The Vikings Tale

Bjorn Helmutsson had been taking a shit in the woods, when he saw a van enter the area to the west of the Viking camp. The Shade server had been down all morning and net access was completely cut off. Normally, when something like a van approached the Viking camp, they would see it as a Longship, or a chariot pulled by goats or something. This was just a plain old van.

Taking up the mantle of Viking was a big commitment, and was not done easily or without thought. Born Tyson Freeman, Bjorn had always felt out of place in the North Shore Long Island town he had grown up in. Everyone kind of thought of him as an asshole. He regarded himself as more of a freethinking self starter.

Society in general had too many arbitrary rules for him. Things like waiting in line, or other small social contracts entered into on a daily basis seemed silly to him. He considered himself a stranded time traveler marooned in the wrong century. A century of lilly livered pansies. He was the master of his destiny, and felt that society wasn’t something that he had implicitly signed up for, so he was exempted from its rules.

To fulfill this urge to escape the bonds of civility, he had poured himself into what he considered manly pursuits. Martial arts, historical reenactments, man-o-sphere weekend getaways, they all reeked of shallow low commitment pretending. HEMA, or historical European martial arts, was something that he considered passibly realistic, and he became quite proficient with sword and shield. He sank countless hours and dollars into what all the other practitioners considered a hobby. He, on the other hand, considered it a lifestyle.

This whole thing came to a head one afternoon at a Dunkin Donuts in the Catskills. He had gone to a HEMA gathering at Hunter mountain and had spent most of the weekend being kicked out of various technique seminars and sparring rounds for acting like a Buffel or a Try-hard. These disparaging terms describe somebody that treats every sparring session as if it were a life and death no holds barred bloodsport.

To Tyson, these were life and death battles. He had a sword, it was his turn. Most people tended to overlook the fact that when you were holding a sword, it was in fact your turn. It was an expression of will. An object of destiny. The other HEMA practitioners didn’t seem to appreciate this fact like he did, so he was in a rather foul mood when he was forced to stand in line to order his coffee and crossandwich.

He chose that time and place to make his custerian last stand against society as a whole. The other patrons of the Dunkin Donuts did not see this coming, and were fully unprepared for the violence that he wrought. A couple of broken jaws, arms, and traumatic brain injuries taught them some valuable lessons in preparing for violence in what was otherwise considered a peaceful situation.

Circumstances dictated that a retrograde maneuver north was the wisent course of action. The police force in that sleepy town were singularly unprepared for the demonstration of wholesale violence that he undertook, and he managed to slip out in the ensuing confusion.

He had been toying with the idea of becoming a shady person. Fundamentally, he thought the whole thing was a bit of a cop out. Changing your reality and buying into a mass delusion didn’t really seem like his cup of tea. He had bought a pair of shades a few months before the whole Dunkin Donuts thing, and had messed around with them a little bit. He had tried out a few eras, but nothing really caught him until he had heard about Ullrvik.

Ullrvik was a Viking settlement in central Vermont where the shared reality had completely overwhelmed and then infiltrated local law enforcement. They were the law, and nobody could do shit about it. Tyson, soon to be Bjorn, headed northeast to join what he considered to be a libertarian utopia.

The Vikings of Ullrvik welcomed him with open arms. These were his true soul brothers and sisters. They actually understood how society should work. He had settled in nicely and had been among the Viking ranks for six years.

In those six years, he had seen a number of Yarls come and go. Disappointingly, none of them were named Bjorn Helmutsson. That was, not until Bjorn looked into the passenger seat of the van.

There, lying among discarded coffee cups, thankfully not of the Dunkin variety, was an object of pure will. Pure violence. Pure destiny. There was a broadsword of particularly fine make. To add a cherry on top to this whole fortunate situation, it was also a talking broadsword that said a lot of things that Bjorn desperately wanted to hear. A lot of the things that it said to Bjorn didn’t make all that much sense to him, but it was speaking a language of destiny. One in which Bjorn considered himself fluent.

“Blazer, The Master has called upon you to fulfil your destiny,” the sword intoned, “take up the blade and free this empty world from Deathtoll’s wretched grasp.”

“Bjorn,” he answered the sword, “my name is Bjorn, not blazer.”

“Bjorn,” the sword thought about it, “what an interesting name. Now go forth and free all the world from Deathtoll.”

Who or what Deathtoll was wasn’t a concern of Bjorn’s. His main concern was Magnus.

In the early hours of the morning that day, the bottom had dropped out of their shared reality. The shade server that fueled their shared delusion had gone dark. For a lot of Vikings, this didn’t change all that much. If they had been encamped in a suburb, or a city, it would have been a different story. They were encamped in a place that had a pretty Scandinavian vibe to it, so essentially nothing changed. It was their perception of each other that gave the vikings pause.

On a normal Viking day, they saw each other as epic Viking warriors decked out in glimmering mail and leathers. Lagertha, their Yarl, even had a very convincing set of Valkyrie wings that helped her look Yarlish enough for her to be the leader of this band. Her boyfriend and second in command, Magnus, looked like Baldur made flesh.

With this perception gone, Magnus suddenly remembered that Lagertha had been stepping out on him with a local shit farmer or whatever. While this would normally be the right of any Yarl, Magnus not only took umbrage to this state of affairs, he also got the bright idea that he should be Yarl. That seemed to be a pretty popular idea that morning, and there were various fistfights and duels with Magnus coming out on top.

