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Post #1 Subject: Show your published copyrighted work Posted at: June 30 2022, 6:27:42 pm

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273

So I was speaking with admin chaos and he gave me the okay to do this; this is where players can share non-gaming websites for their published works such as poems stories or even just little biographies or anything they'd like if it's copy written and published you should post it here



Please keep in mind to respect others when posting and if you are going to post a graphic Story please post a warning with it.




Post #2 Subject: Posted at: June 30 2022, 6:35:35 pm

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273

So I'm about halfway through publishing my second novel fully it is posted kind of like a comic book and added to every other month or so.

I would like to warn others before they delve into this story that it is not for the faint hearted and is an 18 or older story. There is graphic content and language used in the story as it is a realistic story set in the 1800s of America through the Viewpoint of a Native American slave who finds a way for freedom while trying to keep herself in a white world. The 1800s was not like it is today therefore please do not read this story if you do not have a strong stomach or are offended easily.


https://www.inkitt.com/stories/horror/835374


If you would prefer something a little more light-hearted and less graphic this would be more of a story for you it does not have an 18 or older restriction on it and is more rated PG-13. It is a story that I ended up writing and publishing for a dear friend of mine who passed away at the beginning of the year who used to live in the same town as me who was quite ill but always took his time dressing up for children with cancer in local hospitals and helping people with everything he had with the shirts of his back. He was literally crowned a Knight . If you like fantasy as well as Dragons this story is more for you. I personally had a very dear friend of mine do the cover art for it and so even the cover art is copyrighted. This story has started picking up traction all over the world and even in rare places of Africa like Mozambique. With over 411 readers who have finished the book according to Analytics.

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/fantasy/882276


There is also my character for this games origin story that is also being published on but is much slower at being published and added to.

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/other/886877




Post #3 Subject: Posted at: October 27 2022, 5:15:41 am

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273

New content posted tonight

https://www.inkitt.com/stories/horror/972668



Post #4 Subject: grave yard grift Posted at: October 29 2023, 12:31:18 pm

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273
“What’’re you posing for? You look silly.” I nagged looking at the little doll dressed in yellow silks with a brides dot on her forehead. My friend in her gardens in India seemed to be giving back soft sass as of late; especially, ever since I brought the doll with me to Dead City that was.

“So pose me differently then! You have my doll,” Dahlia sighed and went on,”Listen, we’ve spent centuries hearing about this thing and never actually seeing it; I don’t know about you, but I was beginning to think it was just another urban legend.”

“Stories had to have some type of truth to them to become legend, you would know that more than anyone else with your… long, life experience.”

“I cannot believe you really aren’t that excited over finding this here!” She paused and gave a pleading glance, “Let’s put a coin in! Do you have any?”

I rolled my eyes and rustled through my bag looking for spare change, “Firstly, this is a graveyard, I am not sure if you noticed but headstones are kind of a big thing.” I grinned and continued rustling as I sat leaning against a different headstone across from the strangely shaped slot-machine one.
This bag was always glued to my body and had been through my darkest experiences with me; It is made of raven feathers and my coven leader Valdina had gifted it to me upon my return from my first punishment in the French Catacombs back in 1817 A.D.


Anyway, I found a coin - what harm could this do anyway? It’s just a headstone, games are fun. We like games. No harm, right? Besides, Dahlia’s right, I could learn to lighten up every now and again; Dahlia loved to live on the edge but never go over the edge while I was always overly cautious and she always swore my gut feelings were anxiety. I suppose this one time, I could ignore my gut telling me not to put a coin into a stone slot machine - I know, that doesn’t sound normal but considering we’re an immortal species that have seen plenty of strange and unusual events, wars, and other non-normal species, then what exactly is the term, ‘normal,’ supposed to fit under?
I placed my little cloth doll on the ground against my bag and stood up from the ground with a quick stretch; making my way over to the headstone and slightly bending over to insert the coin. It was incredibly anti-climatic;I chuckled and stood up, turning around to face Dahlia, “See? Literally, nothing,”(Or so I thought)

I looked around, the sun had disappeared and it looked as if it was night time? So suddenly and it was as if it was the middle of the night at the darkest hour; we really hadn’t been out so long though? Or were we? I felt so tired and that’s not possible, my brain had felt foggy and I had a memory of the machine’s gargoyle like mouth opening and then the memory is hard to remember… and where was Dahlia? I cupped my hands around my mouth so my voice echoed,“Ugh, okay Dahlia - so not funny; You can come out now.”
Still nothing. I walked back over to my bag and my doll was missing. I felt a small whisper of a gasp escape my lips, “Dahlia’s missing?”


I should explain a bit here, Dahlia isn’t really
here, I mean, she is my best friend and like a sister but she resides elsewhere but this doll was created by the Original witch that existed and started it all. It was a way for Dahlia to traverse the world, stay by my side, and have experiences with me while having to tend to her own life responsibilities in her home in India. She also has this incredibly beautiful, massive garden which she had owned since the time she was human; It was truly her pride and joy.
At the time, India was under reign of Queen Rani Velu Nachiyar and the queen treated Dahlia like a daughter; they were each other’s confidantes, so much so, the queen always consulted Dahlia for a second opinion and advice for everything.


Dark days had fallen and long story short - the queen had gone to the first ever witch for protection, just not for her own. According to Dahlia, the queen always spoke of how she wasn’t afraid and she had fought hard against enemies she had known of and made, she was already ready and prepared to fight and for whatever outcome may be. The queen had requested Dahlia be immortal, a child of the moon that could hide in shadows when needed, run at the fastest speeds if she had to, and kill with the greatest strength when necessary.


Of course, with this is born a new Dahlia, the first immortal but everything comes with a price. The sun brings pain to children of the night and to be stuck in getting old but never growing old. Blood is what created us and blood is what we crave; I am not as old as Dahlia, nor have I been around as long as she has. The worst of it? This very old garden could also be her undoing. Dahlia’s life force is tied to the garden and the location of it died with the queen and remains solely in Dahlia’s own thoughts; I have never even seen it myself. She remains physically there to protect it and herself, we met when she had left it to explore and the farther she got, the more the plants started to wilt since nobody knows about it to care for it.
Dahlia went back to the witch and cried out about how she felt like a prisoner of a sort, confined to the very place she loved but with no ability to ever see the world again; she was given a doll, a fragment of her soul instilled in the doll; as long as the doll was here, she was also technically here and not.


Looking up, I didn’t realize that I had been so lost in thought that I was actually walking the whole time, dragging my bag along the ground completely unaware of my own senses or environment around me.
“Damn it! My bag is dirty.” I groaned, it was strange, I felt… somehow physically drained and I can’t recall ever leaving Ghost Town’s graveyard? What time was it? How long was I walking for? How could I have been so… lost? How could I feel physically drained as a vampire? I have so many questions and absolutely no answers, “Dahlia!” I screamed out.


I immediately opened my bag and started frantically scrambling everything around, no Dahlia doll… but what was this? My foggy memory held little details of anything that happened today, the slot machine headstone had dispensed a strange compass that seemed to move on it’s own; I am at least sure of that when I tried to recall events of my day leading up to the headstone. Out of my own curiosity, I swung my bag back over my shoulder and I felt like I had spun in several circles before the compass had come to a dead stop and pointed to a path illuminated by the moon. My hopes would be that this would lead me to my lost doll that held the fragment of my friend’s soul.


Again, I felt like I was walking for hours with a midnight hour that never ended and underneath the canopy of bare trees, still seemed dark and the moonlight didn’t seem to make a difference. I could not tell if there was faint whispering or my mind was running wild with my own imagination. Was it anxiety that made me feel as if I was being watched with every step that I took? Or was I actually being watched? Throughout this seemingly endless walk, I called out Dahlia’s name time after time to no avail. I could only keep moving forward but because I felt there were eyes everywhere and I was too terrified to look behind me, I held my bag so close to my chest with the constant compulsive feeling of checking to see if Dahlia’s doll could somehow just appear in my bag. Instead, realistically knowing that wouldn’t happen and that this was real, my bag remained tight against my chest in my arms and the compass gripped in my hand. It was so much easier to keep my eyes on the compass rather than look toward the darkness ahead.


Suddenly, the dark wasn’t so dark and I saw an opening between two trees illuminated by two pedestals merlot toned fire; these pedestals of fire lit the trees next to it that revealed runes carved noticeably deep spanning from the ground the top of the trunks. What was this? How old are these runes? I didn’t recognize any of them from any of my studies with Dahlia. I threw my purse over my shoulder and traced my finger over one of the runes embedded in the trunk; the tree was actually wet but the water didn’t transfer with my skin after removing my finger.
In front of me was a large football field sized clearing that, next to the dead and bare forest, bloomed a variety of lucious florals - the difference was that these flowers all glowed in bioluminescence of various colors, I have never seen anything like it before. It didn’t take me long to click it together, ancient rune carvings in an entrance, wet trunks for water, and fire pedestals, big clearing. Who was strong enough to create this and what did they want to keep from getting out? This was a sealed area but I had to find out how that headstone relates to all of this and Dahlia’s disappearance.


I did a test and tried to hold up my hand toward the threshold, nothing happened so I stepped forward and relaxed my body once nothing happened. I looked down at the compass and the arrow that pointed me here seemed to no longer exist on the compass face itself. My gut feeling had intensified and my vampiric senses were
useless since strange happenings; I started to panic when I thought I was seeing shadow figures appearing in my peripherals and when I looked, nothing was there.


I turned around to go back onto the forest path but I couldn’t leave; this is when my panic started to really set in and the realization had hit me that this witches circle was meant to keep vampires in and what did these vampires do to be forever entombed in a sealed off area with what seemed like no access to any blood source? I myself had suffered my own madness in my punishments without blood in the dark lifeless catacombs. Even a matter of 16 years could drive me into delusion and madness until I got blood. What did an endless time cycle do to one's mind? Or were there walking humans in this garden meant to be living donors?
I turned to face the area, my back pressed against a forcefield that felt like a solid wall, still nothing. No shadow figures, just me and this supposedly empty space with my eyes only seeing shadows. I closed my eyes to recenter myself and my racing thoughts, once I reopened them and that is when I saw a significant shine separate from the bioluminescent flowers; it almost seemed blinding.


I cautiously walked toward it and realized the moon was directly on this sole vial compared to the field and even when I had crouched down to pick up the vial, the liquid shimmered metallic silver and even being held in my hand had continued to radiate as I could’ve been holding the moon itself in it’s bright glory. Right there, in my hand, “Maintenant, qu'est-ce que tu es?” I pondered softly under my breath in my native tongue . I had put the vial in a small hidden, zippered compartment inside my bag, “Safe and sound, I suppose.”


Within seconds, I was surrounded by a full circle of six, decrepit looking cryptid creatures with a humanoid form. They’re bodies were so thin, so frail looking that they seemed like deformed walking skeletons with flesh that were various hues of muddy greens, ashy blacks and gray, and white beige… the ashy black and beige colors are what start to become of us after extended periods of time without blood. Did we also become these horrifying cryptid looking things? Are the muddy green part of the skin from being entombed in an outside field? It had to be; as the moonlight reflected on their skin, it shown specs of various glowing colors and when I looked to my fingers that touched the flowers and my boots, the bioluminescence had transferred almost as if flowers.
These were vampires and these vampires had not been starved for 15 years as punishment or even centuries; they were starved for multiple millenia even…my feet remained glued to the ground and I felt terrified and shocked. My stomach turned to knots and it was as if my body had turned into its own paperweight against itself. They started to take a step closer and even then, I couldn’t move.


There was the loudest screeching noise that remained inside the dome, the vampires had seemed to curdle over in pain holding their heads before disappearing. I fell to the ground and the screech was so loud, I felt as if I was going to black out but WHO had this kind of power over us? My eyes squeezed shut and all of a sudden, the unbearable noise stopped; when I opened my eyes, I was no longer in the same clearing and was on my knees in front of a large wooden door, I felt the compass vibrate and the arrow re-appeared pointing exactly to it.
I heard an old, high pitched, hoarse voice, “Only vampires are affected by those spells. Come in, come in, I have been waiting for you since you pulled the stone lever of my beloved’s grave and popped out that compass.”
I recuperated and stood up, walking into a large wooden kitchen with a round wooden table; it all looked so old… and not? At the same time, there was an elderly woman in a cloak with her back turned to me, though I sniffed fresh blood and I felt my natural primal instincts kicking in that I was trying so hard to suppress. This is not the time to lose yourself.

“So… this is all because of you?” I questioned.
“I am aware of all that has happened today.” She confidently mentioned, “That field is the only access anyone has to finding me and no one has ever made it this far after touching that headstone, you can imagine how surprised I am.”
I stood there shocked and with the release of the blood scent, my emotions were getting amplified; it was hard not to get aggressive,
“Do you know what I’ve actually been through though? I’ve lost something of high value to me and I’ve been wandering for Gods know how long! What have you done?” I exploded, snarling.
“Oh, everybody loses something for another to discover, my name is Sybil and you must be hungry.” Sybil turned around and placed a large bowl of fresh blood on the round table, “Peace offering, drink up.”

