Hagalaz

As I stand in the Beast's rose garden, years down the line, I remember my first love. The thorns are aflame, the sky is scorching, and my heart is torn in twain:

Between the Troll Queen, and my first love, once mortal, now a handmaiden of the warrior goddess.

This is how my tale begins:

We were sixteen summers old, but time for me, and my soon to be Valkyrie, was never enough.

We strayed to the banks of the Maroon Sea Bay by midnight, my best friend and true heart's companion, the stable lass Yolanda, glimmering under Mani's moonlight like a Valkyrie of Mother Freida the Wanderer's own dauntless making. She was chosen by the Goddess for glory, after all.

My sweetheart, the Lady of Love and Luck's fierce devotee, was bold and free and wild as she rode aback her stallion like a sunburst striking the gods' rainbow bridge of Bifrost, high in the stars above.

Yolanda's long, wild, velvet black hair was a curling bear's mane, her brown eyes sparkling, sienna Tuniska skin alight, and as we raced in laughter after each other aback our steeds, all was like a skaldic springtime song.

The wind was a burning cutlass on the warm summer air, and the stars dotted the summer sky high above. The burning nebulae were sacred ancestors of old, all faring brightly forth upon Aurvandil's boat to bless our blossoming love. In the constellations and aurora borealis of Skadhi's Bow, the maternal Disir witches and paternal Alfar elves smiled gently down upon our maidenly, comely forms.

"Princess Turiel, my dear lady, what brings you a courting with your roguish, dirt stained knees and swordplay bloodied trousers? Did you take your temper out on an undeserving page during practice yet again, hmm? Were you out futzing about: fighting and drinking and gambling with the berserkers and shieldmaidens, as per your usual vices?" Yolanda dismounted her steed Niksandriel and set out rye bread, apples, cured lamb, and a wheel of goat's cheese on a woolen blanket, her homebrewed lavender, apple blossom, and raspberry mead set out in an iron fringed horn flask. She also took out a pocketknife and a small book of skaldic poetry, then began to intone Sigfreida's Prayer.

"I am your knight in shining armor, Yola my love. Would you expect any less roughhousing of me? I carry your banner and lay my sword's steel down in battle for our love every joust! The troubadours will sing your name one day far and wide all across Arcadia's green pastures and black forests – Yolaaaaa! Yolandada! Yolalala!"

She smirked, and it rattled my bones pleasantly, seeing the crook of her plush brown lips. "Please, oh please stop singing in your toadish voice! You are too much a ruffian to dine at my noble table of grass, alf mushrooms, and slimy worms. This peerless table of dirt is much too refined for a princess of ill mien. For shame! Lady Freida is my beloved, and I shall serve as her Valkyrie when I die – not waste away as courtesan in the immortal court of a scoundrel like you, Turry, a lady knight trying to steal my heart away with her sword's slicing, brutish motions. As if that is any way to cut the Gordian knot of my heart!" My best friend and one true love tossed the wax sealing the goat's cheese rolled into a ball at my cheek. It bounced off me, and I winced, blushing. My gelding Marnier whinnied, and I steadied him, laughing up to Valhalla on high in Asgard's starry bower.

"Oh, stop complaining and let me but prove my worth, demanding, scornful lover! I come bearing gifts, fair maiden," I winked, pulling some crushed daisies from the practice field out of my skirts pockets and dismounting Marnier. I petted his chestnut and white splotched flank and tied him close besides Niksandriel to a birch tree. Forget me knots and Freida's hearts scattered the grassy meadows sloping into the freshwater sea. "Look, only the finest of blossoms for you, my dearly beloved and betrothed."

Yolanda bit coyishly into the white rosy flesh of an apple and grinned wide from ear to ear. "Ah, your usual gifts of courting – dirty weeds. However shall I resist your enterprising heart?"

