The first fat flakes of snow began to fall as Dr. Elara Vance pushed open the heavy wooden door of the longhouse. It was exactly as described in the tourism brochure: low-ceilinged, smoky, and reeking of woodsmoke and something vaguely animalic.
A museum piece. A cliché.
And then she saw him.
He wasn’t a paunchy, bored reenactor. He was a mountain of a man, poured into worn leather and shaggy furs, currently honing the edge of a wicked-looking seax with a slow, rhythmic scrape that seemed to be the only sound in the world.
His hair was the colour of wheat past harvest, braided back from a face that looked like it had been carved from granite and weathered by a century of North Sea gales.
He looked up. His eyes were the blue of glacial ice. They assessed her with an unnerving, primal stillness.
Elara, suddenly acutely aware of her puffy synthetic jacket and her smartphone clutched in her hand, felt a flush of ridiculousness.
“You are lost.” His voice was a low rumble, like stones deep under the earth. It wasn’t a question.
“Sheltered,” she corrected, her own voice sounding terribly thin and academic.
“The storm’s coming in faster than forecast. I’m Dr. Vance. I’m here to study the Oseberg artefacts at the museum.” She used her title like a shield.
He gave a grunt that might have been amusement or contempt and returned to his whetstone.
“The longhouse is closed to visitors. The season is over.”
“Yes, well, the weather didn’t check the opening hours,” Elara said, brushing snow from her shoulders. “I just need to wait it out. I won’t trouble you.”
“You are trouble simply by being here,” he said, not looking up.
“You smell of cities.”
Elara’s mouth fell open. Indignation warred with a strange, unwelcome thrill. “That’s incredibly rude.”
“It is truth,” he said, finally setting the seax and whetstone aside. He stood, unfolding to an impossible height that made the longhouse seem suddenly much smaller. “I am Bjorn. And you are trapped, doktor. Not sheltered.”
As if to prove his point, a deep, thunderous roar echoed outside, followed by a violent shudder that rattled the wooden walls and sent dust sifting down from the rafters. Elara stumbled, her heart leaping into her throat. Bjorn didn’t move, his head cocked, listening like a wolf.
When the silence returned, it was absolute. The weak grey light from the doorway was gone, replaced by a solid wall of white.
Elara rushed to the door, pulling at the handle. It didn’t budge. “It’s blocked! We’re buried!”
“Avalanche,” Bjorn said, as calmly as if he’d announced supper. He walked to a storage chest and pulled out a thick wool blanket. “Here. Your city clothes are thin.”
“We need to call for help!” Elara fumbled for her phone. No service. The battery icon flashed a weak 10%. Panic, cold and sharp, began to climb her throat.
“Your magic box cannot help you here,” Bjorn said, nodding at the phone. “The mountain does not listen to its whispers.” He began to move around the longhouse with practised ease, lighting more oil lamps until a soft, golden glow pushed back the shadows. “We have air. There is food. Water. We will wait.”
“Wait? For how long? Days? Weeks?” Her voice rose hysterically.
He stopped and fixed her with those glacial eyes. “For as long as it takes. Panic is a luxury that steals your warmth. Sit by the fire.”
Chastened, and feeling utterly useless, Elara sank onto a low stool near the central hearth. She watched him, this man who moved through the ancient space as if he’d been born in it.
Hours bled together. The howl of the wind was their only soundtrack. To fight the silence, Elara fell back on what she knew.
“The construction is remarkable. The jointing is based on the excavations at Kaupang, but the roof pitch is more akin to the later Gokstad design. An interesting anachronism.”
Bjorn, who was mending a fishing net with swift, sure fingers, didn’t look up. “It keeps the rain out. That is all that matters.”
“It’s history,” she insisted. “It’s important to get the details right.”
“History is a story told by the quiet ones who survived,” he said, his voice low. “The truth was louder. And messier.”
Frustration prickled at her. “What would you know about it? You just wear the clothes.”
He finally looked at her, a faint, dangerous smile touching his lips. “Is that what you think I do?”
“It’s what all reenactors do. They play at the past.”
