The Space Wolf hit the floor hard enough to make the cups jump.
Then he laughed.
The warrior who had thrown him hauled him upright and handed him a drinking horn.
Around them, the hall roared.
Stacy moved her chair away from a widening crack in the bench.
**STACY:**
“Is this the sacred part?”
**CAELWYN:**
“Which part?”
**STACY:**
“The drinking. The shouting. Throwing each other through the furniture.”
Caelwyn looked around the Great Hall of the Fang.
**CAELWYN:**
“Nobody seems to be waiting for those things to stop.”
Outside, Fenris lay beneath snow and mountain darkness.
Inside, there was heat, roasting meat, spilt mjød and enough overlapping conversation to drown out a transport engine.
Their hosts had provided a separate jug for the mortal guests.
Stacy was grateful.
At the far end of the hall, an old skald began a saga.
Someone interrupted him.
Someone else accused him of inventing the best part.
The skald answered without losing his rhythm.
Laughter rolled between the tables.
Then fists began striking wood.
Three slow beats.
A pause.
A phrase.
The hall answered.
—
At first, Stacy followed the words.
A winter sea.
An icebound ship.
A crew who could no longer tell where their vessel ended and the ocean began.
Then she began anticipating the response.
The same pause.
The same three beats.
The same words returning through a hundred throats.
Across the table, a young warrior leaned forward.
Beside him, an older Wolf with a grey braid had stopped touching his drink.
**STACY:**
“They know how it ends.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Apparently that doesn’t make the crossing any less important.”
The skald described a wave rising over the ship.
Shoulders tightened around the hall.
Then came the answer.
The young warrior grinned as though he had just reached open water himself.
**STACY:**
“The rhythm. The repetition. Knowing when to answer.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Yes.”
**STACY:**
“The drink for some of them. The heat. The people beside them. All of that helps shape the experience.”
**CAELWYN:**
“It does.”
She studied him.
**STACY:**
“You’re not going to tell me that explaining it destroys the mystery?”
**CAELWYN:**
“No. But explaining how a song reaches you isn’t quite the same as explaining what it means when it does.”
Stacy put her dataslate down.
—
The ship cleared the wave.
The hall erupted.
Horns rose.
The young warrior embraced the man beside him.
The grey-braided Wolf wiped his face with one hand.
Stacy waited until he looked towards her.
**STACY:**
“What happened just then?”
**THE WOLF:**
“We crossed.”
**STACY:**
“Did you feel as though you were on the ship?”
He shook his head.
**THE WOLF:**
“I know where I’m sitting.”
He looked at the men around him.
“But for a little while, there wasn’t much distance between their winter and ours.”
Then someone challenged his version of the tale, and he turned to defend it with considerable enthusiasm.
Stacy watched him laugh.
**STACY:**
“No vision. No ancestor appearing in the smoke.”
**CAELWYN:**
“No.”
**STACY:**
“And yet something became present.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Something a written account might not have given him.”
—
Near the hearth, another wrestling match began.
The tables supplied its rhythm.
Every movement changed the room.
The room answered.
Stacy watched a warrior slip from what had looked like an impossible hold.
She caught her breath.
Caelwyn glanced at her.
**STACY:**
“What?”
**CAELWYN:**
“Nothing.”
**STACY:**
“I thought he was going to lose.”
“So did half the hall.”
When the contest ended, the cheering belonged to both warriors.
Stacy loosened her grip on her cup.
**STACY:**
“For a moment, I wasn’t simply watching.”
Caelwyn waited.
“The moment before he escaped felt longer.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Longer?”
**STACY:**
“Not on a chronometer. In the experience.”
She looked around.
“The evening keeps doing that. Drawing everyone into something they couldn’t make alone.”
—
A different song began.
Its first verse concerned a boast, an unfortunate warrior and an animal that had refused to cooperate.
The second verse was less respectable.
By the third, Caelwyn was laughing.
Stacy caught enough of the fourth to join him.
