Spirited Away

That was the night - the first rosy night that my Beast began to call on me, and never, ever, ever did my monstress queen cease drawing me down submerged in to her unholy, trollish web.

Now, I am never alone.

By the candlelight after Skadhi had carried me to my room, me unable to stand, I slit my wrists that gloaming, my prayers to dead mama, Queen Aslaugh, unanswered.

I could not give up the ghost. No, I was the Troll Queen's draugr – an undead scion, cursed. Now, I was of the zombie armies that had eaten father's berserkers alive.

A grave of a girl. Belonging to none other than Jarngrimr of the Sorrows from mother's ill-fated curse, last of the Cunningfolk witches.

The Beast peered back at me in my looking glass, the Troll Queen's red dead eyes cold and lustful. She smirked, a yellow fang agleam as she watched me with wicked delight and decrepit fascination.

I picked at the black, black clots of blood, ignoring her – I was too far gone, now, oh, now. My veins smelled of rain, worms, and soil.

I am more Dead than Alive now and forevermore and foreverafter, and I always make sure not to let my wounds show on the practice fields.

The sick sweet blood within my decrepit veins reeks of rotten roses, and I am a wicked creature through and through.

She pressed against my thighs, her teeth a cutting ring on my neck. Her breath was tinder sparking in my ear, and she dragged abyssal claws across my waist.

"I could break you with my bare hands," the Beast whispered, her pearly fangs bloodying my blonde hair. "But I will not, for you are my treasured rose, the foremost fruit of my gardens, my sweet Beauty."

Our lips met in a crucible of passion. She sucked the breath straight from my lungs, this handsome Troll Queen of mine.

I wanted to give all of myself, blood, body, maidenhead and soul, to my Beast.

"My Beauty. I will make you shake like a sinner, and your last cry will be my name."

"My one and only Beauty. I will break the walls shackling you to this wicked world and let your Magick flow free. And you will beg me for even more. Always, always, more."

I had been painting in a haloed reverie, the magick of my canvas spiriting me away to the wild huldrelands of my Northern Cunningfolk Disir and Alfar forefathers, far far above our latitudes in the land of the midnight sun. I shook my head, spooked to Latinate Salem that the monks and nuns always droned on about in church.

"What in Helheim did I do?" I muttered, my gaze iron as I dissected the strange omen I had channeled onto the vellum, the canvas stretched taut over the wooden frame, with my horsehair paintbrush's lashes decorating it like black and brown stab wounds.

Thick strokes. Deep pigment. Gleaming eyes:

The Beast had emerged, as always.

"I cannot stop painting you, my dear, strange Beast," I murmured, tracing the brush strokes of her black as night fur, the shape of her muzzle – her sharp eggshell claws stained with blood.

My blood, thick midnight black clots like ruin as recognizable as my own fingers.

"Why do you call to me thus, so maddeningly and intoxicatingly, that I could drown in the sea of you?" I was talking to myself again, it was true, but it also felt like I was wrapped up in Queen Jarngrimr of the Sorrows' great leathery wings. "You are not some lindworm for me to slay, no… you are so, so much more."

The Beast was my only solace now – the punishment I deserved – now that Yolanda was dead. Alive in another realm true, made Valkyrie… but dead in Midgard.

I absently gazed out my tower window and down onto the frozen winter scape:

Mourning doves luted an emerald melody as dawn caressed my face from the tower's window. The language of birds flew up from below in the courtyard's persimmon trees. One mourning dove perched at the feeder on my window, a bit of holly in its beak, the delicate red berries juicy and tempting. I paused from painting at my canvas - an image of the Beast had emerged from the oils and palette knife: iron fur, ruby eyes, leathery wings, with a crook of a finger inviting me down into her wicked lair in the Jotun mountains of Utgardr.

My Magick had gotten the best of me again, damn it all to Helheim. I aggressively cleaned the horsehair brush in a basin of water and quietly put the lid on my palette, biting my lip so hard I drew a bit of stringy black gore. I licked at the sharp taste of gravel in the accursed clot and swallowed the tarry spittle down into my burning, choking throat. It felt like inhaling suffocating smoke and had a rusty tang to it, my bloody mouth and I. A taste I had become all too familiar with, after sweet Yola's death.

