Scandinavia had always been a land carved by cold and cruelty. Its people lived by raiding, and so the world named them Vikings. Their longships sliced the North Sea like winter winds—year after year they descended south, burning and pillaging the Roman coasts, leaving villages drowned in ash and screams.
Emperor Flavius Augustus of Rome finally lost his patience.
In the closing days of the year 2315 of the Divine Calendar, he issued an order unlike any before it—a campaign of absolute retribution.
In the last weeks of winter the following year, the Roman fleet appeared out of the sea fog like lightning, launching a massive assault along the coasts of Scandinavia. Fire-lances and bolt-throwers shattered timber palisades; armored legions stormed ashore like black iron tides. Within mere days, many coastal Viking settlements fell. The Romans fortified the conquered beaches one after another, sealing the North Sea as if with iron walls.
From that moment on, Viking raiding voyages nearly ceased.
The tribes inland still fought among themselves for what little they had, and a few bands taunted Roman outposts along the shoreline, but divided and poorly led, none could reclaim what had been lost.
Still, Emperor Augustus was unsatisfied. He believed that to extinguish the Viking flame entirely, he must seize the legendary stronghold known as Oslo.
Oslo sat along the southeastern coast—a city famed for its “berserkers,” warriors said to turn fury into divine power, shrugging off steel and death to tear armies apart with their bare hands. All Viking tribes agreed: if any place could never fall, it would be Oslo.
But the emperor’s resolve did not waver.
He entrusted the impossible task to his most loyal strategos—Count Felix Thomsen. After months of secret preparation, the Roman fleet surged through the ice fog at the dawn of 2316. Under the shroud of night, fire painted Oslo’s timber walls crimson. The berserkers had scarcely awakened when the city fell.
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Historians later named this invasion “The Storm That Ended the Vikings.”
From that day on, no tribe dared rise.
Silence blanketed the North Sea.
After the conquest, the emperor granted Oslo to Count Thomson.
The count did not rule through iron and terror. Instead, he saw opportunity: the Vikings feared the northern elves—the Alfar—and would not provoke them. So Thomson tore down the ruined wooden homes, rebuilt the streets with Roman stone, opened markets and squares, and reshaped Oslo into a trading nexus between Rome and the Alfar.
What had once been a wasteland slowly became the frontier of Roman civilization.
Yet just as peace took root, an unsettling story broke through the calm.
In the forests outside Oslo, merchants were ambushed.
The attackers were a young Viking man and woman—bandits who had struck trade routes multiple times. Eventually, a patrol found them. By the time they arrived, both bandits lay unconscious on the ground.
And something stranger still:
near them, a little girl sat slumped against a tree, a long blade buried straight through her small abdomen—a foreign sword, shaped in the Eastern style. The weapon, later identified as a katana, was found planted in the earth beside them.
The patrol concluded the bandits had attempted to sacrifice the girl in a ritual to their gods.
Miraculously, she survived, rescued just moments before death.
The pair were taken inland to Roman custody. When brought to court, they denied everything. Their testimony was broken nonsense—delirious contradictions, refusing to admit harming the girl or explain her identity. Most believed they had long poisoned their minds with belladonna-laced alcohol, leaving their thoughts ruined.
As for the girl, she recovered with shocking speed under the care of the Oslo infirmary.
She spoke little.
She gave only a name:
“Ga.”
Nothing more.
No family.
No home.
No history.
Eventually, she was adopted by the infirmary’s head physician and his wife.
