The Viking Ship Sitting Offshore... The AI Age

The Saga of the Lightning Age of AI

Lo, the sky is torn asunder.

Not by a single bolt, but by a storm of endless lightning — white fire leaping from cloud to cloud, as if the gods themselves cast runes across the heavens faster than men can read them.

Hailstones fall, hard as the skulls of giants, each one shattering roofs aof gold-plated halls where merchant-kings once boasted of their quarter-counts. The sea, vast and cold, heaves against their walls, thunder upon thunder, a war-drum without end.

Around the mead-benches, the law-thanes gather. Their lips drip with greed, and their knives are whetstones’ song. They chant not of heroes, but of settlements and spoils, eager to carve the fat from the fallen.

Then from the smoke rise the fire-dragons. Scaled in iron, crowned in embers, they swim not in fjords but in flame. They coil through the burning timbers of the slow and the stubborn, kicking up ashes like snow. They laugh in fire-breath, for to them ruin is feast.

Woe to the chieftains of quarterlies, who thought each passing moon was their shield. For the storm does not pass, nor the dragons sleep. This is not a raid, swift and gone. This is Ragnarök unending — a lightning age where the sky is always torn, the sea always rising, the thunder always near.

And those who cling to molasses-speed, who mistake permanence for stone — they shall be remembered only in the sagas of ash, sung by the skalds who warn that foresight untended becomes a dragon’s banquet.

Upon the grey sea it waits,

the unhurried ship of oak and iron.
Her masts creaking in the winds.
Its dragon-prow cuts no haste through the waves,
for the storm itself moves swifter than sails.

Offshore it lingers,
shields stacked, spears sleeping,
warriors drinking in silence.
They know the quarter-count kings grow fat on illusions,
their halls lit by lightning not of their making.

Boots will touch shore when the tide is right.
Not in frenzy — in certainty.
They shall scrape the flesh from the hides
of corporate inefficiency,
tan it into banners of conquest,
and laugh as the bones of permanence
sink beneath the waves.

For the sea is patient,
and the oars are steady.
What is unhurried is not weak.
What waits offshore is inevitable.

The longship waits, steady on the tide.

Its oars are still, its prow unhurried.
For the Northmen, there is no race.
The sea itself keeps time.

But on the shore, the halls burn hotter.
Those who signed no pacts, who built no ships,
stand naked beneath the dragon’s flame.
Their gold melts quicker than their tongues can beg.

The storm is not against the Vikings.
It is theirs,
a herald of inevitability,
a patient ally.
For those without ships, without contracts bound in rune and blood,
the fire is not a trial —
it is the end.