It has been over seventy years since Thormun last drank from a Wellspring, and yet the nightmares persist. In them, he sees himself as a young Kyrie, kneeling beside the frigid waters of the Tarn of Volsunga, cupping his hands to drink a draught that would change Valhalla’s fate forever. He sees the Wellspring tainted, with crimson poison spreading across the surface. A wolf, jaws dripping. Ruby-eyed serpents writhing through his dreams. Valhalla’s vast and encroaching doom.

When he wakes, he prepares for his final day on Valhalla. By the time he is done, the Valkyrie will not suffer him to live. But he has already sacrificed everything else—his eye, his family, and his closest friendships have all been taken by war. He has lived long enough to watch Valhalla burn, and to see his former friends corrupted by the waters he discovered. If they will not end this war on their own, then he will end it for them—and history will thank him. He dons his coat, his armor, his amulet, and strides onto the deck of the Golden Flame.

Many of the offworlders in the Widow’s fleet would never have trusted a former Valkyrie to care for their interests or secure their passage home. But they carried out his written plans over the months of their mission, and now have received a final wave of enchanted bottles with his last orders: distract, and keep a wide berth of the Golden Flame.

The fleet drifts away from his flagship, but the ruby-eyed vipers painted on the side of the Viper’s Blood give him pause. When he dreamt of drinking from a tainted spring, jaws bloody, was it a vision of the Wellsprings’ corrupting power—or the poison he would one day supply?

He is out of time to ponder this. After a lifetime of restraint, today he will ascend into the full power of a Valkyrie one last time, to send the offworlders home, and destroy the Wellsprings once and for all.

Thormun is available in the Thormun and The Kraken Army Expansion!