Chapter 1
Hammerfest, Northern Isolation Zone
Frozen Exclusion Belt — 0613 Hours
Temperature: -38°C
Status: Active CHF-1 dormancy field — 27 days unbreached
Snow peeled sideways in bladed sheets, slicing across the frozen wastes like an executioner’s whip. Hammerfest, once a sleepy Arctic hub of fishing exports and sub-zero bragging rights, now resembled an ossuary carved from glacial sorrow. The ocean had receded. The buildings were frost-bitten corpses of industry. And somewhere between the quiet hum of geothermal stations and the moaning bones of long-dead cruise liners, a dragon lay curled like a murder waiting for a reason.
Taraxius the Scald — twenty-seven meters long from snout to tailbone, with dorsal plates like obsidian machetes and breath that could reduce a bunker to slag. His coils steamed in the permafrost, vast wings folded in like a priest’s judgment. He watched the falling snow with a predator’s patience, eyes glowing like sunstones dipped in blood.
Perched beside his ribbed foreleg, wearing nothing more than a crimson cloak over ritual-leather combat gear, sat the Imp of the Bleeding Sky.
Vashta Skor was eating pickled radish from a rusted tin.
“I’m just saying,” she said, cheeks slightly puffed as she chewed, “if you get hungry enough, fermented vegetables are technically a form of violence.”
Taraxius didn’t respond, but his pupil dilated—one slit widening as if offended.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she snorted, flicking a frozen sliver at his eye, which he ignored. “You ate a seismic patrol team last week, and I’m the weird one for snacking?”
Taraxius exhaled steam. The snow in a five-meter radius hissed into vapor instantly.
“I know that one of them was radioactive. That’s on you for chewing the guy with the dosimeter first.”
Her legs dangled over the ledge of a collapsed transit depot. Below, frozen streets coiled into obscurity. Vashta kicked one foot like a bored child, teeth glinting as she grinned into the cold.
“I give it four more days before the whispering starts again. You know how it is—‘help us, please,’ ‘we’re still alive,’ blah blah... Typical infestation dreaming.”
Then came the flickering.
A shimmer on the edge of visual logic. Not quite a flash, not quite a blink. Just enough disruption in the air for Vashta to feel her canines throb with recognition.
“Speak of the abyssal little bitch,” Vashta said, lips curling. “You summoned poetry with tits.”
Yuka Ruinenokami did not so much walk into view as refuse to remain unnoticed. One moment, she wasn’t there. The next, she leaned against a half-submerged rail track with her marker-stained fingers tucked inside her sleeves, one phantom limb idly miming a yawn.
“Still sitting in the snow like a feral mascot,” Yuka said. “You’re remarkably consistent in your stupidity.”
Vashta popped another radish. “Still doing that ‘tragic kimono but evil’ cosplay I see. I almost missed the smell of your existential decay. Almost.”
Yuka smiled like a scalpel. “Skor. You still look like a blood clot someone gave legs.”
“Thank you,” Vashta said brightly. “I exfoliate with gravel and the tears of survivors.”
Taraxius raised his massive head. Despite the dragon’s lack of vocal cords, the air around him pulsed with a low psychic thrum, a ripple in nearby snow that translated as: She returns.
Yuka ignored the beast. She stepped closer, her footsteps refusing to crunch — the snow ceased to exist where she walked.
“I’m here on message duty,” Yuka said, casually dragging a finger across an invisible notebook. “You’re getting guests.”
Skor’s expression soured like old milk. “The fuck do you mean ‘guests’? Nobody comes here but ghosts and suicidal cults.”
Yuka shrugged. “Hender and Ward.”
A pause. Only the wind dared speak for a second.
Vashta tilted her head slowly, one fang tapping her lower lip. “…Why?”
“Why do you think, Miss Vampire?” Yuka asked. “To fight CHF-1. The surge vector is shifting again. Command wants someone who can burn faster than it spreads. That means you.”
“Oh, right,” Skor said, making a mock-gagging gesture. “Because I’m the only flamethrower with legs up here. No one else in the North. Definitely no other freaks. Just poor ol’ Skor and her little death-lizard.”