**STACY:**
“I keep expecting the laughter to stop before something profound can happen.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Does it have to?”
She looked at the grey-braided Wolf, now struggling to finish a verse while his brothers made it impossible.
**STACY:**
“Apparently not.”
There was no clean division.
The food did not end where the memory began.
The laughter did not cancel the reverence.
The body was not something they had to leave behind before the feast could become more than a meal.
It was how the feast reached them.
—
The refrain returned.
Stacy knew when to answer.
She missed a word.
The warrior beside her supplied it.
Next time, she got it right.
He struck the table.
So did she.
She did not forget her name.
She did not suddenly understand all of Fenris.
But for several moments, she stopped watching herself have an experience.
She was simply there.
The hearth.
The voices.
The uncomfortable bench.
Caelwyn laughing beside her.
The world felt closer.
As though she had stopped holding it at a distance.
When the song ended, she remained quiet.
**CAELWYN:**
“Well?”
**STACY:**
“I could hear myself. I knew what I was doing.”
A pause.
“I just wasn’t checking every part of it.”
Caelwyn nodded.
**STACY:**
“Is that what they all came here for?”
**CAELWYN:**
“Some may have. Others came for dinner.”
She smiled.
An old Wolf by a pillar had barely moved all evening.
Now and then, he smiled too.
Nobody demanded a revelation from him.
He still belonged at the table.
—
Near the hearth, drinking horns rose towards a carving of Leman Russ.
Other warriors raised theirs towards one another.
**STACY:**
“One calls it devotion. Another calls it brotherhood.”
**CAELWYN:**
“And another may simply call it a good night.”
**STACY:**
“They don’t need the same explanation to share it.”
“No.”
She listened to the next answering chorus.
**STACY:**
“But feeling something as sacred doesn’t prove that everything it tells you is true.”
**CAELWYN:**
“No.”
**STACY:**
“Or good.”
“No.”
**STACY:**
“And that doesn’t make the experience empty.”
Caelwyn rested his cup on the table.
**CAELWYN:**
“We may need to remember both.”
—
A platter passed between them.
Stacy helped herself.
**STACY:**
“Tomorrow, perhaps this makes them a stronger pack. More willing to trust each other.”
**CAELWYN:**
“Perhaps.”
**STACY:**
“But if that’s our only explanation, we’ve turned tonight into maintenance.”
Caelwyn looked at her.
**STACY:**
“At some point, they’re allowed to enjoy being alive without proving how useful it will make them tomorrow.”
He raised his cup.
**CAELWYN:**
“To an evening that doesn’t have to justify itself to the quartermaster.”
She touched her cup to his.
—
The skald stood again.
Someone demanded the winter crossing.
Someone else demanded a shorter version.
He promised neither.
The first three beats struck the table.
Stacy recognised them immediately.
**STACY:**
“I thought ecstasy meant leaving the world.”
**CAELWYN:**
“And now?”
She listened to the voices gathering around them.
**STACY:**
“Perhaps sometimes it means letting more of it in.”
No apparition rose from the hearth.
The stars offered no answer.
But the hall held the sea, the crossing, the remembered dead and the people still alive to sing about them.
For a moment, it held more than any one of them could carry alone.
Stacy left her dataslate beside her plate.
The skald drew breath.
The hall waited.
And this time, she was already there.
**What do you touch in the ecstasy of a feast that ordinary life rarely lets you feel—and, in that moment, are you escaping the world or entering it more fully?**
—
**Game:** Warhammer 30,000 / Warhammer 40,000
**System:** Wrath & Glory / Imperium Maledictum
**Campaign:** Mythveil Chronicles
**Theme:** The Bacchanalia · Month IX · Week II — The Ecstatic Feast
**PLAY EPIC. FEEL THE STORY.**
Enter the living worlds of Mythveil Chronicles, where a feast, a song and the people beside you can matter as much as the next battle.
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https://startplaying.games/gm/dunchan
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