Before Sybil could even finish the sentence, my hands were already holding the large bowl to my mouth and there was only so much my mouth could swallow as the blood also trickled down my jawline, onto my neck, and started onto my clothes. I was starting to feel myself come back again and the primal animal underneath that had the urge for a killing spree was repressed for now.
Without even a thought, the empty bowl slipped from my hands as I fell into the kitchen chair, my body felt tired and I wanted to break down with all I had just gone through, not to mention that without Dahlia… I felt lost.
Sybil sat at the table, across from me and parted her lips to speak.

“The purpose of the headstone was meant as a double punishment, as well as a trail of passage.” She explained in her raspy voice as she played with a ring on her finger and her eyes never leaving mine. They looked cold with no tones of love in it. This woman looked like she had forgotten emotions long ago and maybe that's why I felt so many. Was I feeling what she could not? The woman behind the hood began to explain.


“My poor Giacomo’s faux headstone comes out once a year to those who truly seek it. Most who try and fail give an item and then receive. In my case, I lost my husband before I even pulled the lever, I suppose. A cruel trick by an old witch with a connection that didn’t fare well.” She held out both her hands then showed me her palms. “You my Dear Coraline, are not most. You gave something that is so irreplaceable that you have eternally punished yourself. Just as it is my eternal punishment to be here and live a life without my most precious value, where I cannot die by any means.“ She set her hands down and for the first time looked sympathetic.
“I did some bad things in my time in the mortal world as a vampire and my atonement is a gift for a sacrifice. Needless, to say, this all started as revenge from another for my selfishness of not realizing what I had until I lost it.” She raised her well groomed silver brow at me. “Can’t you think of just one thing you’d like as that kind of gift? The gift for a sacrifice that cannot be replaced?’



I could feel myself compulsively sucking in air. Both sides of my cheeks caving in and being bitten down inside my mouth until I drew blood. There was one person I could think of- only. Dhalia. I could feel a silver mist shrouded around us both. It was as if Sybil knew what my heart was yearning for though I had not spoken the words out loud. Her voice was now venomous as she spoke. “You have to say it outloud!” She demand in a low toned growl. I looked deep into her eyes and could swear they had a hard little tone of red just around the iris forming.


“ I want Dhalia back , you can keep the doll but I want her physically free with a free life and her own will!” I demanded back.
“Oh, you’re so naive little girl.” My upper lip twitched in frustration, “You’re deepest desires weren’t thought up when you were with what you valued most but to enjoy it with and the fact is, all things come with a price.” I went to lunge my claws at her but in that moment, the silver mist grew completely opaque between us and I fell to a marbled floor. It was like falling into an alternate reality; I was in my dream house, in my dream kitchen, with various herbs and plants hanging over and sitting by a beautiful stained glass window. When I turned around, on top of a small glass coffee table was paperwork and documents for property, statements of various things in my name that Dahlia and I always spoke about. An approved permit for a vastly large green house with a natural pool on the property which could be seen from two glass porch doors the little table sat in front of.

Dahlia and I always spoke about having our own peace, our own space, I had wanted a life and stability more than anything; even though I had loved traveling, I wanted more than anything, a roof that was always there with no other immortals of any species causing issues and peaceful mornings.
I recalled what Sybil said, mentioning my deepest desire which would've been for a normal life with Dahlia but Dahlia wasn’t the one who put the coin in the headstone, maybe it could’ve been different if we both held the coin and put it in. However, the old lady did mention Dahlia is to be found again and it was her doll lost but not her. I solemnly swear that I will be the one to find her, break her curse, and bring her home.





Post #5 Subject: To Author. Dec 3 2023. Posted at: June 1 2026, 3:00:32 am

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273



Wjybjorn stared in amusement at his father’s silver statue. The battle pose was not too terrible, but from his personal experience he knew the footwork was wrong. Utur never wanted a statue in life, but in death Jarl Silas had put them everywhere, including the dock. Gatta Gathad changed. He had seen so much plunder from mining on Sámi. He should have listened to his mother. Silas had been wrongfully in control for just a few short months while he has his men raid the West Francia lands. ( French ) his father once had. Perhaps his mother`s ways were rubbing off on him... Perhaps.

The advance scouts had reported so Silas knew he was coming and there would be a feast in his honor at nightfall. Already the drums played a welcome and the people lined the route from the dock to the Jarl’s house, curious to see the Garðarshólmur - Icelandic items of regalia and witchcraft. The mood was celebratory, but Wjybjorn was not.

He found it a strain to wave to the crowd and smile on his way to Jarl Silas’ lavish great hall. His herald announced him as “Wjybjorn, the true son of Jarl Utur, Husband to the ruler of Garðarshólmur Runiea the bold.”

Silas added in a similar voice and with diplomatic admiration, “warden of the Northern Marches.” To this Wjybjorn raised an eyebrow so Silas explained. “In Utur’s will you are declared warden of the area where the elves are plentiful, to protect both humans and elves and judge between them that they might live in peace.”

Wjybjorn spat and offered sarcastically, “He was too generous!” He added in his own mind but not out loud,
“May he rest in piss.”

Utur was a good man, but deep down. Despite all of his mother Asta`s protests, fights , screams, many times of trying to leave only to crawl back slowly for her children. He had never taken on the love and care for his own children in the way Asta had. Asta wanted them to shape the world! Utur wanted them far away from Norse rulings he forced them to grow up in. It was Utur who had forced them to live away from his mothers true home. Yet never let them be either Sámi or Norse.

“Congratulations on your great conquests. They are surely in the spirit of our great family. It is a shame that you missed the funeral rites and days of mourning for my grandfather.”

“I was doing what he did best. Killing people, breaking things, gaining glory and riches. I imagine you have not had time for raids these past two years personally.”

“Ah too true and regrettable,” Silas answered it was true other men raided for him. “What token do you offer to the Jarldom in Utur’s memory of your great conquest.” There were many marvelous objects and Silas greedily eyed them.

“I offer to the Jarldom a Jarl worthy of the name, myself.” The once boy now turned man thought of how this was the only way to make true peace with the Sámi.

Silas countenance turned purple, “Treason!! Seize him!!” His guards inside the great hall charged but were quickly subdued by Wjybjorn’s personal troops. The prince ruler husband of Garðarshólmur Queen Runiea drew closer to his nephew with a grin.

“Go ahead and call for your army. You will find my men have ringed this place. You would be long dead before they broke through enmasse. The color now drained from Silas face, “Surely you know that most support Utur’s will and testament. It would be an endless civil war; everything would be consumed, even if you won. There cannot be two Jarls or regicide, everything would fall to chaos.”

“I only need one man to die to take what is mine,” Wjybjorn stated simply, drawing his father’s ax.


“I am unarmed,” Silas protested, he discounted his scepter in this assessment.

“Why is this not surprising? You shuffle parchments and build monuments but have forgotten why we are called Vikings.” There was a dramatic pause and he continued, “I challenge you in personal combat, we both have a claim on the throne, let it be decided as Vikings decide matters of honor: with blood and iron.

“Blood and meteorite steel blessed by Loki himself. I cannot beat you in personal combat, but I can appoint a champion.”

Wjybjorn passed the ax to his mother who watched with her violet orbs. Hair put up in a nolaldi hat. She looked like a witch of the ` elves` like she would feast only on bones and not that of life or fruit. The Viking had always feared her all these years. Now Asta was, what she was always accused of being beyond the vision maiden... A witch something Utur had oppressed for quite some time. The Jarl had suppressed her indeed for some time. What he had also failed to see is that when his wife came back. She would not be like the ones she ached to live like. With peace and Magick.

No Asta would have her son take what was his with blood, what was her fathers. Long before she had over stretched the vision dreams she had brought to council that even made her husband Jarl. Long ago this had all started with Utur killing Wybjorns name sake- He in the moment invited Silas to fight it out right here, but it was clear that this would not quite give him the legitimacy he needed. “You appoint your champion, and I will serve as my own.” Even after all her torments, the fact he wasn`t her true father. Asta wondered how simple life could have been. She had always told her boys so. If the former Jarl had not died in a raid.

“You are a principal and cannot be a champion,” Silas announced as if he were making up rules to a child’s game as he went along.

“Very well, how about this, coward; your best ten men and yourself against me and my best ten men at daybreak, after the feast of course. I would not ruin a good feast!” This caused raucous laughter from both sides and Silas saw he was trapped.

“I agree, but it shall be cudgels only and inside a ring of citizens. The fight will go until one side agrees to the other’s demands, in my case, that you continue to rule the lands you have conquered and also the Northern Marches…”

“And in my case the demand is that you rule every pigsty from here to West Francia!” Again the crowd of soldiers found Wjyjbjorn’s wit far superior to Silas’ wheedling tone. “Not so generous as my father would have been.”

Silas sounded disappointed like a father lecturing a child. “I am not Utur, nor are you, but let it be decided before Ásynju as it should be in blood and … wood.” again chuckles from the crowd as he characterized the cudgels.

The tense meeting ended, the two men spoke kindly at the feast. Many women were ravished, many cups were drunk, many animals were roasted. Silas retired early to rest along with his ten chosen, but Wjybjorn went on drinking into the wee hours.

The ring of men was fifty deep and three thousand strong. It was a good solution, there would be one winner and it prevented the division of the kingdom as Utur had intended to do by naming just one heir. Asta knew it deep down even if all this time she had tried to prevent it. After all she had always known and seen this in dreams. She did not fear in this moment. Not now, Utur was dead, her son would not die.

Wjybjorn was surprised to see that Silas and his men wore armor of the metal formula brought from Garðarshólmur. The cudgels were of solid wood, perfectly formed with no points. His men had just gotten limbs of trees and chopped them down for the occasion and while most had armor, they wore it under a silk tunic, in the Moor fashion.

The battle was joined after a tiring and lengthy speech by Silas commemorating his grandfather and all his many deeds. Wjybjorn, when given a chance to speak, merely said, “Bite your tongue before I make you."

Silas and his men advanced with shields locked making a wall from which jutted their cudgels. They used the crowd as a natural barrier so they had no rear to defend. The cudgels shot forward unpredictably making it dangerous to approach. Silas drew first blood on one of Wjybjorn’s trusted henchmen. Parrying was useless as Silas’ cudgels were harder and did not split as easily. The first quarter hour certainly went to the Jarl as they sparred and jeered, dealing minor injuries and breaking their opponents’ sticks.
Wjybjorn tired of the game, “They are only sticks for the Gods’ sake, take a whack and let’s tear them limb from limb!!”

He hurled his own cudgel and struck a man on the foot and then plunged ahead taking smacks to the head and shoulders. His men roared and followed, seven made it through and it was now hand to hand. Cudgels did not work well in close quarters and shields too were abandoned shortly thereafter. Fists, headbutts, bites, kicks and elbows were now the order of the day.

The crowd loved it. They cheered and wagered and gave useless advice. Silas was not nearly as popular as he imagined the day before when there was no one to replace him. Clearly the crowd wanted blood… His blood. One by one men were beaten into submission as the bloodied men patted the ground they were ushered out of the arena for medical attention. None gave up easily, but broken limbs and torn faces were enough. There were four of Wjybjorn’s against three of Silas now.

Silas’ last guards were beaten senseless and lay sprawled on the ground. Silas appeared ready to concede, but, Wjybjorn pretended not to see the raised hands. Instead he ordered his two remaining men to take their opponents for medical treatment. They refused to abandon him, but he started striking them instead of Silas so they obeyed their commander.

Now it was Silas against a mountain. Silas had almost none of Utur in him. Wislt his son had everything.

He had regained his stick though and now twirled it so quickly it could not clearly be seen as he made a mad dash for the king. Wjybjorn took several blows and was knocked backwards. The crowd was hushed when he fell taking a tremendous shot to the ribs that lifted him off the ground and caused him to make a peculiar whooshing sound as his wind was taken. Bu, where he fell he found a cudgel, one of Silas’ men’s cudgels and he parried almost absent mindedly while Silas tired from the assault.

When Silas backed off to breathe, the husband of the great Queen rose and smiled a bloody smile.

“As it should be, uncle, let’s finish it.”

Silas awaited his approach with a two handed defensive posture. Wjybjorn drove him back with slices and thrusts until they were in the center of the ring. Now the would-be Jarl used his cudgel to vault himself in the air. Silas with his two handed grip could not get a good punishing strike against him and now Wjybjorn landed on his enemy’s shoulders with his leap and drove Silas to the ground. Wjybjorn, on top, threw punches which could not be parried by the stick. Silas let go of it to block whereupon the mountain of a man above him took the stick, made it vertical and then with two hands brought it down driving the cudgel through Silas’ mouth pinning him to the ground.

Sure that his opponent was dead he rose and cupped his hand to his ear.

“Now isn’t that a pretty sound, Silas not talking.”

The crowd roared and began to chant his name. His wife joined him in the ring and kissed his bloody mouth. The people did not stop chanting for two hours. The lands of Utur had a new Grand Jarl.

Freyja’s blessing swept across the battlefield like a golden storm. The air shimmered with her presence, filling the hearts of warriors with unshakable courage and the thirst for glory. Shields held firm, swords struck true, and the wounded found strength where none should remain.



