, absolute. “The mountain made you. I claimed you. You will serve me. Do you understand?”
Gromr’s mouth worked. The sound came out clearer this time, shaped by effort and will:
“Yeee-sss.”
The steward’s smile widened.
The mountain provided.
And she would use every gift it gave.
4
Gromr stood at the shaft’s edge, lamplight throwing his shadow long against the stone.
One winter since the steward pulled him from the dark. One winter learning his body, how the legs worked, how to balance weight in a body made of rock and ice. One winter of learning his name and his purpose.
She called him Ram. The steward’s enforcer. He had grown. Too large now. As large as the steward. He had become the one who descended when others would not. The one who dragged prisoners to the deep, who stood guard at the steward’s door, who served the pack.
The mountain’s air.
He breathed it without discomfort. Gromr could stand here for hours, days. The warmth did not trouble him. The thickness did not choke.
It felt like home.
Below, a pick rang. Steady. Rhythmic. Strike, pause, strike.
Gromr’s head tilted. Listening.
The sound pulled at something beneath his ribs. Not pain. Not quite memory. Just recognition. His hands flexed, frost-veined fingers curling into fists. He had held a pick once. He knew that. His body knew it. The weight, the angle, the swing that made stone crack clean.
But when? Where?
He could not remember.
The steward said it did not matter. “You are Ram,” she told him. “What made you is gone. Only what you are serves me.”
He believed her. He had no reason not to. She had named him. Claimed him. Given him purpose. And purpose was enough.
Wasn’t it?
The pick rang again. Closer this time. Footsteps on stone. Multiple legs, uneven gait. Another miner climbing toward the hauling-stations, basket on their back.
Gromr straightened. Watched the tunnel mouth.
A figure emerged into the lamplight.
Six-legged. Face shadowed beneath a hood, but the body was familiar. Too familiar. The gait, the way the legs moved, the shape of the shoulders—
Gromr’s breath caught.
The miner stopped. Looked up. Saw him.
Stillness. One six-legged figure facing one who had a memory of having six legs, lamplight between them, the sound of the deep breathing at their backs.
The miner’s eyes were dull. Exhausted. But aware. Still themselves. Still whole.
Gromr’s chest tightened. His hands trembled. He did not know why.
The miner’s gaze moved over him. Took in the wolf-tooth at his throat, the leather straps the steward had bound across his chest, the ram-horn sigil carved into the metal plate over his heart. The miner’s expression did not change. Just tired. Resigned.
They had seen this before. Others who went down and came back different. Others who stood guard now at the deep shafts, watching the tunnels with sharp eyes and no names.
The miner adjusted the basket. Nodded once and walked past him toward the upper stations.
Gromr did not move. Did not speak. Watched the miner’s back disappear into shadow.
When the footsteps faded, he turned back to the shaft.
The warmth rose from below. Salt. Sweet. Humid. The smell of the mountain’s breath.
He knew that smell.
Had known it before the steward pulled him out. Before she named him. Before he was.
He had been in it. Surrounded by it. It had filled his lungs, moved through his blood, synced with his heart. He remembered the pressure. The pulse. The walls contracting around him, wet and close and alive.
He remembered darkness.
He flinched. The memory fractured, slipped away. He tried to grasp it, hold it, but it dissolved like smoke. Just sensation without image. Warmth without context. A gap where something should have been.
The steward said it did not matter.
But standing here, breathing the deep’s air, hearing the picks ring below, he felt the ghost of it.
Below, another sound rose. A hum. Low. Resonant. The sound of stone shifting, or breath moving through vast lungs. The mountain, stirring in its sleep.
He went towards it.
When he came close, he saw something wet and heavy sliding in the dark. It had been ejected from the mountain wall like a pit spat from a fruit.
Indigestible.
A pale heap of soft flesh, a tangle of limbs, covered in gray, viscous slime.
It moved. Coughed slowly. It sounded like broken glass in a wet bag.
He saw six legs twitching, stripped of connective tissue and muscle mass. Hands with frost in their veins, clutching at nothing. He saw dirt and stone embedded in the raw skin.
But what shocked him was the face. It looked like him. Square jaws, Same teeth, but broken. Same eyes, but this one had one eye blind, the other wide open with no eyelids to shield it.
The creature lifted its head.
“Hrym…” it gargled, choking on slime. “...fótr...”
Gromr felt nothing. No recognition, no compassion. Only the cold certainty of the refinery. This thing possessed the same foundation, but unlike him, this sack of guts and failed nerves was the slag. Gromr was the iron.
He bent down, picked it up. It dripped on the ground, light as a husk. He looked it in the eye. It stared back in panic, seeing its own face but finding no mercy.
Then he threw it at the wall without hesitation.
It hit the stone with a soft, slushy thud. The light in its eye extinguished.
The echo died quickly in the cave. The heap did not move again. It would dry here, turn to dust, and be forgotten.
The hum came back.
Gromr’s body responded. His heart slowed, matching the rhythm. His breath deepened. His legs steadied. The trembling stopped.
The mountain recognized him. Not the waste it had discarded, but the tool it had kept.
And he recognized it—
—as mother?
No. That word did not fit. The mountain was not gentle. Not nurturing. But it had made him. Shaped him. Taken what was useful and remade it into what the steward needed.
He was the mountain’s child. And the steward’s tool. And the hall’s servant.
And whoever he had been before was lying broken against the wall.
Just another clone. The mountain would make more.
The hum faded. The warmth settled. The shaft breathed its slow, patient breath.
Gromr exhaled. Turned away from the edge. It did not matter.
Because the mountain always took back what it made.
And the steward would descend after him, lamp in one hand, ledger in the other, to see what new shape the mountain had given her.
To test him.
To claim him.
Again.
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