"What a strange vision... I do not like what I ken from that omen, not one godsdamned bit," I breathed, flushed, imagining the monster queen's touch on my chest and her biting words like rattling birch leaves in my ear. What did she want from me, after these long two years of haunting me from age sixteen on? "Wherever I look, I see Queen Jarngrimr of the Sorrows in the shadows, mama. The Beast. Mama, what do you think of all this arcane, intangible nonsense? You would never stand for a ghost – you would banish her to Helheim, wouldn't you, dear Asa. Am I talking to myself, when I talk to her, oh Sunna, keeper of mama's soul?" I asked the sun goddess of my Isa clan, staring up at the bright, clarion sky. "Is she the root of mama's curse upon me, or is she something more, sweet sun?"

Somehow, the Beast's lush black fur was colder than even far flung northern Arcadia's own chilly Black Forest. I closed my eyes and leaned towards the canvas, sinking into my imagined monster's embrace. Only she who too was Death understood me – at least, in my mind of minds.

I was startled awake by a sudden chill.

Winter's frost iced my chambers, and Jokul Frosti was keeping quarters by the burnt out hearth, ice Jotun that Jokul was. I banished the sprite Jokul with a bit of runefire from my fingertips, and he danced out with a holler and hoot.

I suddenly felt as cold as the river of knives, Nastrond, where the Damned were felled and rotted eternally.

I remembered more of the grueling vision of my Magicked reverie and shuddered, slamming down my brush and burying myself in white wolf fur blankets up to my chin as I was wracked with chilly, subarctic blues like the damned Beast herself. I closed my peridot green eyes to recall my monster's visage.

There Queen Jarngrimr was, a black omen burning on my cornea, peering into the depths of my wicked soul. She pet my sunstained hair. She reached, deep within me, and plucked at the black rose within.

I shook with cold, shook with her icy touch. I could feel the Troll Queen's presence haunting me, like breath fogging my godsgiven visions.

We had a connection, my Lady Beast and I:

"Turiel..." the Beast had growled into my ear as I had painted her gargoyle ears. "You are my Bride, the queen of my desolation. By the Blue Star, know the advent of my kingdom. By the Silver Star, know the birth of my war. And by the Black Star, know that I am your rood."

I shivered as the lead pane windows let in light that should have warmed me, but left me barren with chill - like a miscarriaged fate. Onto silken sheets and an embroidered tasseled pillow, the rosy morning light shone, spindles of dawn's first blush planting gardens of fractals across my pink cheeks and satin night shift.

"What in Helheim is the meaning of this disturbing portent?" I murmured. I closed my eyes, and I could smell her, feel her, taste her – she was driving me mad. "What does that damned troll bitch want?" I screamed into my pillow.

Images flashed on my haunted sclera, turning bloodshot:

The charcoal furred, leather winged Beast.

Me bleeding my heart's grace into a grimy tub, none of the royal trappings of my father's kingdom about me. My black Helish blood came out in thick tar clots, cursed as the rot inside of me. Nothing was sacred in this place, and I was not whole. After all, I am draugr, zombie – undead.

It was no palace. Instead, it was a haunting imaginarium of me barely clothed in a necromancer's lab - the She-Beast's lair - my only belongings that remained the binding bandages around my breasts I typically used to stunt their growth and groin, no princess signet or circlet of platinum or rubies, missing my velvet dress and brocade, gone was my trusty Isa dagger.

Me. Unburied but inside I was rotted through like wood in a shipyard, decayed. More of us - Draugr – the unholy undead of Jarngrimr's huldrefolk armies – clanged broken and rusted swords and shields around me on their rotting, spindly limbs, then vanished like umber smoke.

Then, I was simply alone, bloody, crude, needing, wanting with lust - waiting on a lover who would turn to dust.

Just silence in a dank cell chamber.

Then, rose petals, a whiff of rotting spring, and the grave. Worms.

An empty, beatless heart.

Thorns, pricking my skin into torture.

A garden of fire like a curse, like the flames guarding the Valkyrie Brunhilda.

Her. She was my Siegfried, I supposed.

I fisted the sheets and screamed into my pillow.

"I may as well roast on one of father's witchcraft stakes, with the way my life is going," I grunted, my knuckles white as I clutched the tassels of my pillow, tearing them from Yuri's delicate sewing.