Asta stood at the edge of the throng, her violet orbs cold as the northern seas, watching as her son one of her many greatest triumphs with the deepest sorrow as he took what was his. The name of Wjybjorn echoed through the air, a hymn to bloodshed, to the truth of their people. Beneath the thunderous approval of the gathered Norse, a storm raged in her soul.

She had always known it would come to this. She had seen it in her dreams, in the twisting smoke of the sacred fires, in the tremble of the bones she cast. It was true what Utur had told her all those years ago. The night before they wed- Witches are often remarkable at seeing their future and not being able to persuade Odins tread of fate. She had fought against it, even as she whispered to the gods, "Let him be stronger than fate." The was the cry of a woodpecker in the air and she knew Utur was also watching.

Asta had joiked to her husband almost everyday to keep the damn from cracking and bursting the scorched grief dam that was her heart. She wondered if grief had caused scar tissue to wrap around her hearts, the way the blade to the cheek had once permanently scared the side of her face as a young warrior.

Now fate lay broken and bloody at her son’s feet. Silas was dead. The crowd rejoiced. Despite all this, Asta did not smile. She had accomplished many things and was a master witch as well as an archer. Her life even after all these years and children felt hollow like it was just starting for the first time thanks to her now adult son.

Her gaze traveled to the silver statue of Utur, its footwork all wrong, as if even in death he could not stand as he should have. She always knew that when he did pass away the man twice her age and all fully human. Not a bit of Sámi eleven magick in him. That his daughters from his life before her would try to get one of their sons to take everything.

She had a little to do with fate herself. For she was the raging ice storm of the land with her powers and for all her bad luck and weather she had raised her son to be a uncaged fire. She had forced the boy at 8 to go on raids for a reason. For this reason. So seal fate in its place and make a Jarl where a boy once stood. He would have never handed this to his son. Despite the boy having earned it from a young age. The only way he`d accept his own son was if he won it the way Utur himself had. - With murder.

This was no ordinary murder. On a raid, a man can forget the faces he has pillaged. When killing your own blood for what`s right. That face never vanishes from the man`s mind.

Her hands curled into fists at her sides. Utur. Her husband. Her captor. Her betrayer. Her loving wild protector. A man who had once held her love in his hands like a fragile bird, only to crush it in the name of his own ambitions over and over int he dance they had called his life. He had never let her go home. He had never let their children be what they were born to be: neither fully Norse nor fully Sámi, but something in the middle the had done her best to rise up and make greater, something whole.

In death, he played his final game. Even from the grave, he had set grandson against son, crafted a war with his words as surely as with his Axe. For what? For the hate he had nursed against her people? For the resentment he carried against the land and the magick that had shaped her?

Her jaw tightened. She had suffered at his hands, been caged in his halls, been forced to live beneath the rule of his people while her own lands were plundered and burned. Still she had chosen to stay the young woman who used to bring wild flowers at the older warriors feet deep down always hoped they could mate it work. Always foolished prayed for things to get better.

Only in death Utur was still in control now, even in death, he had sought to steal her son’s peace, to weave his will like chains around Wjybjorn’s fate. Not while she was around.

Utur was gone. And her son had proven that he would not be bound. She should have been proud. He had fought like a God, like a spirit of the seasons himself: of old, and the people had embraced him as their Grand Jarl. He had fulfilled what she had whispered in his ear as a child. You will take what is yours with blood, my son.

Yet, she could not shake the feeling that something was still being stolen from her. That even now, Utur’s hand was upon them, shaping their fates, bending their paths toward the ruin he had always wrought.

Asta turned from the cheering, her steps slow but deliberate as she walked toward the docks where the silver effigy of her husband stood gleaming in the weak sunlight. She touched the cold metal of his face and whispered, "You thought you could control them all, even from beyond the grave. But, you were wrong. I cannot say I am sorry for it either. Without his crime of passion our eldest twin boy would be dead."

She glanced back at the space where her son stood tall among the people, where his name rang like a war drum.

"You did not break me, Utur. You did not break Wjybjorn. However with love and a broken heart... I will break you, even in death. I will make sure your will is forgotten, buried beneath the rule of the son you made fight for his with blood rather than my mercies."

For too long, Utur had dictated the course of her life. No more. As deeply as she yearned for him she was free.

With a wave of her hand, the air thickens with swirling winds, and the snowflakes fall in graceful spirals. Each one glows with an dewy sparkle like light, their forms delicate yet bold, some resembling intricate geometric patterns, while others appear as natural wonders. The snow covers the land like a blanket of crystal, the flakes shimmering in the pale light of the frozen world she controls.

She kissed his cheek before using her storm magick to push the statute into the River by pulling all the ice from the water, wrapping it around the statue and letting the sea claim Utur`s figure for itself. It wasn`t her husband after all... Just a wrongly footed false memory of what once was.

"Like a raven on the wind, my heart remembers, but my spirit will not kneel again, beloved."



Last edited by Admin Chaos at June 4 2026, 11:04:13 am, edited 2 times in total.
Post #6 Subject: Posted at: June 18 2026, 7:30:25 pm

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


Rank: #8 Good
Posts: 273
Kirkenes Norway/ Sápmi

Late May - 1918 (This is the end of Spring for this Country.)

It was the time of year everything was nearly too hot. The birches were leafed out now, their pale trunks bright against the sky. The fields around the village of Lavvu’s were full of flowers that seemed to have arrived all at once. It was a short reprieve from the months of snow. Soon the reindeer herders would migrate nearby and bring goods to trade. The air was warmer than it had any right to be in the North. Oh yes, now it was warm enough that a person could stand outside without the wind cutting straight through their clothes. Warm enough that the sea air no longer felt cruel at every breath. ElinMarie liked these days best of all. Somehow she found herself spending more and more time with the American soldier. Gideon Lynch. They now had a hazel tree on the edge of her village they met at in secret quite often and every full moon. He had asked a few times to see her village but it was forbidden to let outsiders in.

She knew how her father might react and always found an excuse to not show him. Today was no different as she went to meet him. She was a little late as she had been trying to get her áh&269;&269;i (father) to eat better since her eatni‘s (mother) death. ElinMarie’s áh&269;&269;i was a strong man. However, Willamona going off to join the ancestors had left him hollow. As well as ElinMarie questioning why life must be so hard. ElinMarie found Gideon at the hazel tree beyond the edge of the village, where the ground sloped down toward the woods and then farther on toward the cliffs. It had been hollowed out long ago by lightning before she was ever born. The tree had grown broad and old. Now it has little messages and things hidden inside it for one another.

The fields around it were thick with flowers, small bright heads bending in the breeze. White cotton grass, yellow marsh marigolds, blue harebells, violet wildflowers. All the little northern blooms that rose from the thaw. He turned at the sound of her step and his face changed the way it always did when he saw her. As if he had been carrying something around all day and had finally set it down. He was in shirtsleeves again, sleeves rolled to the forearm, his red hair bright in the sun. It was longer now than when she had first met him, though not much. Still red enough to catch the eye from half a field away. Still the kind of color that looked almost too alive against the greens and browns around him.

“You’re late,” he said. Taking in the sight of a non-wool gakti with a more simple design and flowers on it.

ElinMarie stopped at the edge of the shade and gave him a look. “I am not late.”

He folded his arms. “You are.”

“I said I would come when the sun was up over the ridge.” ElinMarie stuck her nose in the air. Speaking a funny concept of English where all her Rs rolled. Her eyes seemed to have that yellow in them again. Beyond the violet orbs. Lately everything had no color other than around the strange man. “And it is.” She glanced at the sky, then back at him.

“Barely.”

Her dimples showed when she smiled. Her eyes fluttered softly. His mouth twitched. “That is still up.” She moved closer to his frame, the bottom of her gakti brushing the tall grass. There were flowers tucked under one arm, a loose handful of them, stems and petals already gathered together in her fist. Gideon noticed them and narrowed his eyes. “What are those for?”

ElinMarie looked at the flowers, then at him. “You.”

He stared at her, his nose wrinkled and he smirked. “Why do I feel like I’m about to regret asking?”

A smile stole her visage; she rarely smiled these days and just wanted to feel something, anything again since eatni went. Her mother was always on her mind and it wasn't right for a woman like herself. Even on her birthday in April, she had wanted to feel anything, and could not enjoy her yoiks. She refused to practice the Noadi rituals to become close to the Gods. She could not reach for them now in an overcharged state, to do so would be clingy and disrespectful. She needed to come with a calm loving heart. “Come closer.”

Gideon rose both hands at her, prying himself from the hazel tree, “That sounds suspicious.”

“Lynxie.”

He closed his eyes briefly. “There it is.”

She laughed, and before he could stop her she tossed the first handful of flowers at his chest. The blooms burst apart against him in a scatter of petals and stems. He looked down at himself, then backed up at her in disbelief.

“You threw flowers at me.”

ElinMarie rose both her eyebrows and said very coldly with no over emotions. With a small lift of her chin. “They were going to wilt anyway.”

“That was not the issue.”

“They are native flowers,” she said, as if that somehow solved the matter. “It is respectful.”

Gideon stared at her, then laughed despite himself. “You are impossible.”

She stepped back, eyes bright. “Chase me.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Chase me.”

Gideon crossed his arms. “ElinMarie.” He disliked her little games in his time of reprieve. ElinMarie lead him into the outer fields of flowers down to the ways she had been taught by her mother. She was going to take him to the cliff-sides. The seidis for only the kind, faerie people. With her long arms she bent down and took a carefree hand of flowers. Never the marigold, as they were medicinal. She threw another handful of flowers at him and turned on her heel, running before he could finish the sentence.

He shouted after her and took off in pursuit. ElinMarie was good at climbing trees and jumping from tree to tree when she played these little games and her braids would come undone. She was limber even if slightly stocky. She enjoyed these times. It was the time when the birds would yoik back to her. When everything was alive as the deep heat set in. He followed her into the woods without hesitation, because there was no dignity in letting her win twice in one afternoon. The light changed immediately under the trees. The sun broke through in narrow pale shafts.

She looked over her shoulder again, laughing when she saw how close he was getting. “You are too slow,” she called.

“I am not too slow. You are cheating.”

ElinMarie leaped down from her tree and now ran fast. If she was going to bring him to the trollies and faeries alike, he needed to be carefree. With childlike wonder. She didn't know how to teach that to someone who had not learned it as a way of life.

“How?” She said in a yoik-like voice.

“You know every stone in this place.”

She looked back, not slowing in the least. “That is not cheating. That is living here.”

He heard the laughter in her voice and quickened his pace out of pure stubbornness. A branch slapped at his shoulder. A root caught his boot. He swore under his breath, and she laughed harder, ducking between two birches and vanishing for a second behind a curve in the path. “Don’t run me off a cliff,” he called. Her voice floated back to him, light and wicked. “Then stop following me.”

He pushed through a patch of undergrowth and the trees thinned suddenly ahead. The ground gave way to rock and open sky. The cliff-side dropped off in a hard, sudden line beyond the scrub and wind-bent grass, and far below the sea flashed bright and hard under the sun. The water was darker where it broke against the rocks, silver where the light caught it. The cliff path was narrow there, not dangerous if a person knew it, but enough to make most people step carefully. Gideon slowed at once, catching his breath. ElinMarie had already turned to face him. She stood near the edge with the look on her visage that always meant trouble, the same look she wore when she was about to do something foolish just to prove she could. Her hair had come loose at the sides from running, and there was color in her cheeks. Her eyes were bright with mischief.

“You have that face again.” He gave her a fake glare. He was always so composed and never laughed as much as she did. He didn't even have a dead mother. As far as she knew. His Mamo (mother) did very well indeed with the money he sent home every week, explaining to her that sometimes these letters could take over a month to get there.

“What face?”

“That face.” Gideon remarked with a cool brush of brogue from his lips. He always had a thicker colorful accent when flustered.

ElinMarie smiled. “What face?”

“The one that means I should be worried.”

She tipped her head. “You should be.”

That was all the warning he got. She lunged forward and shoved both hands against his chest with enough force to send him backward before he could catch his balance. He staggered, arms flailing for one impossible second, then went over the edge with a shout of pure outrage.

“Point your feet straight, you break the fall proper that way!” She called, a fit of laughter about her. He hit the ocean with a heavy splash. ElinMarie jerked forward at once and peered over the ledge, one hand against the stone. She lay her belly flat on the stone as if spying on someone. For one awful heartbeat she saw only the churn of water and the dark shape where he had vanished. Then his head broke the surface, spluttering, and she burst out laughing hard. It was the most she had laughed since eatni passed and she hoped the faeries would welcome her for the first time too. He came up coughing, hair plastered to his face, shirt clinging to his shoulders.

He reached his hands to his mouth to shout from below. “You…” he choked, wiping water from his eyes. “You absolute…”

She was still laughing. “You should have seen your face.”

“I am going to kill you.” He glared up at her from the water, breathing hard, one hand braced against the rock. “You pushed me into the sea.”

“Yes.” She admitted, getting up now and getting ready to leap into the sea with him. “You did that on purpose.”

ElinMarie made no comment for a while. After a while she said softly. “Yes.” His face was so full of offended disbelief that she laughed again, helplessly this time, the sound carrying down over the cliffside.

“You are enjoying this far too much,” he called.