Yuka raised a brow. “You are the only one with a volcanic wyvern who eats radar installations for brunch.”
“Maybe,” Skor muttered, swinging down from the ledge and landing with a crunch. “But I’m not the only one up here you should worry about.”
She approached Yuka with that loose, serpentine grace she wore like perfume — head cocked, hands tucked behind her back, smile just a little too wide.
“You know what they say,” Skor purred. “The more remote you go, the more you’re hiding.”
Yuka blinked slowly.
“…I haven’t heard a single person say that ever,” she said.
Taraxius exhaled again, this time in what could only be described as draconic sarcasm.
Skor grinned wider. “Well, I say it. And I’m people.”
Yuka gave her a look usually reserved for misbehaving syntax.
“You’re going to assist them,” Yuka said finally. “Whether you like it or not. You owe Command seventy-eight counts of ‘non-cooperation in a Containment Priority Zone.’”
“I ate those counts,” Vashta replied, lips pouting. “They were chewy.”
“You’ll receive coordinates at 0800. Be ready.”
“And if I’m not?”
Yuka’s eyes glinted like ink across a death warrant.
“I’ll write you out of this chapter.”
A pause.
Then Skor gave a single, slow clap. “Ooooooh. Spooky. You gonna erase me, story-girl?”
“I’ll erase your dragon’s name first,” Yuka said.
Taraxius shifted uneasily.
Vashta blinked, once. Her smile didn’t waver, but her fingers twitched.
“…You wouldn’t dare.”
“I already did. Twice. He just hasn’t realized it yet.”
Another pulse of dragon-thought rumbled through the frost: Clarify. What name?
Vashta’s expression soured. “You psychotic footnote—”
“0800,” Yuka said sweetly, and vanished with a flicker that left the taste of ink and unfinished eulogies in the air.
Skor glared at the empty space, then tossed the tin can at it for good measure. It clattered uselessly into the snow.
Taraxius looked at her.
“What?” she said. “I know she’s creepy. Don’t look at me. I wasn’t the one who let her mark the continent.”
The dragon blinked once, very slowly.
“…Fine,” she sighed. “We’ll help the meat-sacks. But I swear, if that Hender guy tries to boss me around, I’ll drink his spinal fluid.”
Taraxius gave a low growl of agreement.
Snow fell harder.
The hunt was warming up.
Taraxius flew low, wings slicing clouds into vapor trails as the dragon glided above the treeline, burning arcs in the snow below. Skor rode his back like a bloodthirsty empress, her red cloak snapping behind her, hair wild in the high wind.
The ground below pulsed with life. Wrong life.
Infected—at least seventy—ambling through a ruin-choked stretch of boreal forest, scattering birds and ice-rats alike. Most of them were in various states of half-frozen decomposition. One was dragging a tattered violin case behind it. Another had nailed feathers to its back.
Skor pointed.
“There they are,” she grinned, crouching against Taraxius’s spine. “Sick ’em, boy.”
With a roar that tore clouds into jagged spirals, Taraxius dived.
The first column of infected didn’t even look up before the fire hit. Magmatic breath spewed downward in a conic fury, igniting snow, bark, meat, and bone alike. The ground didn’t burn—it screamed into ash. Trees went up like matchsticks. Half the horde disappeared in a flash of orange annihilation.
Skor leapt off mid-plunge.
She hit the ground running, boots skidding over scorched moss and broken antlers. Her eyes gleamed with feral delight as she spotted an infected hunched over an old, tattered Bible, muttering verses from Revelation in a child’s voice.
She grinned wider, baring her fangs.
“WAIT—SIR. SIR! PASTOR!”
The thing looked up, lips flaking, its milky eyes trying to remember what “sir” meant.
Too slow.
Skor launched.
She hit it like a missile, legs wrapping around its torso, hands grabbing its skull. It shrieked something about “trumpets and seals” before her mouth latched onto its neck and bit deep.
There was no blood spray—just a sickening inward collapse.