Witches were burned in my father King Hakkon's kingdom, so I held my Gifts close to my heart after mama had died. What I knew of witchcraft: runes, herbs, tonics, alchemy, starsight and blood magick, I knew from mama, and mama alone. After Yolanda's death, I had told no one but my wee sisters of my powers.

I, Turiel: the princess much more suited for wildcrafting and wandering the woods with the huldrefolk than learning Latinium, needlework, and the stations of curtsies and waltzes depending on the ranks of jarls, courtiers, and foreign dignitaries. To Hel's wastes with all that; I would much rather be wandering wild through the far reaches of the castle lands.

How all those trivialities of court life revolted me. I was eighteen sun revolutions blossomed, far past marriageable age, but my cursed eyes were telltale signs of magick blood - at least, the ghosts of it left in our peaceful Germanic kingdom of Arcadia. My irises, unearthly, were a godstruck green. Mama always said a fetch kissed witch's eyes and then burned them like grass with the color of Mother Freida, Queen of Witches.

But now? There were no more fetches. No more Cunningfolk to cast spells by Disablot fires or Bergresar Queens to curse King Hakkon in his darkest imaginings with draugr armies of the undead - like the ones he had sent all of Arcadia's berserkers and shieldmaidens after, only to perish on unholy skeleton swords.

Now, only the huldrefolk remained, hidden away in Utgardr with the last remnants of the Isa tribe of outcast Northern Cunningfolk. Only the mara night riders rode their black steeds in our kingdom anymore, daring to feed upon Arcadians' nightmares. Even the cow tailed huldra maidens would take no shepherds to bed. And nixies lured no maidens by the bayside.

Humans were not to meddle with Magick. Runes and spaekraft and seidhr - utiseta even, a strict domain of the genderbending holy Ingsmen, who were all now in exile in the Northern Holds, as all the priestly caste was, working in gulags to death - were outlawed, our old god Wotan the Raven's holy spells dark and ruinous' Magick be damned. Father had forgotten, the right to rule Arcadia came from Wotan himself, but father was given over to infidel gods.

Father worshiped a foreign Latinate God, Eleleth, as his first royal disciple from the Latinate soothsayers whispering godspower unspeakable into his ear, and tried to force his kingdom to do the same. That meant, no Magick. Only the priests could practice alchemy, and in our kingdom, women were becoming second rate. Much less those ladies and Ingsmen and Lokiswomen who fleed the sword like me, or dared to bind their breasts and wear breeches.

There were no goddesses in Latinium. No Freida, no Holda, no Skadhi, no Perchta, no Lussi, no Hela, no Sif, no Sunna, no Ran, no Idunna, no Eir.

Just Eleleth, Luciferian king of the Gnostic Aeons.

There was talk, in the far flung corners of Arcadia, Tunis, and Periland, even the Northern Holds, that where Lord Eleleth walked, old gods died, and Magick became corrupt like Eleleth's sickly sweet alchemists and rabid eyed soothsayers and ascetics. Lord Eleleth smited witches and shamans, much like my father did. Already, his light had infected father, giving him a sickly white aureole and having colorless daisies bloom after father's steps and horse tracks that smelled of stale water. When father spoke, his voice now sounded of stale bells, and he always smelled of a fungal rain. But he was not the only godtouched one in the family – I had Lady Skadhi, after all.

Lord Eleleth was not a god I bothered listening to at our forced Masses. I spat at his altar when no one was looking and constantly pissed on his fires in the convent when the Latinium imported crackbrained nuns were all asleep.

But that was a matter for another day. The dawn was new, and calling at Sunna's fingertips. Enough of foreign gods and infuriating, luxuriant She-Beasts!

I sighed, dizzying myself out of bed and donning my rabbit fur slippers and a minx coat. I paced to the window and looked down upon Arcadia's crown harvest, the gardens of my father, King Hakkon.

This was surely no place a Beast, necromancer or not, would plunder, much less torture me in. I shook the fitful grains of the vision from my eyes and tried to forget the foreboding, nightmarish vision of last night's new moon that had haunted me into my painting this morning. I turned the canvas away from me to the wall, so that the Beast's glaring eyes did not penetrate the very depths of my soul. Perhaps Mani was ill, sending strange daydreams abreast on his lunar rays. But for now, Sunna wrapped her glorious, warm, golden arms around me, embracing me in her loving daylight.