ElinMarie crouched where she was and looked down at him with a grin. “Maybe.” He shook water from his hair and started for the nearest rock shelf he could climb, grumbling all the while. It took him a few tries to get the purchase, but he hauled himself up in the end, dripping and irritated and glaring at her with the force of a man trying not to laugh.

When he reached the lower stone ledge, ElinMarie leaned closer to the edge and looked down at him. “You’re alive,” she said.

His mouth twitched. “You sound disappointed.”

“I am considering it.” She teased.

He looked up at her, water running down the side of his face. “You pushed me into an ocean in broad daylight.”

“You looked too serious.”

“That is not a crime.”

“It can be.” She mused back in response. He gave a helpless sort of laugh, then braced one hand on the stone and looked back toward the sea. “I should know better than to trust you when you get that glint in your eye.” He climbed enough that he could sit on the lower rock shelf and face her properly. The sun was warm on the cliff-side, but the sea wind rose cold off the water and played through his wet clothes. ElinMarie remained above him, perched easily on the upper ledge, one hand tucked around her knee. For a while neither of them spoke. Just watched the sea and listened to the wind and the distant cries of birds circling over the water. So many birds were here to witness this strange love affair she had with him. She pried her gaze away from him to stop herself from saying something foolish. As she often did around him. The flowers around them had burst open in every direction, white and yellow and blue and violet, so many colors spread over the field that it looked almost unreal. Every breeze carried their crushed scent into the air, mixed with salt and pine and the damp green smell of the woods beyond.

Gideon was breathing hard, the climb had been difficult. The rock was slick and sloped at an angle that made it hard to find purchase. He had been forcing himself up steadily, one hand over the other, feet pressing into the small notches, muscles straining. She waited until he was almost there, until his body was angled up, weight on his hands, chest rising with effort. Then she dropped forward and pressed both hands hard against his chest. Gideon went over with a shout. ElinMarie was standing now, laughing so hard her body bent. He fell backward into the sea again, the water closing around him, the sound of the crash echoing off the rocks.

Just as she saw the evidence of his firebrick hair, she turned and ran to the lower rock shelf, where the water lolled against the stone, and leapt in after him. The dark waters around her stole her breath, her balance, the sound of the world above. When she came up gasping, hair plastered to her face, Gideon was already treading water nearby, sputtering and glaring at her with complete outrage. “You are insane.” His voice was thick. That accent always thickened when he was upset.

ElinMarie laughed, breathless, and wiped water from her eyes.

“You jumped in,” he said flatly.

“You needed company.” She said this softly like it was a secret she had been holding in for a long time. She was giggling again.

“I did not need company. I needed to get back up there.”

ElinMarie had another look in her eyes. Her visage seemed to glow with how happy she was; she said very casually. “That way is too slow.” She turned in the water, treading easily, and pointed along the cliff face toward a narrow shadow in the stone. “Come. This way is better.”

ElinMarie turned in the water and let her shoulders settle; out here she was free to be herself. She found that often the ocean did not command perfection from her. To always be the queen of morals. It was so tiring to be the perfect noadi. All the time. She was far from perfect. She knew it by the feelings she suppressed in her chest about Gideon. Around them the surface of the water moved in slow, regular waves, the light from above breaking into shifting patterns on the deep blue. Gideon was swimming quietly a few feet away, watching her, lifting her head back as she yoiked. To the ocean mostly and about how she felt inside.

The song was carried in echoes by the cliffs. The sound started low, almost under her breath, and then it rose, spreading out over the water in a long curved shape that was not quite a melody and not quite a call. The yoik moved differently in the sea than it did over land. It sank into the water and traveled deeper. She had small happy tears in her eyes that perhaps only the spirits could understand. Somewhere in all the fighting over the last few years. This part of the world. Her father's lands? They had become the only home she really ever knew. The ocean had never demanded more from her than she could give. To heal more than she could do.

The air around them seemed to change in response. Gideon had never heard such a thing before. She had never yoiked around him in their times together other than the one event in Tromsø. That had been a planned yoik her sister made her practice. This was impromptu. From her heart in ways she had not expressed in so long that even someone not from her homelands could feel them. ElinMarie kept the yoik alive, drawing it out longer now, letting it open into the space between the water and the sky. She was not singing to anyone human. She was calling something that lived in the deep, something older than the language of the people who had built walls and roads and names. He felt a small twinge of fear as the water shifted, not understanding how she could stay so calm. Lost in her trance even as the waters changed around them.

Gideon’s head turned toward the darker movement beneath the surface. At first it was only a shadow. Then he saw the spray from its spout and ElinMarie broke the yoik only long enough to laugh. It was a rich sound. One he had grown keen for in the last few weeks. She was his reprieve and the only thing that stopped the sounds from the tunnels and mines plaguing his mind. Then the water lifted with a smooth weight, and the shape broke the surface. A young Minke whale. He had never seen a whale in person. The way ElinMarie’s visage lit up he could surmise this was not the first time she had seen one. It was smaller than an adult, but still enormous, its dark wet back gleaming in the sun. Its skin slick with salt and the deep cold of the water. It turned in the water with a slow powerful grace, circling once, close enough that ElinMarie could see the shape of its eye as it looked at her. Gideon made a sound somewhere between a laugh and shock.

The Minke moved again, its tail lifting slowly beneath the surface, the fin of it spreading wide as it pushed against the water with a force that sent ripples outward in perfect circles. It circled them once more, and then, with a sudden playful burst of motion, it surged upward. Its tail struck the water just beneath her and sent her high into the air. She went up without warning, the world flipping around her, the water spilling from her hair and clothes as she rose for a brief impossible second. The sun catching the spray and turning it into a thousand points of light. Her laughter broke out before she could stop it, startled and wild, and then she was coming down again, the water closing around her, the cold hitting her skin all at once.

She hit the water with a splash and came up coughing, giggling with child-like wonder. Her hair plastered to her face, her eyes bright with the shock and the joy of it. She began to tease the young Minke with a whale yoik she heard a few Sea Sámi’s perform on the trade routes. Though she made the classic lule sounds with “la la”s instead of “Loy La's.” Gideon was staring at her, completely stunned. When he could speak, his voice was somewhere between disbelief and awe, “The whale tossed you.”

ElinMarie wiped water from her eyes and laughed again, the sound free and unguarded. “She was playing.”

He looked at the spot where the whale had vanished beneath the surface, then back at her. “That was a whale.”

She laughed, a little amused by his own shock, and said very sternly as if telling another secret yet again. “I know.”

“That was a whale who decided to toss you.” He said as she splashed him, causing him to laugh and splash her back.

“I know.” ElinMarie said softly with a little bit of soft grace.


He shook his head, initially speechless, then managed another laugh that sounded half like wonder. “I am not going to forget this.”

ElinMarie smiled, the water still moving around them, the sea calm again except for the soft rhythm of the waves. She looked toward the place where the whale had dipped beneath the surface. It was gone now, the dark shape melting back into the deep, leaving them in the quiet. She turned back to Gideon, her expression softening.

“It was a young one.”

Gideon looked at her for a long moment, then at the water, then at her again. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. “That was real.”

ElinMarie nodded. “Yes. It was.” She began to tie her hair up in a tieless knot to keep it from her face. “Come on, Lynxie, let's go. I am finding that you might prune up like an old plum if I keep you in here too long.” She teased him, leading him along the stone walls they had jumped off from. After a short distance, he saw something he had not quite caught before. He stared at the dark gap in the rock. “Is that a cave?”

ElinMarie nodded and clicked her tongue. “Clever Lynxie.” She said as she led him closer to the entrance. “The beginning of one.”

“That is not a yes.”

She was already swimming toward it. “Kom igjen, du trenger litt eventyr i det kjedelige livet ditt.” (Come on, you need some adventure in your boring life.) She made that comment in Norwegian as she wasn’t fully sure how to say it in English. He was nearly as lost as she was. Still, Gideon followed her because the alternative was treading water in the North Sea alone, which seemed considerably less appealing than treading it with ElinMarie, even when she was infuriating. He had a feeling he might get lost now if he tried to climb the cliffs alone. The cave entrance was narrow and low, half-hidden behind a shelf of wet rock. ElinMarie reached it first and pulled herself through without hesitation, water running off her in sheets. Gideon followed, ducking his head, and emerging into cool dimness. The cave opened behind the entrance into something much wider, its ceiling high enough to stand under without discomfort. The stone walls were dark and damp, marked with patches of pale lichen and the dark gleam of moisture seeping down from above.

Light came in through the entrance behind them, silver and thin. Somewhere deeper in the cave another faint glow suggested a second opening further along. The sound of the sea pulled back to a low murmur, distant and steady, as if they had stepped just far enough from the world to hear themselves think. ElinMarie was wringing out the seawater from her summer gakti with floral patterns on it. She shook water from her hands and looked back at him. “Well?”

Gideon turned slowly, taking it in. “How did you find this?”

“My áh&269;&269;i showed me. His áh&269;&269;i showed him.” She moved deeper into the cave, one hand trailing lightly along the stone wall, and he followed. The passage narrowed slightly before widening again, and the second glow grew stronger until they stepped through into a wider chamber where a cleft in the ceiling let in a shaft of afternoon light. It fell in a pale column onto the stone floor, warming a small circle of dry rock. Past the chamber, the cave continued as a passage, sloping upward until it opened entirely onto a wooded path beyond, sheltered between young birch trees and low pine. The ground underfoot went from stone to soft moss.

They continued to wring out their clothes as best they could and walked the path with water still dripping from their hair. He watched her take off her reindeer skin boots and use the ties that told where she was from in her crafts to sling them around her back. The waterfall announced itself before they reached it, making a song of its own. After hearing her yoik, it was kind of close to maybe… Just maybe being able to listen to nature better as well. First as a vibration in the air, a constant low hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Then as sound, building steadily as the trees thinned, until they stepped around a curve in the path and it came fully into view.

The falls dropped in a wide silver sheet from a height of bare rock above, catching the late afternoon sun as they fell and breaking the light into fragments that scattered across the stones below. The pool at the base was dark and deep, edged with flat rock where the spray had worn everything smooth over centuries. The air around it was cool and full of mist, fine enough to feel like a soft pressure against the skin. ElinMarie had hoped the magical day they were having was enough to free his mind from dark thoughts so the fairies of this place would bless him as they had her in her times here. He was her offering to this place. Normally she brought berries or animal bones with names carved into them. She was praying, to herself mostly now, that he would be accepted in this place. That the fae would bless him to never part from her. Gideon stopped at the edge of the clearing and stared. “This is where Utur and Asta came,” ElinMarie said.

He turned toward her. “Who?”

She met his eyes with an expression he had learned to pay close attention to when it appeared on her visage. The quiet, inward expression of someone about to say something that mattered to them in a way that would not be fully visible from the outside. She moved toward the side of the falls where the rock curved inward, creating a shallow overhang that kept the rain and spray off. She sat down there on the dry stone, her back to the cliff, the falls roaring not far from her side. He sat beside her, close enough that their knees nearly touched. She looked at the water for a while before she began.

“A few hundred years ago,” she said, “the world was different here. Before the schools. Before the officials who came with their books and their rules and their certainty that they understood everything better than the people who had always lived here. Vikings and Sámi were not always enemies before colonization. Sometimes they traded. Sometimes they made agreements. Sometimes they stayed near each other long enough to know one another's names. In those times, a young girl was taken. Her and her mother both. The Vikings who took them were not kind about it, but they did not kill them either. They kept them. They brought them north with the ships. Her mother died when she was very young and she was given the name Asta.”

“How old was she?” Gideon asked.

“Young enough that she grew up believing she was a viking…” ElinMarie glanced at him sideways. “She learned to survive among them. Asta grew up with their language. She watched how they moved and thought and argued. Asta learned from her mother long enough that she also learned from the crows.”

“The crows?” He mused the question in half thought.

“They found her,” ElinMarie said simply. “Birds know when a person is listening. Crows especially. They came to her and she learned to understand what they were saying. Warnings, mostly. They indeed showed her things too. Visions. Things that had not yet happened but would.” He was quiet for a long time after that. She let everything sink in. After all, English was not her strong suit and she struggled to find the words anyways. “There was a man among the Vikings,” ElinMarie said. “His name was Utur. He was not young when she met him. He had been fighting for most of his life and he wore it on him the way some men do; not with softness, but with a kind of heaviness that the wrong person might mistake for strength. He was proud. Difficult. Not unkind, perhaps, but not easy to reach either. It is said by my father's people that she raised him with her visions into being a Jarl.”

Gideon smiled faintly at that. “Asta showed him things,” ElinMarie continued. “Through yoik. Through the crow visions. She sang to him and he saw paths that had not yet opened, battles that had not yet been fought. He learned to trust what she showed him before he understood how she knew it. That was how she rose him to power; the elves came for her in those days and told her she was Sámi, and a bridge between the two worlds to bring back peace.”

“Did he love her?” Gideon interrupted in half thought.

ElinMarie shrugged, looking as if she was thinking deeply about this. “He loved what she could do for him at first. Then he loved her. The way people sometimes do, slowly and without meaning to, though my father told me he never truly saw their children as his and forced them to fight for power upon his death.”

“Asta, did she love Utur?” He asked again.

