Aldric Thorne

Bjorn was hanged on a Thursday for a theft he didn't commit. When the rope broke and he woke on the frozen ground beneath the scaffold, two ravens watched from the crossbeam above. Odin's birds. They had cut him down with methodical beaks and perfect timing, and they had left something behind in his chest: a cold weight, a tone that wasn't sound, a certainty about endings. Now when Bjorn touches someone, he feels their fate. Not the small fates—the daily fortunes and misfortunes—but the final one. The moment where their thread runs out. He feels it as a note in his sternum, an amber-not-amber colour that his mind cannot properly name, and a bone-deep certainty about when and how they will die. He doesn't want this gift. He didn't ask for it. But the ravens chose him, and now he carries the weight of every fate he touches—including his own. *Gallowssong* is a Norse fantasy about fate, weight, and what you do when you can see the ending coming for everyone you love. Set in a world of jarls and völvas, fjords and longships, it explores the Norse understanding of wyrd—not as prophecy to be fulfilled or subverted, but as accumulated consequence. The Norns do not decree. They account. They weave from the material a person gives them, which means fate can change in theory, but by the time most people encounter it clearly enough to consider changing it, the weight has accumulated so thoroughly that the projection is stable. Bjorn encounters fate directly, in everyone he touches, and then has to decide what to do with that encounter. He could isolate himself, touch no one, learn nothing more about the endings waiting for his village. He could warn people, though warnings from a man who was hanged and didn't stay dead are not always welcome. He could use the knowledge—to protect, to manipulate, to prepare. Or he could carry it, the way he carries the cold in his chest and the ravens on his roof, and trust that there is a shape to what he is becoming even if he cannot see it y

Sael is twenty years old, a shepherd's foundling, raised in a small village by a man who found him wrapped in an undecaying cloth in a mountain pass. He has always been different: the sheep don't drift from him, children and animals seek him out, his touch eases fever and his presence settles disputes. He has learned not to remark on it. Then a priest comes to the village with news: Sael is the child of Avar, the god of patient abundance. Avar died giving birth to him—exhausted her divinity to create something mortal, something that could carry forward what she was without being what she was. Sael has been living on evidence of her ever since: the cloth that doesn't decay, a book of 347 promises, the memories of those who loved her. Now the word is spreading. Pilgrims are coming. And three factions—the Covenant Church, the Keepers of the Deep Rite, and the Secular Inheritors—want to claim Sael for what his mother was. *The Stillborn God* is dark fantasy about theology, inheritance, and the question of what you owe the thing that gave everything to make you. It follows Sael as he discovers what he is, navigates the factions that want to define him, and decides what he's willing to become. The novel unfolds across three acts: Before the Revelation (Sael's life in the village, the priest's arrival, the news that changes everything); The Followers and the Factions (the pilgrims, the three groups that want to claim him, the miracles he didn't intend, and the question of what Avar actually wanted for him); and The Theological Decision (what Sael chooses to be, what he refuses, and what kind of divinity survives being passed to something mortal). Sael is not a hero in the conventional sense. He is genuinely good—kind, patient, the sort of person who listens and doesn't push. This is not a liability. His goodness is the thing his mother gave everything to create, and it becomes the foundation for a theology that none of the factions anticipated. The god Avar never appears o