Arcadia was no place for monsters, or my strange enemy and imagined lover – fearsome, beautiful Queen Jarngrimr of the Sorrows:

She was a fabled Beast of graves and forgotten Magick, which father had burned out of the kingdom with his witch hunts and war against the Northern Cunningfolk. Latinium church bells tolled in response to bergresar, and they were the most powerful of all giants and trolls. It was said, when the Bergresar Queen and her sisters yawned in their sleep, that Germania's earthquakes blackened the land, and the tree's forest worth of leaves fell from the fir into the green, icy fjords.

It was a war that my father, the Latinate king, had won - only his queen, my mother Aslaugh, was a Northern Cunningfolk princess, of the Magick of old, given in marriage by the gods as a truce when the tribal Northern Cunningfolk had nothing left to give but the last of their Magick, their witch queen. It was a Magick father would have liked to forget, father the regent who had suppressed that godsgiven heritage in I and my two sisters' castle and denied mother's secret dealings with the huldrefolk at the borders of the Maroon Sea bayside.

The bards sang that when King Hakkon murdered Queen Aslaugh's famous fetch, a white jackal named Signy, the mara of all Arcadia wept like banshees as father plunged an elfshot blade through her beautiful, untrammeled fetch's heart. That killed any Magick left in mama after she sealed shut the Stronghold, and slaughtered the spirits of any priests or priestesses in Arcadia still resisting. The godsfolk, defeated and depressed, gave up their godsvows and went to the gulags in tears and regret, Thur's hammers clutched to their breasts.

King Hakkon would like to see Magick uprooted from the world, the old gods forgotten and replaced by the Latinate Aeons. Hakkon would desire above all for As and Van gods alike to become ancient channels of memory untouched by future generation, and for the gods' rune stones to be toppled alike. But gods, our gods, still touch our lives, and are simply not easily forgotten. Talk to any villagefolk, any peasant, any soothsayer who practices in secret, and Wotan the Raven and Freida the Wanderer still walk in the small, quiet spaces of Arcadia, seeking bread and goat's cheese, cursing cattle and blessing newborns in equal measure. Only Loki lays chained in the Maroon Sea far reaches.

My father Hakkon would like things dead and buried, and yet I am ever a thorn in father's side.

Any Cunningwoman can tell you this: Magick does not die.

Only the men, the alchemists, were allowed to practice the more refined, human tamed version of Magick that had none of the wildness of the huldre about it. They used Latinate sigils, trying to summon Eleleth in the flesh, not the native runes of our land Wotan had fished from up from Mymyr's well at the cost of his merry blue eye.

What the alchemists could conjure with their leads and sulfur crystals was paltry compared to what I had inherited from Queen Aslaugh. My sisters, beautiful Yuriel and mischevious Rosiel, sixteen and twelve and Magickless as dumplings made by Cook, were beautiful girls, but not of mother's Magick, and so I rarely spoke of my Gifts, much less visions of the Beast or dreams of my patroness Skadhi, with them. They simply knew that I was of the witchblood, and destined for under the barrow.

There was an urgent knocking at the door, feet bouncing, and the hem of a dress obscured the crack of light under the hinged oak slab.

"Turry, quick, open the door, Cook will have my head for stealing her heavily guarded fig jam! I had to fight my way through three whole serving boys to get to it all, treasure trove that it was, and the jam was so yummy that I slurped it ALL up!" came Rosy's urgent soprano voice.

I smiled quickly to reassure myself of the obsolete nature of the sickly daydream, then hastened to my door and undid the lock. In piled Rosy and Yuri, in the most elaborate tiered dresses I had ever seen.

"Tonight is my debut ball, oh Turry, and I could not keep little sister from eating like a pig at sop! She will embarrass us all in front of the princes and handsome jarls," Yuri fretted. "Why, we were all just fitted for the dresses now, and Seamstress had us bring you yours - just look at it's fine color! Don't worry, I know your exact measurements, trim as a feather as you are! You shall be Queen someday like mother was before us, so nothing less than the finest dress would befit you! Oh, with your long curls, tall and slender frame, and wide green eyes, you are the spitting image of dearest mama! Only, I suppose she had Rosy's red gold hair. Anywho, the dress! Here, I helped Seamstress sew it and treat the fabric - I added the ribbon and lacing! Isn't that nice, Turry? Hmm?"