“The story says yes.” She tilted her head slightly. “I think she loved him because he was the first person who ever listened when she spoke. I think she felt trapped by him in many ways, ways that a hard life pushes into someone.” Gideon looked down at the stone for a moment. “He died eventually,” ElinMarie continued. “Old age, or battle, the stories differ. Their son took his place after; Jarl Utur made his grandson from his first marriage and his son fight to the death. When her son won the territories, Asta came back here. Back to Sápmi. Back to the old places where she made love to him. They say the elves and faeries still knew her name when she returned. That she walked through the North changed and heartbroken. This was the time when we did not descend from the Fae but were the Fae.”

Gideon looked at the falls for a long while after she stopped speaking. “She gave everything to a life that was not hers,” he said finally, “only when his death freed her, did she go home.”

ElinMarie looked at him. Something in his voice had changed. “Yes.” She mused while playing with her hair that was the color of stone when it was wet, pulling out her tieless knots. She took his hand and led him to a deep cave, just beyond the waterfall. The outside world was blocked by the rush of water from the falls. The water was like a nonstop current. Here the lighting was low but still had bits of light from holes in the cave, enough to see. Gideon could swear he saw faint glittering in the stone. ElinMarie had never taken anyone back here and her father had forbidden her to when he had last taken her here. They built the fire on the flat stone near the overhang, sheltered enough from the spray to keep the wood dry. Their clothes hung over a low branch nearby, steaming slightly in the warmth.

Without the wet layers they felt lighter, freer, the heat of the fire pressing against bare skin. ElinMarie sat near the flames with her knees pulled up and her hair spread loose across her shoulders to dry. She wondered who had left the wood for them there. She pulled the small bundle of feathers from her gathered things and turned one over in her fingers. Then she reached across and ran the edge of it lightly down the inside of Gideon's forearm. He looked up from the fire; there was a soft distant look in his eyes that he often got when he was thinking too much. ElinMarie watched him for a moment before running the feather across the back of his hand, and along the line of his collarbone.

Gideon did not flinch away. Nor did he speak words to stop her. His breathing changed, just slightly. She drew the feather down the side of his neck, very slowly, watching his face the whole time. “ElinMarie,” he said, very quietly. She touched the feather to his jaw in return to the way he barely spoke. He reached out and took her wrist. So, ElinMarie leaned forward and pressed the edge of the feather to his shoulder. He turned it in his other hand and traced it lightly up the inside of her arm in return, and she felt the sensation travel all the way through her, that strange delicate aliveness of something so soft it was almost nothing. For a long while neither of them spoke. The fire popped. The waterfall kept sounding behind them, constant and deep. Gideon set the feather down and looked at her with the expression she had begun to recognize, the one that meant he had been holding something back and had run out of space to keep holding it.

“ElinMarie,” he said again only louder this time, more urgently.

“I am here,” she mused before letting her violet orbs settle on him. Those icy depths she had grown to care for so very much seemed to be gazing right through her soul. In all the ways she hated and enjoyed. She heard the change in his voice at once and the smallest part of her stilled. “What?”

He was quiet a moment longer. “ There is no universe in this existence that I would not come running to you, what I am saying is that I love you." The words did not come with flourish. They came simply, stripped clean of any kind of performance. That was what made them hit so hard. She scoffed. She had not meant to, but the sound left her lips before she could stop it. ElinMarie went still.

“I know that sounds too sudden,” he said. “Maybe it is. I don't care. I've been carrying it around for too long. Since the docks, maybe longer. Since I realized I wanted to see you every day and not just because it was easier to breathe when you were there.”

ElinMarie said nothing. Her throat felt too full. She wanted to pretend she didn't understand the words. Still, she had passed from those schools with good enough grades she knew what he was confessing to. She couldn't quite admit she had fallen for someone. Not with others around her like Ailu whom she had known since she was a small child. Ailu had felt it too, her pulling away from the village more and more. Doing shaman work less.

ElinMarie never truly enjoyed setting those things aside but human grief made you blind. No one had warned her of the shock of waking up and her mother was gone. ElinMarie was young and she still had so many questions, like what was the yoik she first sang to allow her as a baby to fall asleep? The kind of questions that came weeks after that human withdrawal was done. He went on, more quietly now.

“You've been the only peace I've had since the war began.”

That made her chest tighten in a way she did not have words for. He looked younger all of a sudden and older at the same time. Like all the years he had not yet lived were crowding behind his face. ElinMarie swallowed hard. When she spoke, her voice came out low. “You should not say that unless you mean it.”

“I do mean it.”

She studied him for a long moment. There was no trick in his expression. No careless grin, no attempt to turn the moment into something easier than it was. He looked like a boy who had been holding himself together too tightly for too long and had finally come undone in the only way left to him. “My áh&269;&269;i will hate this,” she said at last, and the words came out before she could stop them.

“Your áh&269;&269;i?”

“Be&273;ar.” She looked away into the lapping orange flames of the fire. “He lost Maxinda to the coast. He barely spoke for weeks after she left. My eatni would have told me to be careful. She would have said love is not enough if it costs too much.” Gideon did not interrupt. He only watched her, listening with the kind of attention that made her feel more exposed than any crowd had. ElinMarie looked back at him. “I cannot pretend this means nothing.” His expression gentled at once. She felt the truth of the moment in her bones before she fully understood it.

This was no passing infatuation, no private amusement that could be set aside when the weather changed. This was the sort of thing that rearranged the body around itself. Something had already happened. She knew it now. The question was only what she would do with it. Then, after a moment, she reached into the little pouch at her waist and pulled out a narrow braided strip of hide wrapped around a sharp obsidian stone. “Then I promise.” ElinMarie felt her breath catch.

“Will you come back with me?” he asked. “When the war is over. To New York?” He clarified, trying to choose his words carefully.

“Yes.” ElinMarie breathed out, her voice under a whisper even like admitting it had sucked away her voice from her lips.

“To meet my mother.” The word landed with a strange softness.

“Your mother?”

He nodded. “Mamo,” he said, glancing at her with a faint smile, then correcting himself. As they had spoken in a sea of languages and often switched up at any given point to make something make more sense. ElinMarie looked down at the knife in her hands, then back at him. The thought of leaving Sápmi did not come easily. It tugged against everything in her that had been shaped by her parents, by the village, or by her years of shamanism. She thought of her mother's grave. She thought of Maxinda. Of all the things she had already lost. Of all the things she did not want to lose next. Still. When she looked at Gideon, she saw the raw seriousness in his face and understood that this was not a passing fancy to him. It was not a game. He meant it. “I know it will break my áh&269;&269;i's heart,” she said quietly. “After Maxinda left, it was bad enough. He will say I am leaving him too.” Gideon's expression changed. “Then I'll come with you first.”

She blinked. “What?” ElinMarie avoided his gaze. She didn't have the backbone to bring him into the village.

“I'll come to meet him before anything else. If that's what it takes.” ElinMarie shook her head. “I cannot take you to my village, it is forbidden, you don't know what that means.”

“I know it means I want to do right by you.”

She felt them land in her chest in the most agonizing way. Her knees felt very weak. “You have been the only peace I have had,” he said, “since the moment I signed my name to a piece of paper and stopped being just a boy from upstate New York and started being something I never quite asked to become. Every day in those tunnels. Every time I tried to remember what the world was before it turned into that.”

ElinMarie looked at him for a long time. She thought of her father out on the water, the sound of his yoik carrying over the harbor. She thought of her mother's voice in the dark of the lavvu, steady and unhurried. She thought of Maxinda, and of the shape of loss, and of everything a person gave up when they chose a different life from the one they were born into. She didn't have a mother to kill with a broken heart anymore. Her sister had done the terrible deed for her. ElinMarie knew what this would cost. She searched his face like he was a dangerous creature ready to consume her. All of her. Until she had no more ElinMarie left and only the bones Gideon spit out. He looked back at her without flinching.

“When this is over,” he said, “I want to take you home with me. To New York. To meet my mamo. She will talk too much and feed you more than you can manage and probably cry once when she thinks I am not watching.”

Despite everything, ElinMarie smiled faintly. “She sounds terrifying.” She chuckled a little at her own words but it had no smile to accompany it.

“She is, a little,” he admitted with a wry smile. “But she will love you because I love you.”

She looked down at her hands for a moment. Then she reached out and placed her palm flat against his chest, and she felt his heart beating under it. Quick and warm and very much alive. “I cannot be apart from you,” she said quietly. “I have tried not to think about it and I cannot.”

“I can't be apart from you either,” Gideon said, covering her hand with his. “It's only this fact that makes me selfish enough to ask you to come home with me.”

ElinMarie took the obsidian knife from the hide wrapping and held it in her palm. The blade was sharp and black, old and sacred. She looked at Gideon and he understood. ElinMarie pressed the obsidian to the center of her chest, just above her heart, and drew a shallow cut across her skin. The pain was sharp and clean. Blood welled in a dark line that ran down toward the fire. Gideon watched her, then turned the knife to his own chest and made the same cut, the same length, the same weight. Blood rose on both of them, bright and red in the firelight.

The same hue as the very color of his hair. Gideon stepped forward and dipped his mouth to her bosom, drinking the blood from her flesh. It was warm and heavy with the taste of life and the old weight of the ritual. His icy eyes never left hers and it took all her willpower to still stand. Then ElinMarie pressed her lips to the cut on his chest and drank from him. The blood was warm in her throat. It carried the weight of him, the work he had done, the war he had survived, the darkness he had carried in silence. She drank it all.

In this moment they traded one another's sins and demons alike. All that was evil inside them until they were one. In the old Sámi way, the blood oath was a promise to always find each other, to always love each other, and to never let the other suffer alone. The ritual was a way of drinking the evil and the demons of each other, transferring them from one soul to another so neither would have to carry them alone. It passed the burdens between them, binding them so that the shadow in one would be the light in the other. When the blood was gone, they both felt the same weight settle in their chests, the same lightness, the same certainty. ElinMarie met his eyes. “Always.”

“Always.”

They stayed there for a long time, the fire between them and the waterfall behind, the blood still warm on their skin. When they finally lay down beside the fire, ElinMarie tucked herself close against him and felt the steady sound of his breathing settle over the night. The waterfall kept speaking in the dark. As it had been since she had brought him here. If there was ever going to be a place she admitted she loved him, maybe some deeper part of her always knew it was going to be at Utur and Asta’s old place of love.




Last edited by Admin Chaos at June 18 2026, 9:50:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Post #7 Subject: 1935 confessions. Posted at: June 30 2026, 9:23:25 pm

Violet Eyed Minx Donator Gender: Female


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Posts: 273

Saratoga Springs, New York. 1935 late summer. [/]

[c=C8A2C8]
The late July heat of 1935 had turned the valley into an oven, but inside the industrial estate, the air was a suffocating soup of competing worlds. On one side of the corrugated iron partition lay the estate’s commercial apiary; hundreds of wooden hives humming with an angry, vibrating drone under the heavy scent of clover and sweet, sticky honey. On the other side lay the cannery’s assembly line, and he could understand why in seeing it, why Varra hated it so. It was a mess of automated presses where heavy sheets of steel were stamped, soldered, and rolled into uniform cylinder tins. They were ration containers, built to hold preserved meat for a mass-scale mobilization the newspapers hadn`t even named yet. Only it wasn’t meat they packaged. No, it was honey. As rations even now were being restricted. Perhaps he could only see it more clearly now that he was a part of the unread world. Being the son of immigrants didn`t hurt either. As he was keeping up on international news.

The money from fixing the Saratoga Spring Stakes came in heavy that Summer. Enough to buy a trainer`s silence. Enough to pay off the track stewards who had conveniently looked the other way during the third race. Enough to grease the palms of the young clerks at the newly built luxury cedar spa suites nestled up near the state reservation, where the pine trees grew so dense they swallowed sound whole, and the guests were expected to ask no questions. The IRA had been breathing down his back, after visiting him at the Stronghold bar. That had been quite the meeting his last working weekend, he could have solved his issues the vampire way. Easily. However, if he had done that. It would have meant exposing himself. Losing his visits to his mother, and well. It would mean running from the mortal woman who had caught so much of his attention lately.

Gideon Lynch had been waiting for a reason to leave the stables for weeks. It wasn`t that the work troubled him. He had survived trenches, grinding silence of decades. Horse manure and the close, animal stink of the paddocks were trivial inconveniences. What he required was a controlled environment.

Clean lines of sight. Thin walls. Proximity to the one variable in his very long life that he had not yet been able to quantify. Varra worked the brutal intersection of both. She spent her mornings navigating the swarming hives and harvesting the wax, only to spend her afternoons on the floor of the cannery line, her ears ringing with the relentless screech of metal hitting metal. Oh how her mind wandered often in those hours in a haunting way. Leaving her to think about how wasteful an industrial society was. she often found herself feeling bad for the bees whose eggs may have to be crushed, or even a hive that had swamped and needed to be burned.

Gideon found her near the back of the stamping floor, slipping past the distracted foreman with the effortless, shadow-like ease of a creature who didn`t truly belong in the daylight. He stood in the gloom by the loading dock, just watching her. Out of the worst of the sun`s relentless kiss on his skin, for now. For the past three months, she had been his secret weapon. By day, she slaved away for pennies in this sweltering factory; by night, she sat at a small wooden table in the back of the Stronghold, taking Gideon’s crude, handwritten racetrack ledgers and turning them into flawless mathematical equations.