“Some of us,” he said, his gaze intense, “are simply waiting for the present to catch up.”
The conversation was absurd. He was absurd. Yet, as the days blurred. Two? Three? His quiet competence became a lifeline.
He showed her how to render fat for the lamps, how to make a thin, sustaining broth from dried stockfish. He spoke of the sea not as a thing of postcards, but as a cold, hungry god. He spoke of honour not as a concept, but as a chain that could strangle a man.
One evening, cold and aching with a loneliness she hadn’t felt since her first year at Oxford, she gestured to the rune-covered whetstone he always kept near. “What do they mean? The runes.”
He picked it up, running a thumb over the carved symbols. “This one is for strength. This for protection. This… for a safe journey home.” His voice held a depth of sorrow that silenced her.
“It’s beautiful,” she said softly.
“It is a tool. Like your digging tools. It holds intention.” He held it out to her. “See for yourself.”
Hesitantly, she reached for it. As her fingers brushed against his, a jolt, like static shock, passed between them. She fumbled, and the sharp edge of the seax lying beside it nicked the pad of her thumb.
“Ouch!”
A single drop of blood welled up and fell, splattering onto the surface of the whetstone.
The world dissolved.
A scream of wind. Salt sting on the lips. The gut-wrenching pitch and yaw of a longship beneath her feet. The taste of fear and mead-soured breath. The crushing weight of a mail shirt. The visceral, bone-deep shock of an axe biting into a shield. A name, screamed into the gale: “Astrid!”
Elara gasped, recoiling as if burned. The vision vanished, leaving her shaking, the longhouse swaying around her. She stared at Bjorn, her heart hammering against her ribs.
“What… what was that?”
He watched her, his expression unreadable, but his eyes were full of a stormy pain she now recognized.
“You asked what I know of history,” he said, his voice rough. “Now you have felt a page of it.”
“That was… a memory.”
“It is a truth the stone remembers. It has tasted my blood, too. Now it knows yours.” He picked up the stone, cradling it. “It was my brother’s. He did not get his safe journey home.”
The wall between past and present, between academic study and visceral experience, shattered. She wasn’t trapped with a reenactor. She was trapped with a ghost, a man who carried the past inside him like a shard of ice.
Tears she didn’t understand welled in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I called you a fraud.”
“You saw what you were meant to see.”
The air between them crackled with a new, terrifying intimacy. All her carefully constructed theories, her intellectual detachment, lay in ruins.
She saw him now. Not a savage, but a man scarred by a loss so profound it had stretched across centuries. A loneliness that mirrored her own.
Another day passed. The silence now was different, charged.
She found herself watching the way the firelight played on the planes of his face, the startling gentleness in his hands as he worked.
Finally, she could bear it no longer. “Bjorn?” Her voice was small in the vast quiet.
He looked up from the fire.
“When we get out of here… what happens?”
He poked at a log with a stick, sending up a shower of sparks. “You will return to your universities. You will write your papers on dead things. You will forget the smell of this smoke.”
“Will I?” she challenged. “Will you forget the woman who smelled of cities?”
He was silent for a long time. “The world out there,” he said finally, gesturing with the stick towards the wall of snow, “has no place for my kind of truth. It is a world of whispers. I am a man who only knows how to speak in a roar.”
“Maybe I’m tired of whispers,” Elara said.
He looked at her then, a real, full look that stripped away every last one of her defences. He saw the brilliant, lonely doctor, and he saw the woman beneath.
“In here,” he said, his voice so low it was almost part of the darkness, “for this time, it was real. Wasn’t it?”
It wasn’t a question for the historian. It was a question for the woman.
Elara didn’t answer with words. She crossed the space between them, her city-sore feet silent on the earthen floor. She reached out, her hand trembling only slightly, and touched the faded scar that cut through his eyebrow.
It was not a gesture of study. It was a gesture of acceptance.
His breath hitched. His hand came up, his work-roughened fingers closing around hers.
They were warm. Alive. Real.
Outside, the wind screamed its ancient song. But inside, for the first time, Elara Vance was not afraid of the silence. She was part of it.