"Can I wear britches and a hunting cap and jacket?" I tried my luck.

Yuri's lips quivered. "But I worked so hard on this."

I took it gracefully. "Thank you, little sister. I will be honored.

Rosy simpered, jam on her face.

"Is'not fair, I'm the one who canned the fig jam from my garden last summer! It all belongs to me," Rosy protested, squirming. "Yuri is being a shrew. I can eat all the fig jam I want... no wonder boys turn up their noses at her, hmph!"

"You'll turn into Audhumla if you keep eating all the jam, fat as a mother auroch licking Ymir out of the ice of Ginnunagap" Yuri chastised, crossing her arms and looking at me imploringly. "Then you won't fit into your pretty pretty dresses, Rosy, and I'll have to sew you new ones. You'll come begging to me to let out the seams, and I'll refuse your silly stupid sob story, you little pig!" She pushed up Rosy's nose. "Oink! Oink! Oink!"

"I'm not a little piggie!" Rosy bit Yuri's prodding finger, and Yuri yelped. "I'll show you  an oink!"

"You're an animal! Feral as Ingvi's boar!" Yuri screamed.

I gave a bright laugh. "You two are the essence of ridiculous, like Thor and Loki off to marry a giant dressed in princess clothes."

"Like you in the fighting courts, in men's garments," Rosy said innocently.

I smiled. "I prefer men's pants, yes."

I wiped some fig jam from Rosy's plucky pink lips and smeared the remnants of the jelly away on the hem of a rich unicorn tapestry on the wall I usually used for grease stains from my paint palette - it was a kitschy old trapping befitting food scraps. "Rosy, don't pester poor Cook. And by the gods Yuri, I forgot that your ball was today!"

My heart warmed as I held my wee sisters close. I, the golden haired, mossy eyed eldest who painted and dueled my days away. Rosy, the strong and rough and tumble rebellious redhead with merry blue peepers who was always smudged with dirt and currants from her garden and from making food with Cook. And last but not least, Yuri, the sweet, beautifully curvaceous, plump and petite, soft-spoken brunette seamstress with peculiar amber irises whom all the knights fancied for her lush, pleasing Rubenesque shape like the goddess Mother Freida the Wanderer.

Yuri thought I did not know that she had a Waterman lover named Dominic, a young man of that traveling boat tribes father hated so much for helping the last of the Isa tribe of Northern Cunningfolk escape across the Maroon Sea to Utgardr before the Stronghold was erected. The Watermen were a wandering tribe who lived on the sea, rivers, and lakes. The Watermen's ancestors sailed here far, far North from Indrajit, named after their rain god Indra, and they loved to mingle and make friends of Arcadians, fabled for their sweetness, spices, and pearls they went diving for, which Yuri hoped to keep secret - but nothing ever escapes an elder sister's watchful eye. I spent enough times on the shores of the bay to see her wading off to her trysts with Domni. I, in fact, loved the boy dearly. He often sought me after dark by the lea for tips on how to woo my younger sister and win over her maidenly heart.

I doubted Yuri would look forward to suitors at tonight's ball, with her sweetheart Dominic on her mind, and Domni out fishing for the day's catch with his clan.

"Oh Yuri, thank you for reminding me of the ball, I shall make my famous violet and lemon cookies to win over the hearts of all your suitors - one bite and they will all fall in awe inspiring love with you, young beauty that you are!" I squeezed them both tight. Rosy laughed, and Yuri gazed down at the mourning dove in the window.

"Mother always said a mourning dove with holly meant the mourning dove was making a nest for new beginnings," Yuri said contemplatively. "Maybe this is my new day..."

"A bit of Isa Cunningwoman wisdom," I said quietly in agreement.

"Ooo, a Northern portent! Maybe it's the day you'll find a husband!" Rosy teased, pinching Yuri's pale cheeks. Yuri bit her finger in revenge.

"Silence, fig eater!"