Her sharp mind could calculate the odds, the track weights, and the payout probabilities faster than any bookie in New York, ensuring his fixed bets at Saratoga went off without a single hitch. They had grown dangerously close over those late-night ledgers, an unsaid friction sparking every time his cold fingers brushed hers over the ink-stained paper. Lately despite his best efforts to stay away from her. As she was human and breakable. He could himself in need of some kind of reprieve with her. He had grown fond of her daughter and would even give her a few extra dollars to ensure Swan got Polish classes paid for.

It would help a girl like her to know how to speak the tongue of the slums around here. He too felt a pull to both of them that had been bothering him for some time. He knew deep down. Varra felt that same pull. She was just too stubborn with her nordic customs to admit it.

He offered the arrangement to Varra on a Tuesday morning, standing between two rows of freshly watered flower beds while she was still elbow-deep in soil and clearly hadn`t slept. In turn, Varra had not noticed him right away, having stayed awake all night working out the numbers of his earnings. Varra assumed there was a little vodka in the losing horse`s downfall and for all her grace kept quiet. For now she had no proof of this and would not use it against him. She gazed up at him slowly with those violet orbs of hers. He noticed the way her freckled high cheekbones flushed when he was near. The way her pale skin looked so very good in her golden frock with a lacey overlay. She in turn had also noticed he was wearing a suit after his horse, River Champion, had just won the most recent race last Saturday.

She was lifting a heavy crate of newly stamped steel lids, her breath coming in short, ragged gasps. A thick smudge of black industrial grease was streaked across her cheekbone, clashing violently with the dusting of yellow flower pollen on her collar and the sweet, cloying scent of honey that still clung to her skin. Her silver-gray hair had completely come out of its braid, damp with sweat, clinging to the nape of her neck. Varra didn`t hear him approach over the din of the machinery, but she felt the sudden, unnatural drop in temperature behind her; the telltale chill that always accompanied his presence. She froze, setting the crate down with a heavy clang. As she wiped her brow with the back of a gloved hand. That flush on her high cheekbones grows to a tomato red. As it did lately whenever he was around.

When she turned around, Gideon was leaning his broad shoulders against a stack of unformed sheet metal, his icy blue eyes fixed entirely on her. He looked completely out of place in his tailored tweed coat, a cigarette unlit between his lips, watching her with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once been in a genuine rush.Gods I hate when he looks at me like that. His voice broke through her thoughts. She always felt like he could hear what she was feeling. "You have earned a reprieve," he said, his low, raspy New York rumble growing familiar to her. She loved how thick he spoke versus other men. All that heritage of his brogue seeping though down to her heart, behind its cage called ribs.

"Three nights at the Springs. The accommodations at the new cedar spa are, by all accounts, exceptional. Consider it a bonus of your tireless efforts with those racing ledgers." Varra`s visage was torn by a half smile half giggle, "You don`t give bonuses, Mr. Lynch," Varra mused, trying to ignore the way her heart automatically quickened just by having him this close. "We agreed on a flat three percent of the payout for the Summer stakes math."

"I am giving one now," Gideon replied, his gaze dropping for a fraction of a second to the damp collar of her shirt before locking back onto her violet orbs. The intensity in his stare was suffocating, heavy with an unspoken hunger that had nothing to do with racetrack bets. "You`re running yourself into the dirt here, Varra. Stamping out tin cans for a war that hasn`t started yet, then staying up until dawn fixing my books."

She looked away from him, her mind racing as she tried to maintain the rigid, pragmatic mask she had worn for so many years now....

"I need the money. The apiary owner docked my pay two weeks ago because I dented a batch of the steel ration tins on the assembly line. I can`t afford to turn down work."

"You aren`t turning anything down," Gideon insisted, stepping closer until the heat of her flushed, exhausted body hit his icy skin. He reached out, his large hand hovering just inches from her face, wanting nothing more than to wipe the black grease from her cheek. "The money from the Saratoga race came in heavy. More than enough to cover your docked pay, and more than enough to buy you three nights of rest across the hall from me. Pack your things when you return home."

He held her gaze without blinking an easy thing, for him. He straightened his cufflinks with a precise, unhurried motion. She was sheepish at him toying with her and had grown to like it when he was outwardly indifferent to her."You may, of course, decline. Though I find refusals of comfort rather theatrical when the person refusing is visibly exhausted." She stared at him for another long moment. He watched the calculation move behind her eyes. The rapid, intelligent weighing of risk against need that he had come to recognize as the signature rhythm of her thinking. "Swan comes with me.’ it was the only yes from her he was going to get. Her and that damn nordic stoicism.

"I booked three rooms," he replied. Which was not a lie. He had booked three. He had specifically requested that two of them be placed as far from his private lounge as the floor plan permitted. Varra`s eyes narrowed. "Why three?" "I occasionally conduct business in the evenings. Your daughter`s sleep should not be disrupted by late arrivals." He glanced toward the potting shed, where he could hear another woman moving carefully among the clay. "Fine," she said. "Three nights."

He had already put the 10-dollar bill in the clerk`s hand an hour before the conversation. He paid for the configuration he needed. Swan`s room and Varra`s were adjacent, connected by a shared sitting room on the east wing. His private lounge was across the hall from Varra`s ; ten feet of polished oak floorboards, two doors, and his left open by a deliberate inch. Gideon guessed that as true it was for him. A man with his little education had never had a respite from life so fancy before. Neither had they.

He had spent six months accumulating small, incongruous data points about this woman and the accumulated weight of them had become impossible to dismiss. She was thirty six, the same age he should have been mortality, and her birthday was in April. Her pain tolerance was extraordinary and completely unselfconscious, not the cultivated endurance of someone trained to it but something deeper, more constitutional. She moved through crowds with the cellular habit of a woman for whom invisibility had once been genuine survival. Horses that refused everyone else went quiet under her hands in minutes, and she never registered this as remarkable. Varra, also wore a silver piece on a cord at her throat that she never, under any circumstances, removed.

From across the hall, in the deep quiet of the first two nights, he listened. The rhythm of her pulse steadier than it ought to be in the stifling July heat. The precise catch in her breathing when she believed herself unobserved, that small involuntary release of vigilance that no human body could entirely suppress. The heavy, uneven stride of a woman carrying too many years of exhaustion through a room, and then the weighted silence of sleep. She always tossed and turned at night. He would hear it if he listened in closely. During the day they laughed and round reprieve in the wine vineyards while Swan would be off doing various things he had paid for. Horseback lesions, grape stomping, and even bird watching.

The heat had been building since late afternoon, and with it he noticed Varra stealing more and more gazes of him throughout the days spent in the shade reading poetry. Each day she wore a nicer dress than the last. Even as a vampire he could smell the rain. Varra has opened her window as the first few droplets released from the sky. New York was never as cold as her homelands. So on nights like this when all it did was rain, it made her homesick for a kind of cold America could not obtain. He had also heard Swan fall asleep across the hall at half past eight, her small body surrendering to sleep with the uncomplicated totality of a child.He had heard Varra check on her twice before retreating to her own room.

She knocked on his door at half past ten. She was carrying the track logistics folder for the following week, her collar open at the throat where the heat had made it intolerable, the silver cord just barely visible at her collarbone. Her hair was up but loosely, the practical unraveling of a long day. She had not changed for bed. She had been intending this delivery all evening. He opened the door and looked at her. She looked back at him. For a moment he felt lost in the yellow loops of her violet orbs. Whatever careful distance she had dressed herself in before knocking… The brisk efficiency, the intention to hand over papers and retreat untouched. He watched it come undone at the seam in the span of one silence that neither of them moved to fill.

"Come in," he said, and his voice came out lower than he intended. Varra could not explain herself. It was as if some part of her. Some deep impulsive part of her she had long ago locked away, was now moving her forward. As his door shut. The folder ended up on the side table. Neither of them noted when. The simmering accumulation of months, every carefully maintained distance, every measured interaction, every charged moment at the stables when one of them had made a choice about proximity and then made the opposite choice immediately after…

Boiled over in the space between one breath and the next. "Gideon" ( Gid Down Nyee) she began, and it was almost certainly a warning. It was the way she said his name. With that slavic lit noone else in the States ever put an effort into that made him come undone. "Przyjd&378; tutaj," he said quietly come here he drew her forward by the wrist. As her hands rubbed his icy chest. His hands found her throat, her collarbone, the curve of her jaw. Cold fingers against warm, damp skin. She drew a sharp breath at the contrast and then, and this was the data point he had needed most, Varra, pressed into it rather than away. Into the cold. He filed it precisely and kept the rest of his attention entirely on her.

She was trembling. Her hands went from his hair, down the curve of the back of his neck. Her eyes, never once leaving his. For a few desperate, blinding minutes the mutual hunger that had been building since February was the only thing in the room, and it was sufficient to crowd out his analytical instincts almost entirely. Almost. He was always still himself but she made that more difficult than anything had in a very long time.

Her hands found his hair and pulled, not gently. The sound that came from him was not something he would have chosen. She gave a short exhale that was equal parts satisfaction and surprise, and he walked her backward into the deep velvet cushions of the sofa and she went with a willingness that was its own revelation, because Varra did not go anywhere she did not intend to go. Her lips did not merely kiss his.

They melted into his. Pushing warmth back into him. As he drained it from her. She seemed to only be more crazed by his touch the longer it went on. Until she was in his lap sheepishly breathless.

He trailed cold kisses down her throat, her collarbone, the warm hollow above her sternum. Her hands rested at the back of his neck, and the heat of her palms against his cold skin was a counterpoint he found, distantly, extraordinary. Her heartbeat was violent in his hearing, rapid and urgent and entirely, emphatically alive. The frantic heat of her began to ease. Her hands went slack at his neck. The rigid set of her shoulders, the armor she wore even unconsciously, dissolved entirely.

Her breathing deepened. Slowed. Her forehead dropped against the hollow of his shoulder and he felt the full, trusting weight of her settle there, and she exhaled long, slow, bottomless and was simply gone. Varra was holding back tears, his body was so cold. So unnatural yet she felt a pull to him she could not explain. Proper ladies did not conduct themselves like this. Varra was unable to stop herself as she nibbled his shoulder softly with need. Moving on the sofa for sometime in what could only be called horizontal dancing with clothes on. Varra was holding back tears, his body was so cold. So unnatural yet she felt a pull to him she could not explain.

"I shouldn`t be here," she mused against his skin, her voice trembling with a confession she had buried for months. "I shouldn`t want this. Every time I try to push it away, it only pulls me closer to you." Gideon caught his breath, his hand resting near her waist but not yet pulling her closer. "You think I don`t feel the weight of it?" His tone rough with a restraint that felt like torture. "Every day I have forced myself to look away. To pretend the distance between us was what we both needed, when it was killing me."

"Then don`t look away," she breathed, the last of her defenses fracturing completely. Moving on the sofa for sometime in what could only be called horizontal dancing with clothes on. She was not in distress. Her pulse was strong, slower than her waking rate, deep and steady in a way he had not heard from her in six months of listening. Genuine rest. The sheer, accumulated weight of her exhaustion had claimed her at the exact moment she stopped fighting it. He found himself biting her own neck. Barely able to restrain his teeth from puncturing into that soft flesh and drinking from her. Oh, how her very smell of lavender was intoxicating. Varra eased into him as she let herself fall into sleep.

He reached over without disturbing her and drew the throw from the sofa arm across her shoulders. He let her settle fully into sleep. She looked strange under the hand stitched throw of many colors. In the absolute quiet of the room, her lips parted. She didn`t speak in English. What came from her lips in the deep, unguarded oblivion of genuine sleep was a particular vowel shape he had not heard spoken in over a decade. Barely audible, in a voice that was half-murmur and half-dream: " Your skin is cold, it feels like Sápmi." He went still in a way that was different from his ordinary stillness.

Sápmi. She had not said it to him. She had said it to whatever landscape her sleeping mind had retreated to said it the way people said the names of places they ached for, with the specific, compressed grief of someone who had been away too long. His mind was a violent wheel of calculation and many things were clicking into place all at once for him. Even more so for the strange spell this mortal woman seemed to have on him. After all, vampires and humans never mixed well for long.

Gideon looked at the silver cord at her throat. The faint glint of the piece beneath her collar. He rose with precise, unhurried care. Arranged the cushions. Watched her breathing settle into the slow, even rhythm that would hold for hours. Then he slipped out into the midnight rain. The country roads between the Springs and the city were dark and wet and empty. To a human the journey would have taken over an hour. To Gideon the night was a friction less expanse of wet pine corridors and empty tarmac and the particular freedom of a nature that had not required roads for some decades. He was a passing shadow against the treeline. Then he was not there at all. His tenement flat near the railyards.

Once inside, he went directly to the floorboards beneath the bed. Pried up the wood. Opened the rusted iron footlocker he had carried since 1918 past trench maps annotated in three languages, past a dented silver flask, past a letter he had not opened in nine years. His fingers found the trinket by weight before he saw it. Small. Old silver, its surface worn smooth in places by decades of handling, etched with ancestral markings in the specific, regional style of the far Scandinavian north. He turned it over once in his cold fingers.

