Editing AfterRagnarok:The Mythic (section)

== Skuld #446 ==

As you open your finger, the forest seems to... come into focus somehow, to sharpen. You sense the weight of its attention, drawn by the spilling of blood. Then you exhale through bloody lips, and as the breath and blood mingles with the wind your mind is snatched up like a rag.

The wind whips through the dense dark trees, and you are drawn along with it. Through the shadows and light that dapple the snow. Through the barbed and tangled undergrowth. Through the scars cut by men, and the fresh wounds where men work still. With trucks and axes and buzzing saws, the thieves. But the wind recoils from something, from the eye that marks them, that burns in the shadows of their minds. Recoils and draws you onwards. Through the hidden clearings where the skogsrå and the huldrefolk dance, through the rookeries and parliaments in the high branches. 

The ravens take exception to your intrusion, and tear your mind ragged with beaks and claws until the wind takes you beyond their reach. Takes you over the wall of the town, through the narrow, frozen streets, through the sulphurous steam that clouds the air over Ragnhall, cooling and freezing. 

And deposits you back in yourself, exhausted and ravaged by a sudden splitting headache.

Even so, you sense all is not as it was. 

A shadow detaches itself from the base of a nearby pine. "You have returned to us, systir." The hulder is beautiful, pale as milk and moving with sinuous grace as she crosses the clearing towards you. "Will you stay, this time?

For a moment she is confused - she feels the sharp pain from the wounds inflicted by the beaks and claws of the ravens, the gashes in her face. Reaching up to wipe away the blood, though, her fingers come off clean. The pain is still there, but the wounds not of this world. She blinks, almost reeling, as the shape of the huldra detaches itself from the pine.

Its´ words hit something inside of her - touches an emptiness at the center of her heart. Makes her feel naked, skinless. She backs off one step, then another - her hand going inside the coat, fingers closing on the taped handle of the stubnosed revolver, her memento from the market massacre.

"I don´t know you." Her voice is sharp, but lacks the hard weight of conviction.

There's a moment of disconnection, sharp and jarring, and the world seems to lurch sideways. You remember hanging from the tree, your blood pooling in the snow below you. The ravens that perched on your shoulder; their beady black eyes inquisitive, speculative, as they regarded you. Snatches of thought and memory return to you. The girl you were. Your life, your name. Your death, and what was taken from you. Odin, eyes glittering beneath the brim of his wide grey hat, laying a rune upon your brow. The arms of the hulder, the tree-spirit, as you hung from her branches.

Those same slim arms embrace you again.

Then rougher, thicker arms are around you, restraining, roughly shaking you. "Hey! Hey! Get a hold of yourself!"

Zeds.

The girl walks through the God-Chamber, bare feet on smooth stone. The runes on her bare skin is painted with blood, carriers of great power. The chamber is immense around her, and the light from the lanterns so very far behind now. In the darkness around her, faint glints of steel and dark glass from the sleeping giants. Sound doesn´t move through teh air as it should - some of them seem to reverberate forever in the immense space, others are swallowed entirely by its´ cold and stale air. 

Her voice, as she speaks, is dry but quickly finds strength and traction. As she speaks the words, raises her hands, there is a humming sound from all around her. Panes of glass flicker and wake, bathing the chamber in light. Motes of dust dance all around her as she raises her arms and calls out to - 

Zed barely has time to register what happens - Skuld´s leg hooks around his with snake-like speed, and the air is pushed out of him as he slams into the ground, cutting off his words and the yell that tried to form into a thin wheeze. She has twisted around, landing hard on top of him with an arm across his throat, one of her knees pushing down on his gun-arm as it twitches weakly in muscle memory and makes an attempt to move. Before he can fucking blink, there is a blade pointing at his eye and the valkyrie´s own pale pair stares into him with a fury that chills his bones.

Her lips peel back from her teeth as she hisses.
"Who the fuck do you think you´re touching?"

''Later...''

"We see what you are, Skuld." She makes an odd gesture, drawing the V of forefinger and thumb over her eyes and thrusting them at you, and the other two copy it. "Valkyr. Draugr. We see you. You would ask us to lend strength to your arm? Your war?"

"Your promise," the other woman interjects, as smoothly as if they spoke as one. "Your promise to look past us without seeing, when the sword-din rises."
She is not sure whether to laugh at the man or smack out a few of his teeth to make him appreciate the gravity of the situation - to some extent this goes for all of them. Their words take some of the fire out of her blood, though; makes it easier to cool it, to soften edges that want to be sharp. Part of her wants to ask more, to tear at the morsels of revelation.

Instead she straightens up, lends weight rather than rage to her voice.
"Lend your arms to my war, woodcutters, and when the storm is upon us I´ll look past you." Her voice drops just a little. "Fate-mark, crow-mark, death-mark, I´ll look past. That is where it ends, though. I can´t keep you from getting a bullet to the face if you go act stupid."

She peeels of a glove, spits in her snow-white hand; there´s a touch of steam as she holds it out to seal the pact.
"Still, it is a whole lot more than anyone else gets."
"When it all comes down, we'll hold you to that," he says, and tugs off his own glove.

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