"Both of you, stop nipping at each other's heels like father's hounds," I laughed, letting them go from my arms. "We are a triple threat to any prince that would have Yuri's hand, aren't we girls?"

They both beamed at me.

"Why aren't you married to a winsome lady yet, Turry?" Rosy asked in innocence. "You're awful pretty, if a bit waifish - as if you never eat. It's an awful shame Yola had to go back to her homelands in the prefects of Tunis to take care of her grandma, I for sure thought she was the one."

I remembered my first and last love, my best friend since birth who I was wetnursed with - the one who, when I first gave her true love's kiss, dropped dead cold in my arms and whose warm, beatless body I had sunk with stones at midnight in the lake, so no one would know that the stablelass Yolanda's demise had been the princess' own making and undoing. There was no way I could explain to my younger siblings that I had damned Yolanda to the fate of a wandering, ever hungry Valkyrie.

I had forged a note in dear Yola's hand, bidding everyone adieu, and that very act had shattered my bloodless heart.

I carried her amethyst everywhere in my breast binding, as if a piece of her were always close to my heart, and could protect me from my undead draugr visions.

After that, I had refused to love ever again, if my love spelled death for my bride to be.

For in truth, Queen Aslaugh had lain a curse on her deathbed, the day the last Northern Cunningwoman fell when I was fifteen sun revolutions old:

"Ne'er shall a Cunningfolk love until Death yields Her last Life."

Father had thought it the babbling of a fever, her last words a hazy memory of Queen Aslaugh's Northern Holds, but I knew what they meant: my Magick and Gifts were poison to anyone human and not huldre, for only the deathless huldrefolk and trolls had life that yielded death, and death that yielded life. It was unclear before, but Yolanda's death had proven it as surely as a dragon breathes spitfire.

So I would take no lady suitors, lest I spell their demise, and I would have no marriage bed or join my moon's blood in seidhr with a woman to bear any bonny babes, much to the torments of my dear, doting father. I just spent my time roaming the woods and riding the horses and hunting with the men. I was as good an arrow shot as the lords, and in swordsmanship, unmatched amongst the knights and jarls. While Yuri dedicated herself to the arts of ladyship and sewing fantastical creations, and Rosy dedicated herself to cooking pleasing foods and tormenting the village boys, I dedicated myself to war and my Magick.

I had all of mama's old grimoires, after all, stashed away from the prying eyes of King Hakkon the Latinate in secret, with their runes and seidhr spells memorized in my mind as finely tuned as a troubadour lute's timbrel twang.

Sometimes, I traced the bonnie babe spell - take two women's moon's blood, bake a cake under the full moon of Mani, invoke Mother Freida, and ingest it to become pregnant with your loved lass' child.

That was something I would never get to do, not with Yolanda or anyone else, and for it, my heart was a shipwreck. Like a constant, irreparable ache...

But, I kept my mind on other things. There was one spell I could never get quite right - as the culmination of my Magick, I was working on summoning a fetch at Skadhi's insistent behest.

Every time, I utterly failed, and it was disheartening, to say the very least. I did not have a Volva to cast the spell properly, anyways.

To my knowledge, there were no more Isa wise women, anymore.

Yuri and Rosy danced around me in a mock marriage ceremony. "Perhaps Turry is too snobbish and tall for the ladies!" Rosy quipped.

"Perhaps Turry is too bookish and skinny for any lindworm slaying shieldmaiden," Yuri observed sagely.

"Perhaps she shall take a Jotun Queen to bed!" Rosy blurted.

"Rosy, don't talk such filth!" Yuri squabbled, dropping my new debut ball dress to my bed as she pinned Rosy to the pillow and tickled her to death.

"You two are the next minstrel duo, taking Arcadia by storm," I laughed, examining the tiered dress I was to wear to tonight at Yuri's debut ball. It was sparkling sable, dyed black, threaded through the corset with rubies and violet ribbon.

It looked like a star, and my Magick quickened as I traced the pleats, black fur, and lacing.

Rosy's dress: sapphire blue silk.

Yuri's dress: metallic silver damask.

My dress: shimmering midnight furs.

The Blue Star. The Silver Star. The Black Star.

The colors the Beast that had been tormenting me in my visions and onto my canvas spoke of.

We were the stars.