"Wait, there's more – look at this! A jewel for the finest of women, plucked from horrific Queen Jarngrimr of the Sorrow's dwarven mines themselves! See how it sparkles just so in the moonlight like an unparalleled Periland diamond, this most precious of gems?" I took Yolanda's fine burnished red bronze colored hand and gave her a shiny amethyst raw of the making that I had found in the woods while out a hunting. It fit into the shell of Yolanda's soft, red clay toned palm like a stone fruit plucked ripe and tempting from father's greenhouse.

"An amethyst, you claim, eh my love? It has got bits of clay on it and is quite dull, but I suppose the thought behind the jagged gem counts, you ruffian of a scoundrel. This stone has edges, but is beautiful, like my only one true love," Yolanda demurred, winking, as she placed the raw amethyst in her picnic basket carved with crimson nixie roses and tucked the pathetic daisies behind her lotus shaped ears. "You truly are as romantic as your father Hakkon was with Queen Aslaugh, which is to say, you would slaughter a boar in front of me, dearest Turry, and give me its still beating heart – but come evenings of poetry, mead, and song, and you would blunder about like the oafish warrior princess that you are, stumbling over confessions of love and songs of paramours. Your singing is like a dying cat in heat, and the poetry you have tried to recite to me is truly atrocious. The feminine arts of courting are better left to your delicate little sister Yuri."

"I am too a romantic!" I protested, nipping her nose with my unusually sharp teeth. She laughed to high Valhalla, so loud Wotan the Raven could hear in his High Seat.

Yolanda's thick, horse tamer fingers crept like spiders up my scarlet dress. "You. Are. Not. Romantic!" she crowed, then tackled me in a tempting kiss, her mouth tasting of apples and mead, her plump hips and ripe belly weighing me down, and my lass began to tickle me. The moon was a silver knife, and it cut me to the bone, drawing feverish love from my wounds as I kissed my curvaceous girlfriend senselessly, with no kenning of the border between her and I. We were in Ginnungagap, between the great Making and Unmaking, being licked out of ice by Audhumla like our forefather giant, Ymir.

"Will you take me anyways, sweet Yola, if I am to be your broken amethyst? My rough edges, flaws, and all?" I breathed, pawing at her breasts shyly but steadily, trying in the darkness in vain to undo her corset.

I was never good with lady's underthings, and wore men's breeches whenever I could.

"I pledge to cherish you. All of you, dear warrior mine."

Yolanda straddled me, and we were at the bridge we had been waiting to cross for months, always hesitant on the banks of the seas of our love. Her silver eyes shone like the Norns way down a witching in Mymyr's sacred well, spelling out a strange fate for the odd pair we had become. I could not ken what the Sister Fates had in store for us in the mercury of Yolanda's sea gray irises. And yet… and yet… and yet… A fish gleamed in their gray coral depths. Goldfish. Their scales like butter. I blinked hard to escape the hazed reverie of her deep pupils.

The fish disappeared. Salmons of wisdom, swallowed by her sclera.

Yolanda smirked, undoing her corset lacings and shucking off her dress and pantaloons, and her ripe breasts hung heavy like the wicked fruit of the huldrefolk, meant for stealing a changeling baby away to the lap of the Grim Troll Queen. I looked at her flawless, earthen sienna skin in reverence and tenderly mouthed the Periland chocolate-colored blossom of her left breast, tracing the thick horsewoman muscles of her shoulders.

"I may be a painter, but even your dwarvesparken form would evade my canvas, my great godsbeauty Yola. Let's run away together to a witch's hut in the Northern Holds and get away from my loathsome father the tyrant, driven mad and hard by grief at mama's passing. I'll hunt for you and witch for you, and you shall raise the chickens, goats, and horses of our lands. Us who flee the sword are not safe in the faith of the Latinate gods that have driven my father up the chicken coop. You and I will cook the finest foods between us to keep our bellies full that would tempt Wotan the Raven and Freida the Wanderer themselves. We can have four little bonnie babies between us from a moon's blood cake, and none in the world would know us the better for it. We could be our own, be our only, be ourselves. Alone, forevermore."