Bjorn had sat this power struggle out, opting to wait until there was a definite Yarl for him to overthrow. Magnus had been cruel in the treatment of Lagertha after the usurpment. Bjorn would have just killed her. Magnus on the other hand took the opportunity to gloat over her and think of creative ways to sexually degrade her over the course of the morning. At first this had been fabulous entertainment, but eventually Bjorn, and most of the other Vikings for that matter had grown tired of it.

Lagertha hadn’t been a bad leader. Bjorn had respected her and raided under her flag for quite some time. She was tough, smart, and above all else fair. She didn’t take shit from underlings and wasn’t needlessly cruel to them. Magnus took to his mantle of power like a spoiled child of divorce, which he probably was. Bjorn didn’t really know about his past, but he showed a lot of the telltale signs of coming from a place of privilege where he could sulk at two Christmases.

Now, with an actual sword, something he had trained with most of his adult life, things might be a little bit different. Actual swords were something that the Vikings didn’t carry, opting more wisely for bats or in some cases like Magnus’, crowbars. If they did carry actual swords, the valley would be the center of a number of murder investigations. Instead, it just had a far higher than average number of assaults.

With the shades gone, Bjorn could clearly see that they were just a bunch of dickheads in the woods playing with sticks. Until recently, they had thought those sticks to be swords, but now by the light of day the reality of the situation was embarrassingly clear.

Bjorn pilfered the broadsword and skulked back into the woods while Magnus was busy being cuckholded by some dumb hick. After that demonstration of exactly how Magnus would be running things, this coup would go far easier than originally anticipated.

Bjorn watched the hick and Lagertha head to the van and eventually be joined by somebody of indeterminate gender with a long gun. Maybe the hick wasn’t all that dumb after all. He had just waltzed in and taken Magnus’ prize right from under his nose. Bjorn would have killed him on principle.

Bjorn waited for nightfall to begin his endeavor. This game of waiting had to be done well away from the camp. The talking sword basically wouldn’t shut up. It spoke in quotes and half remembered video game lore, which Bjorn found annoying. Once well away from the camp, Bjorn tested the sharpness of the blade that he bore. It was the sharpest thing he had ever witnessed. It made a scalpel look like a rusty butterknife. Anything that he decided he wanted to cut through would yield before his might. It was intoxicating. Wood, rock, metal, unbreakable post space age ceramic metamaterial, all was cloven before him and heralded by a shock of intense blue light. He liked it, a magic talking sword.

Food safety was pretty low on the list of priorities in the Viking camp. Every once in a while a few of them would come down with food poisoning and think very little of it. Bjorn must have eaten something a little bit off at some point in the morning, because by mid afternoon he was vomiting and shooting hot red water out of his ass. This was not the end of the world, and actually took up some time in the afternoon that he originally had no idea what to do with, other than waiting for night to fall.

By evening, he had started to feel a touch better and decided that he would go forward with his coup d’etat. By the time he had gotten back to camp, Magnus had organized a tournament to decide who would be his second in command. So the Vikings were just waiting around to beat the piss out of each other. Roughly half of them were already some flavor of beaten up.

Even in a coup, there were certain protocols that Bjorn thought that he should abide by. Namely letting the guy you are about to overthrow know that he is about to get overthrown. Kind of a professional courtesy. So Bjorn marched right up to where the tournament was being held and issued a challenge to Magnus, right to his dumb face.

“Magnus,” Bjorn shouted over the din of the competition, “I’m not fighting in your stupid tournament to be number two. I challenge you to be Yarl. Fight me like a Viking.”

The tournament stopped, as they tended to do for a coup. The Vikings were all pretty amped up, and Bjorn was pretty surprised that nobody tried to deck him right there, or issue another challenge on their own behalf.

Magnus stood, he was on a raised dais, so he towered over the crowd.

“I accept your challenge Bjorn, you piece of shit,” Magnus said wrathfully, “I’ll put you in the dirt where you belong.”

He stepped off his dais and brandished his crowbar. It was a makeshift weapon for a makeshift leader. Bjorn had a proper weapon, something a legitimate leader would have on his belt. He drew the Broadsword and it hissed and cracked into the night. The circle of men around them were all bathed in the strange blue light that poured out of the sword.

One Viking in back could be heard to say, “Oh, fuck this. Hey, anyone with half a brain in their head should follow me. I’m getting the fuck out of here. This place is about to go three mile fucking island”

About a third of the Vikings went with him. This didn’t bother Bjorn, as they could be tracked down and dealt with later.

Bjorn and Magnus stepped to dueling distance. Normally, Bjorn was a dirty fighter and would have taken this formal pause in action to kill the Yarl, but he took his time and let the soon to be dead man square up.

“Bjorn,” Magnus began, “you’re going to wish you never stepped foo……”

Bjorn snapped the blade of the sword through the crowbar that Magnus was holding in a single flash of blue. Behind the crowbar, was Magnus’ head. The top of his head stayed put for a second while his nervous system got the memo that their tenure as Magnus was over. His knees buckled and Bjorn snagged his antler crown out of the air before it tumbled to the ground. The pate of Magnus’ skull was still wedged in the crown, so Bjorn wrapped it smartly with the butt of the sword and popped it out wetly. It had been easy, like all of the soda bottles and watermelons that came before him.

Now, finally, it was truly his turn.