Its skin turned grey instantly. Veins blackened. Flesh shriveled up like a dropped raisin under a desert sun. The body spasmed once, twice, then folded in on itself as if ashamed of its own survival. The soul—if there was one left—vanished like smoke in vacuum.
She pulled back, wiped her mouth with her sleeve.
“Blegh. Protestant.”
Above, Taraxius wheeled around again and dropped another plume of flame across the treeline. A wall of fire roared to life, snaking through pine and spruce, burning so hot it melted snow into steam before it touched earth.
A forest fire.
Skor didn’t notice. Or care.
She bolted toward another straggler—a lanky infected dragging a hockey stick and missing its lower jaw.
She grabbed a fallen branch.
“Oh ho ho ho—what’s this?”
The zombie didn’t react. So she poked it in the back.
Nothing.
She poked again. Then jabbed.
“HELLO?”
It finally turned. No hostility. Just that slow, wet click from its rotted sinuses.
She slammed the stick across its face.
“FUCK YOU!”
Another swing.
“BE BEATEN—”
Another.
“BY—”
One more.
“NATURE!”
The stick broke. The zombie slumped. She stood panting over its mangled corpse, bits of bark and blood clinging to her fingers.
Up above, smoke began rising in great, swirling columns. Satellite feeds pinged with environmental breach alerts. Thermal imaging lit up like a war crime. In a bunker four kilometers south, a lieutenant in the Norwegian Ground Forces dropped his coffee and leaned toward the monitor.
“…Uh. Command? We’ve got…uh…there’s a fucking dragon. There’s a dragon.”
“Say again?”
“There’s a redhead riding a dragon and she just started a forest fire and beat a zombie to death with a stick. Sir. I—what the hell is happening?!”
Another voice cut in—fuzzed, clipped, urgent:
“Multiple heat signatures near Hammerfest perimeter. Civilian sectors at risk. We need—wait, is that the Skor Asset? Why is she unsupervised?”
Back in the forest, Skor was skipping over a field of burning corpses.
“WHEEEEEEEEEE!” she yelled, vaulting over a smoldering shopping cart.
She landed in a roll, then struck a dramatic pose for no one in particular. Her hair was soaked in ash. Her cheeks were flushed from combat and joy.
She turned to Taraxius, who was perched on the remains of a snowplow, licking molten brass from his claws.
“Best. Breakfast. Ever.”
He exhaled approvingly, setting a bus on fire by accident.
Somewhere far below, in a moss-coated military bunker already lighting up with warning klaxons, a single operative leaned toward his commanding officer and whispered:
“…Sir. We have a Skor Event in progress.”
Home.
A jagged chunk of rock floating in the far reaches of nowhere, speckled with ice-caked pines, howling winds, and absolutely nothing resembling civilization. No docks. No stores. No signals. Just cliffs, cold, and a handmade sign half-frozen into a snowdrift that read in scrawled red:
“No Visitors.
No Salvation.
No Refunds.”
This was Vashta Skor’s idea of peace.
The house—if you could call it that—was a two-story wooden cabin she built herself using stolen blueprints, drunk improvisation, and parts of a crashed Soviet weather station. It leaned slightly west, had a chimney that constantly belched black smoke, and was ringed with bones (not decorative). She had strung garlic over the windows, not out of superstition but as a joke. The floors creaked like they were trying to scream. The porch had three chairs: one for her, one for a corpse in sunglasses she refused to explain, and one permanently on fire.
Her dragon, Taraxius, did not fit.
“You’ve got wings,” Skor snapped, kicking one of his claws. “Tuck them.”
Taraxius huffed, smoke curling from his nostrils, nostrils the size of wine barrels.
“You fit last month.”
Grumble.
“I measured! I measured, you overgrown war-lizard! You’re only like, what, 135 meters?”
He snarled, tail thumping hard enough to send a pine tree toppling into the sea.
Skor stared at him. Then at the horse stable she’d built out back—an optimistic gesture from a time when she thought maybe, maybe, her monstrous volcanic death-lizard could squeeze into a wooden shed designed for retired farm horses.