The etchings matched, precisely, what he had glimpsed at Varra`s throat for the past six months. He pocketed the silver. The metal bit cold against his palm. ElinMarie had hung it over his bed, in the infirmary all those years ago. Gideon wasn`t even sure why he didn`t see it sooner. Her violet orbs pressed in all the time. The way she rolled her R’s so thickly. He was back across the hall before the first gray light touched the Saratoga sky seated in the chair beside the sofa with the proof in his pocket, listening to her breathe, waiting for morning with the patience of something that had been waiting a very long time for a great many things and had learned to do it well.

He would not confront her today. Though it seems fate would have them meet again seventeen years later. She was past him in age now and a reminder of everything he once could have had.

He would give her the day. He would give her Swan and sunlight and the ordinary armor of waking hours. Tonight, the very last night of the so-called vacation. It would be different. She was called Njuk&269;a in her mother`s private language, which she had almost never heard spoken aloud. In America she was Swan, which suited her; she had the quality of stillness the name implied, a watchful quiet that made adults forget she was in the room and then startle when she moved.

She appeared in the doorway of Gideon`s lounge at half past seven, when she came looking for her mother. She stood perfectly still for a moment, taking in the scene with her mother`s brand of rapid, silent inventory. The throw blanket. The half-unfastened collar. The logistics folder was abandoned on the side table. Gideon in the adjacent chair with a newspaper arranged with the specific studied neutrality of a man who had positioned himself to appear as though he had been there no particular length of time.

"Good morning, Mr. Lynch," she said, in the careful, precise English of a child who had learned the language from books before people. "Good morning, Swan." She had her mother`s eyes that same flat, measuring quality, that particular depth of assessment that made him feel slightly absurd. He saw ElinMarie in Swan’s face now in a way he had not before. Saw the strawberry in her hair that was all too uncanny for his taste in a way he had never bothered to notice before.

"She doesn`t sleep," Swan said. "Not properly. Her eyes close but it isn`t the same." A pause. "This looks different."

"It is different," Gideon mused with a half arrogant smile. Swan nodded. Then she looked back at him with her mother`s flat, direct gaze. "You`re not going to wake her."

"No."

"Good." She turned and disappeared back across the hall, and Gideon was left with the distinct impression that he had just received permission from the one person in this equation whose approval actually mattered.

Varra woke at half past nine, surfacing slowly through several layers before breaking the surface properly. She lay still for approximately thirty seconds becoming aware of her surroundings. As Varra slipped back into the waking world she rubbed the back of her neck. She could not meet his gaze for the first time in months. "You let me sleep," she said.

"You required it." He didn`t look up from the logistics folder he had been genuinely reviewing for two hours. "Swan was here at half past seven. She appeared satisfied and returned to her room. She has since ordered breakfast from the kitchen service." Varra was quiet for a moment. He watched the small relaxation in her spine at the news that Swan was accounted for and untroubled. She assumed he had heard the service bell as sometimes she did hear it on the mornings they had been here as well.

These rooms were famous for letting front door noise seep inside other rooms. She needed coffee and her daughter and the daylight hours. He would give her that. Tonight would come on its own. She rose, drew the throw around her shoulders, crossed to the door. Then stopped with her hand on the frame and looked back at him, not the flat professional assessment, not the careful wariness she wore like a second skin. This look was deeper. Like she was praying to him almost…

"Gideon," she said.

"Yes?" A beat of silence. She shook her head slightly not a dismissal, but the gesture of someone filing something away for a later she was already anticipating. "Thank you," she said, "for the blanket." Before leaving. The morning opened up golden and washed clean by the night`s rain. The cedar suites had a long porch facing the pine treeline, and the Springs themselves breathed their quiet mineral steam into the warm noon air.

It was a Friday, and the working world hadn`t loosened its grip yet the entrance drive was quiet, only a handful of automobiles in the lot, the kind of unhurried stillness that belonged to people with leisure enough to arrive midweek. Gideon had found a chair at the far end of the porch before ten, where the deep overhang kept the climbing daylight manageable, and he had been reading, watching, and waiting.

The porch came into view around the corner of the cedar wing, and Varra saw him before Swan did. He was at the far end where the overhang threw deep shade across the boards, jacket on despite the midday heat, a newspaper open across his knee. She knew that stillness by now. She had catalogued it the way she catalogued most things that concerned her quietly, privately, without letting on that she had. She knew he hadn`t been reading for quite some time and was waiting for them.

Her feet were bare on the warm porch boards. She had taken her shoes off somewhere between the mineral pool and the eucalyptus steam room and had not put them back on, carrying them in one hand with her stockings folded neatly inside, because the cedar boards were warm from the afternoon sun and her feet had not been warm in what felt like a very long time. She was aware this was not the appearance she typically maintained. She was aware, and she found, to her own mild surprise, that she did not particularly care.

The mineral baths had done something to her that two hours of forced stillness and heat tended to do… Pulled things loose that had been wound too tight for too long. She could feel it in the way she was walking, slower than her usual forward-motion efficiency, her stride missing its characteristic purpose. Swan had commented on it in the changing room, not unkindly: you walk like a different person when you`re not watching yourself, Mama. Varra had not answered, because Swan was sixteen and occasionally correct in ways that were difficult to address directly.

Her hair when damp was the color of wet stone. It was still slightly damp at the ends from the steam treatment, loose against the collar of her afternoon dress. She had not re-pinned it. She had stood in front of the mirror in the spa dressing room with the pins in her hand and looked at her own reflection for a long moment and then simply set the pins down on the shelf and left them there, which was the kind of decision that two hours of mineral water and hot paraffin apparently made very easy. She was aware of the exact moment Gideon registered her.

She wore a structured afternoon dress of deep, muted plum. The bodice was sharply pleated to emphasize a high, modest neckline, and the sleeves were padded subtly at the shoulders, tapering down to tight wrists to project an air of immaculate efficiency. It was a dress meant for a woman who kept her accounts balanced, her posture straight, and her secrets locked away, but against the wild backdrop of the cedar porch, the rigid elegance of the garment looked beautifully exposed. He had indeed once again noticed the last day of this reprieve she has put on the best.

She did gaze at him directly. She had learned, over months, that looking at him directly required a particular preparation; she did not currently have access to some interior bracing, some reassembly of the professional distance she wore between them like a second layer of clothing. Today, loose-limbed and warm and still faintly scented with eucalyptus, she had none of that available.

As she crossed the porch, the angle of the mountain light caught the edge of her jaw, and Gideon froze. Now that his mind was fully hooked on the memory; now that her sleeping lips had spoken that forbidden vowel shape, he could not unsee ElinMarie in her visage. It was there in the precise, high curve of her cheekbones, and the way her brow caught the shadow of the pines. The heavy plum of her dress looked suddenly like the dark wool of a gákti shifting in the wind, and the loose, damp wave of her hair was a ghost from a decade ago.

Every line of her face, once so professional and distant, was suddenly a map leading straight back to memories of her pushing him off the cliffs and into the ocean laughing the Spring of 1918.

So she looked at the treeline instead, and crossed the porch, and held out the second cup of coffee she had carried from the dining room without allowing herself to examine why she had carried it. He took it. She felt the brief, cold graze of his fingers against hers and felt that cold move up her arm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. She sat down. She looked at the pines. Beside her, Swan was already talking about the paraffin, holding her hands out, fully inhabiting the uncomplicated delight of a sixteen-year-old girl who had just discovered that luxury was a real and accessible thing.

Varra listened with one part of her attention and used the rest to simply breathe, and let the looseness the baths had given her stay a little longer before the world required her to pull herself back together. The color that arrived in her freshly steamed cheekbones was immediate and involuntary and had nothing to do with the mineral treatments, and she smoothed it over in approximately two seconds by finding something interesting to look at on the porch railing.

He held the coffee he would not drink and watched her settle into the adjacent chair with the particular, unhurried quality of a woman who had spent the last two hours being deliberately restored and had not yet re-assembled all of her usual architecture. She tipped her head back slightly against the chair and closed her eyes for just a moment, her bare feet flat on the warm porch boards, her shoes still in her hand.

Swan dropped into the chair on the other side of her mother and immediately tucked her feet up beneath her, producing a copy of Photoplay from somewhere that she opened with the guilty enthusiasm of a girl who read serious literature in public and movie magazines in private.

The porch was quiet. The Springs breathed. The pine treeline stood dark and fragrant in the warm noon air. Gideon turned a page he had not been reading. They settled in like this for a while. Before carrying on with a late dinner. Late that night he had paid the front desk clerk three dollars to give her a note. Please meet me again tonight. Just past 10, she found herself in his room without knocking. He had left it unlocked just for her…

For months now, he had been watching Varra. Catching slips of her tongue, noticing the impossible, fluid grace in her movements, feeling the ghost of a frozen past every time she walked into a room. It had all made the holes in her story widen into a chasm. Tonight, away from the grime of the stables and the noise of the crowds, the heavy, humid heat of the private spa room only seemed to thicken the suffocating air between them.

He intended to pull the thread. He sat in silence, staring into the flames of the hearth as if they might offer answers. He had not dreamed in decades. Not since the war, not since the blood had dried on his hands and the ghosts of the trenches had learned to haunt him in his waking hours. Lately, his mind had been showing him something he had buried so deeply he had forgotten it existed. Despite the fact he was here with Varra, only a room away from her even. ElinMarie.

The name came to him like a whisper, like a ghost brushing against his ribs. A woman with violet orbs, a voice that yoiked in a language he no longer understood, and a presence that had once threatened to completely unravel him. "Close the door," he said darkly, his voice was a raspy rumble from the smoke of a half-burned cigarette he had only moments before snuffed out into an ashtray. The flat polish leaking through every bit of New York twang. His piercing blue eyes tracked her as she stepped into the firelight, noting the guarded tension in her posture…

The way the flickering light traced the curve of her throat. It was hard to be so close to her. The urgency in her blood every-time she was alone with him. He assumed they both felt it, this intoxicating pull. She wasn`t the only one with secrets. He was a vampire. With all his brief glimpses of humanity lost inside her veins. Lost inside her... He understood it now and that`s why he had been so drawn to her.

Between his large knuckles, he idly spun the silver trinket. It was a traditional Sámi amulet; the very one ElinMarie had hung over his makeshift hospital bed in the frozen Hell that was Kirkenes, seventeen years ago. He set it down on the dark mahogany table with a deliberate clink, right beside his winnings. "Sit down, Varra," Gideon said, leaning back and gesturing to the plush chair across from him. He took a slow sip of his Gin, his gaze cutting through the haze, heavy and entirely too focused on her.

"The men got into a scrap with some of the local IRA, trying to take our tracks this last time River Champion won. They think they can outsmart a man from the War. They don`t understand how people like us operate. We don`t forget a face, and we don`t forget our debts."

He paused, letting the silence stretch, his eyes dropping to the silver trinket before locking onto her striking violet orbs. The intensity in his stare made the room feel suddenly smaller, hotter. She looked at him sheepishly, avoiding the silver, though her breath hitched slightly at his undivided attention. "I didn`t know you kept such strange trinkets, Mr. Lynch." Instead her gaze focused on the very tacky carpet.

Anything but to meet that icy gaze. That gaze that made her feel addicted to it in ways she wasn`t ready to admit to herself. His eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly at her evasion, a muscle twitching in his jaw. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his broad shoulders filling her field of vision, crowding her without even touching her.

His voice dropped an octave one he only used for her. An intimate purr that sent a sharp tremor down her spine. "Funny, that. Most folks from Norway would recognize that trinket a mile off. It`s not exactly common fare `round Upstate New York." He reached out, picking up the amulet and turning it over in his palm, the silver glinting in the firelight. "This belonged to someone special once. Someone I thought I`d never see again." His gaze snapped back to hers, sharp, probing, and entirely too close.

"I have an education, Mr. Lynch," she said, her voice tighter now as she managed a small, defiant smile. She leaned back slightly, trying to escape the magnetic pull of his presence. "That`s a Lappish silver trinket. One that might get someone back home in Norway burned alive." She avoided his gaze, her mind racing back to so many years ago. "If a Lap woman gave that to you... I can almost bet they burned her alive."

Something flashed in Gideon`s eyes at her words.. Recognition, pain, and a sudden, volatile spark of heat. His grip tightened on the amulet, his knuckles whitening. When he spoke again, the polish grit in his throat was thick, dangerous, and laced with a fierce, quiet hunger. "Burned alive, you say? And what would an educated Norwegian woman know of such things, eh?" He suddenly stood and leaned across the small table, invading her personal space entirely. His breath was hot against her face, smelling of rich tobacco and expensive gin that gave hints of pine. As if he was mocking her with home, as on any other given day he drank Irish Whiskey. "Unless, of course, she`s been running from that very fate for a long, long time."

He set the amulet down with a sharp clink, then reached out, his large hand cupping her chin firmly, his thumb brushing against the soft skin of her jaw. The contrast of his rough, calloused skin against hers sent a jolt of electricity through them both, forcing her to meet his burning gaze. "You`re playing a dangerous game, Milosc. One where the stakes are higher than you can possibly imagine."

