by J.Ironwood
The sacred places are dying. Not fading. Not neglected. Cut — with the clean precision of someone who knows exactly what they're destroying and why. In the ruins of a grove that should have outlasted him, a failed skald-apprentice holds his dying mentor and watches a rune older than the gods carve itself into his palm. The system awakening inside Ulfar Stoneborn is not magic. It predates magic. Predates the Aesir. A cultivation path of Wyrd-Forging — runes inscribed one at a time, each one bought with something he cannot get back. A memory. A sensation. A piece of who he was. Power with a price paid in identity, and no refunds. His only ally: a hostile, wingless Valkyrie who needs him alive for reasons she won't explain. She does not like him. She is not kind. She is the most competent person he has ever met, and she has decided that his survival is her problem. Then there is Thyra — a woman who speaks the future like she's remembering it, and knows his name before he gives it. Together, they follow the trail of severed fate-threads across a dying world and toward a terrible realisation: whoever is cutting the web of the Nine Realms is not destroying it. They're building something. Using the bones of a dying world as raw materials. The gods have noticed. That is not good news. Norse cultivation LitRPG. Rune-by-rune progression with permanent costs. Slow-burn relationships with mythological weight. A cosmology taken seriously enough to hurt.