It looked like a dollhouse next to him. The roof had already caved in. One of Taraxius’s horns was stuck in the ceiling.
“…Fine,” she sighed. “Sleep outside. Freeze your fireballs off, I don’t give a shit.”
Taraxius grunted and flopped into the snow like a pissed-off cat, curling into a semi-circle around the house and lighting a rock on fire just to be petty.
Inside, Skor changed into a nightshirt that said BITE ME HARDER and made tea—something herbal, stolen from a dead hiker’s backpack two winters ago. She sat in her rocking chair, kicked her feet up on the corpse-chair, and cracked open her latest fascination:
“ARCTIC CHAR: Ecology, Behavior, and Seasonal Mating Disasters.”
“Why the fuck do they spawn under ice?” she muttered, flipping a page with bloodstained fingers. “You’re fish, not masochists.”
The wind howled. Taraxius farted fire in his sleep.
It was peace, in the way serial killers enjoy crossword puzzles.
Then—knock knock knock.
Skor blinked.
Paused.
Slowly set the book down.
“…Did I hallucinate that, or is someone suicidal?”
She tiptoed to the door, peeked through the peephole—which was actually just a shotgun pellet hole from a previous misunderstanding.
And saw a man.
A hiker.
Beanie, scarf, frost-bitten eyebrows, cheap synthetic coat. His eyes were sunken, his lips blue, and he was visibly trembling as he waved awkwardly.
“Hi, um. Sorry to bother you. I—I think I have kidney stones, and I—I really need to piss. Could I use your toilet?”
Skor stared.
Blankly.
Then tilted her head with audible vertebrae cracking.
“…Kidney stones?”
“Yes—ow—yes, I’ve been hiking since yesterday and the pain’s really bad and the cold’s making it worse and—please—I’ll be fast, I swear—”
“No.”
“…what?”
She slammed the door.
“GO FUCK YOURSELF.”
Behind the door, she muttered, “Piss on a pinecone like a real man.”
She turned, lifted her tea, and took a long, triumphant sip.
Outside, the hiker stood in confused misery. He looked around at the snow, the cliffs, the dragon-shaped scorch marks in the ground. He muttered something about calling his brother, maybe filing a report, maybe suing.
Then he heard a growl.
The air heated.
He turned just in time to see Taraxius—who had been feigning sleep like a bored god—rise up from the snow with molten eyes and let out a low, ominous rumble.
“…oh shit.”
FWOOM.
Flame. Instantaneous. Mythic.
The man didn’t scream long. He sizzled. A shadow of ash formed where he’d been standing. His kidneys, tragically, remained intact.
Back inside, Skor didn’t even flinch. She turned another page.
“...Huh,” she said aloud, frowning. “Apparently Arctic char sometimes cannibalize their own eggs. Savage. Respect.”
From outside, a flaming backpack slammed into the window and slowly slid down.
She sipped again.
“I love the wilderness.”
The idea came to Skor somewhere between a boredom-induced bloodlust haze and the discovery of a single crumpled kroner note in her boot.
“We need clothes,” she told Taraxius.
“Rgrghhhnn,” replied Taraxius, yawning fire and belching molten air that cracked a nearby boulder.
“We do! I need new shirts, and you need...I don’t know, a muzzle. Or a goddamn personality adjustment.”
So they flew.
Which is to say: Taraxius streaked through the Norwegian sky like a volcanic meteor, his massive wings shattering cloudbanks and igniting the occasional rural barn, while Skor stood on his back in a trench coat and boots, screaming at the wind and sipping her third stolen thermos of black tea.
✦ Arrival: Oslo ✦
Oslo was mostly intact.
By “mostly,” we mean it had survived three CHF-1 mini-outbreaks, two Black Marrow clean-ups, and one Sidus-related “incident” involving a child’s birthday party and a reality fracture in the ball pit. It still had power. Still had running water. Still had shops.
Not great shops.
But shops.
They landed in the center of town like a war crime.