Seventeen years had made her hard, and despite her best senses...

The proximity, the scent of him, and the heavy weight of his hand on her face made her heart hammer wildly against her ribs. She looked him dead in the eyes, refusing to tremble. "I don`t know what you mean. They taught us about such things in schools. They taught us the Laps have no brains, that`s why we overtook them." She spat the lie like a shield, desperate to hide the Sámi blood yoiking in her veins, desperate to ignore how much she wanted to lean into his touch.

His eyes flashed, his gaze dropping for a split second to her lips before snapping back to her eyes. He released her chin abruptly, leaning back as if the contact had scorched him. "Schools, eh? Funny, I don`t remember learning such... Enlightened views on the streets." His voice was a low growl. "Maybe it`s different for the gentry. Maybe they don`t have to watch their own people burn while the world turns a blind eye." He moved around the table with the heavy, coiled grace of a brawler, closing the distance between them until he loomed directly over her seated form. The sheer breadth of his shoulders blocked out the rest of the room, trapping her beneath his shadow. "I knew a woman once. Had eyes exactly like yours. Spoke a tongue as old as the dirt itself. She saved my life, gave me this trinket, and then..."

He saw a flash of tears, realization, and sheer, breathless horror in her eyes.

"I... I am sure that girl is dead," she stammered, her gaze darting frantically toward the door, her body practically vibrating with the urge to flee... Or to pull him down to her. She scrambled up to make a break for the exit, but in a flash, Gideon was in front of the door, his large frame blocking her escape. Before she could dodge, his hand shot out, gripping her wrist with bruising, possessive force as he pulled her flush against his broad chest. Where there should have been heat, she felt only stone, cold stone. When a normal woman would have run. Varra found her arms rubbing his chest. Subconsciously even. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. She was pressed entirely against him.

The sudden, suffocating memory of how perfectly she used to fit against him in the dark northern nights pressed into them both. Up close, she could smell the clean cedar of the spa, the sharp sting of his pine notated gin, and the deep, intoxicating scent of the only man she had ever loved. "No, I don`t think she is," he breathed. His other hand came up, his long fingers tangling firmly into her silver hair, tilting her face upward. He held her tight, his grip dominant but shifting into something agonizingly tender. His thumb brushed away a stray tear, his touch lingering on her cheek. "I think she`s been running. Hiding`. Lying` to everyone, including herself."

He leaned in closer, his lips nearly brushing the shell of her ear, his warm breath sending goosebumps cascading down her neck as he whispered, "Tell me, Varra. Tell me you`re not her. Tell me this is all just some cruel joke."

"I am not a Lap," she whispered, her voice trembling, her body betraying her as she leaned into his chest even as she feigned a retreat. "You`re drunk Gideon." Gideon let out a low, rough laugh against her skin, his grip tightening as he held her body tightly against his hips. "Not a Lap? Is that so?" His voice was a heavy, dangerous rumble that vibrated right through her. "Then explain this."

With his free hand, he grabbed the amulet from the table behind him, bringing it up between their faces. The silver caught the firelight, pulsing between them. "Explain why you recognized it instantly. Why do you know about the burnings? Why, when I look at you, I see a ghost I thought I`d lost in the snow." He shifted, his lips brushing the curve of her jaw as he murmured, "Stop running`, ElinMarie. Stop lying. To me, to yourself, to that beautiful little girl of yours."

Varra recoiled at the name ElinMarie, a desperate spike of panic and fierce protection fracturing the spell between them. She tried to wrench herself from his grasp, feeling entirely caged by his strength. "I told you they sent us to schools...." She realized what she had just admitted, her face flushing as she tried to backtrack, her chest heaving against his.

"To educate us on Laps... Leave my daughter out of this!" His control snapped, years of pent-up emotion, grief, and unspent passion pouring out in a torrent of rage. He slammed his heavy fist against the cedar wall beside her head, the timber cracking under the impact. He didn`t hit her, but his body pinned her flat against the wall, his chest pressing hard against hers, locking her in place. His face was inches from hers.

"Don`t you dare use that child as a shield!" he roared, his thick accent bleeding out, his eyes wild as they bored into hers. "Not when she`s the living proof of everything you`ve denied! Swan`s father. My God, Varra. Or should I say, ElinMarie? Who is he? Was it someone who forced themselves on you? Someone who made you feel dirty, ashamed of what you are?"

"He was a foreign soldier who abandoned me! It was a man I loved..." The words poured out in a breathless, furious rush before she could stop them, her lips agonizingly close to his. "He was the only man I ever let touch me! Alright? Are you happy now? Learning about my poor bastard of a child? The child I begged my parents to let me keep? The child I swore`s father would not abandon us… Only he did anyway! I had my father burned in front of me, and I went to our hazel tree like I promised when it was safe, and he was fucking gone!"

She was panting, her lips parted, her eyes darting from his fierce blue stare down to his mouth. She looked at the silver in his hand, the realization finally crashing through her with a terrifying, heavy heat. She had not seen it in a long time, and she felt like an absolute fool for not recognizing the man who had rewritten her entire soul seventeen years ago. Something shattered in Gideon`s eyes at her confession, the last vestiges of anger completely giving way to a profound, agonizing sorrow, mixed with a desperate, aching reverence. His heavy frame softened against her. His hands fell away from the wall, moving instead to gently frame her face, his thumbs wiping at the tears spilling over her lashes. He stumbled back just half a step, his chest heaving as he stared at her, really seeing her.

"God forgive me," he whispered hoarsely, his rough voice cracking as his forehead leaned forward to rest against hers, sharing the same shaky breath in the quiet, heated room. "All this time, all these years... I thought you died in the fire... I thought you left me..." He looked at her, his hands sliding down to wrap securely around her waist, pulling her back against his heat, no longer out of anger, but out of a desperate need to ensure she was real. "I`m sorry, ElinMarie. I`m so damn sorry." A single tear tracked down his smooth cheek, fresh with stubble from his recent shave. "For everything."

"My name is not ElinMarie... That girl died with her father. She`s dead. As dead as the boy you were back then," she whispered, her hands automatically finding the lapels of his coat, gripping them tightly as if she were drowning. "Swan doesn`t know." He flinched at the reminder of the boy he used to be, but the proximity of her body, the familiar warmth of her skin, swallowed the guilt. He leaned in, his lips gently brushing her forehead, lingering there as if memorizing the feel of her after a lifetime apart.

"Then tell me your name," he begged against her skin, his hands sliding down her back, his calloused touch sending a fierce, possessive warmth through her. Even though he was as cold as ice. His hands were always so cold. "Tell me who you are, who Swan is. Let me help you carry this."

He guided her slowly toward the small, plush sofa by the crackling fire, sitting close enough that their thighs brushed, the heat of the hearth mimicking the electric tension still humming between them. He gave her space to breathe, but his eyes never left her face. "We both have ghosts, Kochany, mine wear the faces of the men I`ve bled in the streets, the lives I`ve ruined just to survive. Yours..."

He waited patiently, the fire crackling softly, casting a warm, amber glow over the opulent room, chasing away the chill of a seventeen-year-old separation. When she finally turned to him, her violet eyes were shimmering, heavy with raw vulnerability and a quiet, reawakened passion. "Varra. My name means blood." She leaned a fraction closer to him, her gaze dropping to his mouth before locking back onto his eyes. "Swan... Swan is ours, Gideon. Ours. A piece of you, a piece of me, forged in the crucible of love and loss. She has no idea who her father is. Every time she asks... I tell her I don`t know."

The word ours did not simply land between them; it sank into Varra’s chest, heavy and consuming, as though it had been waiting years to be spoken aloud. His hands wrapped around her as all her years of lying to survive crashed in on her. And memories she had long since pushed away stole her mind from him in this place. Varra was sobbing and coughing her chest heaving. The retreating Russians had swarmed the encampment with torches, hunting the Noaidic seers. They had no idea the true magick belonged to nineteen-year-old ElinMarie.

They only knew the bloodline had to burn. Norway had promised them peaceful land within displacement and for all its neutrality in the war had allowed Hell at their very village. Hidden behind a frozen snowbank, ElinMarie pressed her hands over her mouth, her violet orbs wide with terror. With her body pressed into the ice of the mound as she watched the soldiers surround her family`s lavvu. The reindeer-hide tent was instantly illuminated by a violent, orange glare.

Her father, Be&273;ar, stepped out into the freezing gale. He caught her eye across the dark ridge and didn`t hesitate. Shouting into the wind, he lied to the commander, claiming he was the Noaidi they were looking for. They shoved him back inside and threw the torches. Elinmarie watched in agonizing silence as her childhood home became a towering inferno. The hides erupted in flames, billowing black smoke against the white Arctic sky.

Her father never screamed. He stayed inside, burning alive to make them believe the lie, sacrificing himself so the true Noaidi could live. Sixteen years later, the phantom smell of that burning canvas still choked her. No matter how much time had scrubbed Gideons name or visage from her it did nothing to rid her body of that smell. The smell of her fathers burning flesh…

She felt it in the way his hands tightened at her waist, trying to ground her, like he needed proof of her beneath his palms. When he mused in her ear “ Hush, little reindeer,” the name brushed across her like a memory made flesh, and her breath faltered despite herself. She was stilling those sobs into his chest. The proof of her humanity soaked into the fabric of his shirt.

“Lynxie…” She answered, the name leaving her lips soft and unguarded, and she watched the way it struck him. Watched the fracture in his composure, subtle but devastating.

Seventeen years, and he still reacted to her like that. “ I am so sorry I forgot your name Gideon. The way you felt near me. That year took so much of my life from me it`s all so black. Black dark anytime I think of it all.” Her sobs stilled as he rubbed her back with an icy hand that felt like a statue. His fingers rose to her face, cold, always so cold, Varra felt the heat bloom under her skin in response. His thumb traced the edge of her parted lips with slow precision, as if reacquainting himself with something he had no right to forget.

“You’re here,” Gideon said, his voice rough, threaded with something dangerously close to disbelief. “You’re here…” He began to lick up her tears in the most intimate of ways. Until his tongue was tracing her lips. It felt like he was worshiping her… She closed the distance, catching his mouth with hers, and the world seemed to tilt.

The kiss was not gentle, as the nights before had been, it carried years of absence, of grief, of lust and rage.Her breath broke against him as his hand slid to her back, drawing her flush against his body, the cold of his touch sending a sharp shiver through her before it melted into something warmer, deeper. Stars flickered behind her eyes. He pulled back just enough to look at her, his forehead brushing hers, their breaths mingling in the charged space between them. His gaze moved over her face as though committing every detail to memory, as though afraid she might vanish if he blinked.

“You have no idea how many nights I tried to forget you,” he groaned.

Varra’s fingers tightened in his firebrick hair, her pulse unsteady, her voice quieter now. “You didn’t.” The certainty in her tone lingered between them,“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t.”

His mouth found her again, but not fully his lips brushing her cheek, her temple, the corner of her mouth, never quite where she expected. It was deliberate, controlled, and that restraint made every touch feel sharper, more consuming. His hands moved slowly along her back, as if relearning her, as if he refused to rush something that had already been lost once. It was maddening. For them both, it was entirely intoxicating.

Varra’s head tipped back slightly, her lips parting as her breathing grew uneven, her fingers slipping from his coat to his shoulders, then higher, threading into his fire- brick hair to keep him close.“Lynxie…” Varra said again, softer, almost unsteady now. “Say it again,” he begged, his voice low against her skin. “Lynxie.”

The name affected him she felt it in the brief pause, the way his breath shifted, the way control threatened to slip.

For a fleeting moment, he was utterly human in her touch. When he kissed her again, it was slower, deeper, drawn out in a way that made time feel irrelevant. The fire crackled behind her, casting warmth into the room. Varra barely registered it. Every sensation narrowed to him… The steady press of his hands, the contrast of his cold touch against the heat building beneath her skin, the way her breath caught each time he moved just enough to undo her again. Stars flared behind her eyes, brighter now, leaving her grasping for balance.

“You’re trembling,” Gideon nearly chuckled.

“So are you,” she returned, though her voice had softened, worn thin by everything building between them. A faint smile touched his lips, but there was nothing light in it. “Only because I’m holding everything back.” Her gaze dropped to his mouth, then lifted again, something unspoken passing between them “don’t,” she relented desperately. That single word unraveled what remained of his restraint. Gideon drew her with him as he leaned back, guiding her onto the unused bed, with a care that felt almost reverent, never breaking contact, never allowing distance to return between them. His voice, when he spoke again, was quieter now, edged with something deeper.

“Little reindeer… You’re going to be the end of me.” Varra’s lips curved faintly, though her breath remained unsteady, her pulse racing beneath his touch. “Then don’t stop.” Gideon didn’t. He didn’t stop as her breathing faltered, as her hands clung tighter, as his name slipped from her lips again and again “Lynxie…” like it was the only thing keeping her grounded as everything else unraveled. Time blurred, the years between them collapsing under the weight of the present, every glance and touch layered with memory, loss, and something fiercely alive. His heart nearly raced like all those times they had played Lynx and reindeer in the woods and if he was human he was sure it would have exploded from the pressure of beating like a drum.



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