Yolanda undid my armor and war dress, and traced the fine scars from swordplay that decorated my slight, tightly muscled frame. "We have duties, dear princess – we can't all be wild Northern Cunningfolk. Some of us are Arcadia born, of green pastures and the Black Forest of Greater Germania, and not of the land of the midnight sun…" she soothed, kissing my small, barely pronounced breasts, and the cherry and apple and plum petals fell amongst our bower in pastel fractals, and the grasses tickled my thighs, and we kissed deeply, no holding back, as wives for the first time.

And the last time.

Yolanda bloomed in my arms like stars and rain, then, suddenly, went quiet and strange, a stillborn fate.

Suddenly, her ghost slipped out, shaped like one of Mother Freida's Valkyries, gave a sorrowful look, blew a hunting horn, then flew with great falcon wings off to the great beyond.

The amethyst flared violet.

I had… killed her?

"Yola? Yola. Yolanda. Stop it! Is this one of your twisted jokes?" I held my true love in my arms and shook her hard, desperate for a response.

Silence. Chill. Cold.

"Yola, this isn't funny at all! Why are you doing this cruel trick. Yola? Yolanda. Wake up! Please, wake up!"

I rapidly took her pulse, panic and fury rising like Ran's sea storms inside my starving breast.

My one true love was cold, a cadaver, mincemeat, Wotan's blue death blooming on her wan flesh like snowflake fractals. Sent to the great beyond by my lips alone.

And all only from a deep, passionate kiss – my first kiss of true love.

I hauntingly echoed mother's dying words from late last autumn, finally realizing them to be a curse on me, the last Isa witch.

"What have I done, my gods! Lady Skadhi Ondurdis, please, please, my great huntress, help me!" I screamed, but only the jackdaw heard, crowing out my song of sorrow and ruin.

Out of a frosted moonbeam, my goddess of ice and the hunt - Lady Skadhi - stood translucent, tears in her rainy blue eyes. "So it's true…" she drew in a breath like a winter gale, clutching her icy blue cloak. "Turry, my child, I am so sorry. I had no idea Aslaugh's curse would… work this way. I thought it meant something quite different, of a bargain of old and roses rotted through to the root. Your father cannot have any evidence of this, or he will know you to be a sword-fleer and of the witchblood, and he will burn you at the stake under his infidel Latinate god, Lord Eleleth. You must sink poor Yolanda with enough stones to weigh her down."

I screamed, tearing out my hair in clumps, clawing at my face until I bled, snot bubbling out of my stuffed, ceaselessly running nose as my tears fell onto my true love's dead, navy, cold breasts. A rot from my curse had marbled her veins black and blue, and she began to stink of death.

"She has… gone to be a Valkyrie?"

Skadhi nodded solemnly.

How quickly my Isa poison worked.

"Is this where I take my life, Lady Skadhi?" I begged, fingering the ivory whale bone dagger mama had gifted me on my twelfth birthday from my belt sheath.

Before Skadhi could protest, I plunged the sharp claw of the dagger into my erratically beating heart.

I heaved, shrieking, the pain imminent and burning like the Latinate god Lord Eleleth's fabled fires of Jahennom.

Still, no blood spurted. Mama's curse, unleashed by true love's kiss, had taken hold of me after all this time.

I had no more blood left to bleed, spilled in my red tears as it was onto my lover's quiet breast.

Skadhi cooed at me, cradling me in her starlight arms. She carried me back to the palace, but not before I dressed, sobbing, bleeding only the tiniest bit… and what came out was congealed and black as tar.

My goddess helped me dress Yolanda's decayed corpse, and gather stones from the bayside.

And so I sank her, Yolanda my heart, my one true love, realizing

That I had been a Beast all along.

To see her again, I would have to cross the border of time, journey far beyond Germania, and awaken my Valkyrie with the slumbering stone – only I didn't know it yet, two sun revolutions down the line that strange fate was.

Still, I could feel her watching over me, and always, Yolanda haunted my dreams, Freida's Valkyrie,

Waiting.

(Years have passed, and still, I wonder.

Am I the Living Dead?)