Taraxius cratered the cobblestone plaza outside a supermarket. People screamed. Pigeons exploded. A very unfortunate Vespa caught fire.
Skor stepped off his back and snapped her fingers like a diva entering a club.
“Try not to moltenify anyone while I’m gone, fatty,” she said over her shoulder.
Taraxius gave her a glare that could melt theology.
As she tried to walk into the store, she yelled back without turning:
“GET YOUR FAT ASS INSIDE!”
Taraxius took this as permission.
He stuck his head in.
Then a claw.
Then his right shoulder.
Then the doorframe exploded.
Skor turned around mid-aisle, holding a packet of ham, and watched as Norway’s most terrifying airborne biohazard tried to squeeze into a Coop Mega like a guy forcing into skinny jeans two years post-divorce.
People ran. Children screamed. Someone tried to film. Their phone caught fire.
“WHY ARE YOU SO FAT?!” Skor screamed. “Did you find a hen house?! You look like you ate Denmark!”
Taraxius hissed, shook the building, and knocked over the cold cuts section. A wave of frozen bratwurst rolled across the floor like meat bowling.
Skor, completely undeterred, made her purchase.
One T-shirt. Black. Norwegian text:
“Psykiatrisk pasient — Ikke mates etter midnatt”
(Psych Ward Patient — Do Not Feed After Midnight)
And a ham sandwich.
“Payment?” the cashier asked, trembling behind bulletproof glass.
Skor tossed a gold coin from a dead czar’s tomb onto the counter.
The register caught fire.
She stepped out into the street, handed the sandwich to Taraxius (who devoured it in one bite and also a nearby lamppost), and whistled.
“Alright, let’s go terrorize Arnold.”
✦ Target: Arnold Rasmussen ✦
Occupation: Assistant Night Manager, DanskTech Refrigeration.
Location: Viborg, Denmark.
Lifestyle: Dull. Fear of geese. Recently divorced. Owns eight beige shirts. Thinks “hard boiled eggs are too spicy.”
Arnold was sitting at his IKEA table, eating crackers and rewatching an episode of Nattepatruljen, when his windows turned orange.
He squinted.
“Is that—”
Then the wall exploded.
A blast of hellfire rolled across his lawn, setting his inflatable kayak on fire and vaporizing his compost bin.
“JESUSFUCK—!”
Skor leapt from Taraxius’s back, crashed through his living room window, and slid across the floor in her socks screaming:
“I’M GONNA SUCK YOUR BLOOD, YOU BLONDE SHITSTAIN!!”
Arnold screamed. He screamed like a man whose soul was being audited.
He ran.
She chased him.
Out the window. Across the street. Into his neighbor’s backyard.
Taraxius casually torched his house, then sat on it like a cat.
Arnold tripped over a garden gnome. Skor caught up. She pinned him down, hissed in his face, then sniffed.
“…Ugh. You smell like disappointment.”
“I—I HAVE CHILDREN—”
“No you don’t,” she snapped. “You have tax write-offs. Now squeal, little Danish piglet—”
She leaned down.
He fainted.
She shrugged. Drew a Sharpie from her coat. Wrote ‘LOSER’ on his forehead in runes and stuck a raw herring in his pants.
✦ Epilogue: Bureaucratic Abyss ✦
Later that night, back at her cabin, Skor sat at her desk.
Stacks of papers. Crumpled receipts. A form marked:
“ÅRSOPPGAVE FOR SKATTEYTERE (Annual Tax Declaration)”
Line 4B: Are you currently housing a living creature capable of continental-level destruction?
She wrote: “Yes. He eats livestock. It’s a cultural thing.”
Line 7C: Do you consider yourself undead?
She checked “Other” and wrote: “Sexy vampire anarchist.”
Line 12D: Any outstanding business expenses?
She listed:
1x Psyche Ward T-shirt
1x Ham sandwich
1x Emotional damage to Arnold
She stared at the final box.
Are you currently at war with the living? Y/N
Skor clicked the pen.
Thought for a second.
Checked “Yes.”
Then underlined it three times and drew a smiley face with fangs.
