Chapter 1
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As Elias climbed the creaking wooden stairs to the attic, dust rose and swirled in the beams of light, making him cough twice. Three months ago, his grandfather had disappeared in the Norwegian mountains, and the search team ultimately returned with only a wind-scattered tent—today was the final clearance deadline set by the lawyer, and this house, which held fragments of his childhood memories, would soon be listed for sale.
The attic air was permeated with the mingled scent of mothballs and old paper. Faded suitcases were piled in the corner, with several worn North Norse mythology albums protruding from the edges of cardboard boxes. On the title page of one of them remained the crooked Thor he had drawn with crayons when he was seven years old.
Elias squatted down to search through items, his fingertips touching a cold, hard object — it was a palm-sized copper box, its surface covered with twisted symbols, its edges polished to a shine by the passage of time.
He recognized these symbols.
His grandfather's study wall was covered with an entire panel of runic stone tablets, those mysterious engravings called "runes" had been the old man's only obsession in his later years.
Neighbors said he had gone mad, a retired archaeologist ignoring the Egyptian pyramids, instead muttering to himself all day in front of stones from Norse Vikings. Elias had once sneered at this too, until he felt a faint line of Latin inscribed on the box's clasp — it was his grandfather's signature abbreviation.
The copper box wasn't locked, and the moment Elias lifted the lid, a damp earthy scent rushed forth, as if the box had just been dug up from underground.
Inside lay three items: a hefty silver pendant with a dark green stone embedded in the hammer head; several yellowed pieces of parchment with brittle edges, showing winding mountain contours sketched in charcoal; and a black-covered notebook with dried blue wildflowers pressed between its pages.
He first picked up the pendant, the cold metal pressing against his palm. The snake-like patterns twisting around the handle reminded him of the Thor statue in his grandfather's study, except this pendant had more intricate runes carved on its reverse side. Sunlight streaming through the attic skylight fell upon the green stone, refracting a peculiar luster that looked exactly like the deep waters of Norwegian fjords.
The wear marks along the edges of the copper box were not evenly distributed; near the clasp were several deep scratches, as if someone had repeatedly rubbed that area.
Elias scraped at those engravings with his fingertips, getting greenish copper rust under his fingernails. He suddenly remembered a winter when he was ten years old, when his grandfather clutched a box just like this one and told him stories by the fireplace about "how Thor's hammer shattered the giant's skull." Back then, his grandfather's fingers were also stained blue-green with copper rust, yet he had insisted on placing the pendant around his neck, saying "this stone was dug from the roots of the World Tree."
The parchment map was made of a peculiar material, not the common sheepskin but more like some kind of deerskin, with fine follicle marks still preserved along the edges. On the most complete map, besides the mountain ranges marked with red ink, there were also several small dots drawn with silver powder, glimmering with faint luster in the sunlight.
Elias turned the parchment toward the light and discovered that the silver dust particles connected to form a dotted line, perfectly circumventing the area marked as "Snake Valley" on the map — a notorious danger zone in Hodalan County, where unexploded German bombs from World War II were reportedly left behind.
The blue wildflower pressed between the notebook pages had dried into a semi-transparent thin sheet, but it was still recognizable as a Norwegian bluebell.
He remembered how his grandfather always kept these flowers in his study, replacing them with fresh ones whenever they withered. Once, when he asked his grandfather why he only liked this particular flower, the old man gazed at the snow outside the window and said, "Because they bloom in the cracks between stones, stubborn like the Nordic people."
An old telescope hung from the beam in the attic, with "1976" engraved on its tube. Elias brought over a ladder to take down the telescope and aimed it at the street outside. The lens was somewhat blurry, but he could still clearly see the sign of the café at the corner—where he had worked after dropping out of school, and where several regular customers were now sitting at outdoor tables drinking coffee. He suddenly realized that he had long felt suffocated by that cyclical life of "taking orders, brewing coffee, wiping tables," but had never found an excuse to leave.
When he picked up the copper box again, he discovered a line of tiny text engraved on the bottom: "The seventh rune is the key." He pulled out the rune reference chart saved on his phone and compared each symbol on the box one by one.
The seventh rune is "Ansuz," representing "divine message" and "wisdom," shaped like an upward-extending branch. Elias traced this symbol with a pencil on paper, when the tip suddenly pierced through—on the backing paper below was printed half of a Norwegian railway timetable, with a departure time exactly three days before his grandfather's disappearance.
The parchment map had clearly been carefully pieced together, yet still had several critical gaps. On the most complete section, an area in southwestern Norway was circled in red ink, with a scribbled English note beside it: "The third root of the World Tree, hidden in the breath of giants."
Elias opened his phone to search and discovered that the marked area was exactly the last exploration site his grandfather had reported before disappearing—an uninhabited mountain region in Hordaland County.
The pages of the notebook had already turned yellow and brittle, yet his grandfather's handwriting remained strong and vigorous. The first half contained academic research on Nordic runes, interspersed with many sketches of museum artifacts, but from a certain page onward, the handwriting became messy and excited: "They were wrong, this isn't mythology! The runic texts record actual locations, coordinates left behind by 'those beings'!"
Elias's heart began to race. He turned to the last few pages of the notebook, where one page had been written in red pen: "The gods never left, they merely hide in the folds of nature, waiting to be awakened." Beneath these words was drawn a rune identical to the one on the copper box, with two English words noted beside it: "Hidden Place."
Voices of neighbors outside the attic brought Elias back from his thoughts.
He remembered his childhood, when his grandfather used to tell him stories about the World Tree by the fireplace—that giant tree connecting heaven and earth, with its roots embedded in the realm of gods, the human world, and the underworld. Back then, he merely considered it a bedtime story, but now looking at the map showing the mountain range's winding contour resembling tree roots, an absurd yet irrepressible thought crept into his mind.
His phone screen lit up with a message from his friend Mark: "How's the cleanup going? Want to grab a drink tonight?" Elias stared at the screen, his finger hovering over the input field, yet unable to press down.
He picked up the Thor's hammer pendant again, the cold metal seeming to carry some strange temperature that spread from his fingertips to his heart.
Why did his grandfather leave these things behind? If it was merely academic research, why hide it in a corner of the attic? Could those crazy claims about "gods actually existing" not be unfounded after all?
Elias walked to the window of the attic, gazing at the distant city skyline bathed in golden sunset light. He recalled the days working at the coffee shop after dropping out of school, remembered those mornings and evenings that repeated until numbness, recalled being at a loss for words whenever customers asked him, "What is your goal in life?" His grandfather's disappearance had once left him with an enormous void, but now, this copper box and the secrets inside were like a faint yet persistent light, illuminating that emptiness.
He closed the copper box and tucked it into his inner coat pocket. The edges of the pendant pressed against his chest, like a silent promise. As Elias walked down from the attic and locked the front door, he knew he wouldn't be coming back—at least not before finding the answers.
His phone navigation had already switched to the map of Norway, with the name of Hordaland County flashing on the screen.
Elias took a deep breath and started the car. In the rearview mirror, the old house filled with childhood memories grew smaller and smaller, eventually disappearing into the traffic. He didn't know what awaited him ahead, but the weight of the copper box in his palm gave him a sense of certainty he had never felt before.
