((So you know that thing that Saga's do sometimes where they talk about a character's ancestors for an annoying amount of text? Here you go, this will take a whiiiile to get to Astmund.
Anything in ** is a character's thoughts that no one else hears.))
The Ballad of Astrid Skycarver: Part One - Windrunner
Generations prior, the second Yule following the Fall of Gotland.
Astrid Windrunner prayed kneeling on the ground outside the temple at Uppsala in the shade of the holy tree, the strange oils the Gyðja and Seeress had annointed her with burning her nostrils.
"Lady thank you for your guidance over these past years, without it I may have preserved my life but not my hope. You have been faithful, giving signs when I needed them and surely acting beyond my sight in my interest, and in thanks for this faithfulness I offer you the blood of the swine that lays before me for yourself and it's meat for the minders of your temple here.
Over this past year you have told me he lives, that he is free, and that he loves me still. I thank you for all of these secrets, but you know well how greedy I am.
I ask for a sign to answer only one question today..."
Astrid paused...
She had planned out what she would ask, perfectly phrased with consultation with the Gyðja, but as the words came to her lips they felt wrong. They weren't her words. She couldn't offer them to the Lady.
"...is he ok?"
*I will not give you the answer to that question oh daughter of Ingrid, Sorrow, and Mine. You deserve the truth in it's stead.*
The smoke turned red, then blue, then black as the ground beneath her knees rumbled and rippled.
The black earth of Upsala was set aside, revealing a woven wreath of flax stalks sitting on light brown Soil who's color she knew like her own soul. A flash of red and gold lay unnoticed in the middle of the wreath as she reached with trembling hands to take the woven stalks between her fingers.
She had recognized it immediately, woven as it was in the manner of the wreathes that the women in her Clan were presented with by their husbands on the second day of their wedding feasts.
She remembered fondly for a moment the night she had taught him how to weave it, before dread began to fill her at the clear meaning of the omen, held at bay only by denial as she forgot where she was and Who she was talking to.
"No...I don't believe you. He wouldn't have..."
Her denial was struck a sharp blow as the ground rippled again and somehow the words she most dreaded were carried to her from the voice she most longed to hear.
"Goodbye, Astrid Ingridsdottir, may we meet in the Halls of the Gods. All of us.
I think you'll like her"
"no...no...he wouldn't have given up on me.....not that easy....not after just twO FUCKING YEARS!" Astrid screamed as she lept to her feet.
"You can't know him! I do, and for longer than the years we've been apart! He would have had to watch me fall! He would have had to hold my body in his arms! LIAR!" she accused the Lady.
*Dear child, he thinks he did.*
The ground ripples a third time, revealing nothing new, causing her to look down at the splash of red she had missed.
She froze, before bending over to pick it up.
Standing, she holds little Grof's feather in her hand and thinks of the boy she was too stupid to teach and too weak to save as horror fills her face and she hears Harald's voice again, carried not by wind or fate or whim of the divine but within her own heart.
"Astrii, I don't want to press but the Seeress' shephard already told everybody you've got the Sight. I get wanting to keep tricks up your sleeve but it's not like we'll ever be enemies and I promise I won't tell anyone. What if I guess it right, and beat you back home, will you show her to me then?"
She shook and swayed, unsteady on her feet. For years she had looked for any hint of Gutes in exile she didn't already know: working and trading and tricking her way onto any boat that would take her to a a new corner of the sea, leaving messages for him as she went. For years she held the certainty that this was just the second act of their story without a single doubt that the rest of it would proceed as he'd promised her.
Until today.
"He...he's not looking for me."
From the side of the fire trots slowly a large boar as her vision splits to show her standing there poleaxed. His snout hangs low to the ground and sways as he walks forward.
Girl and boar fall into each other as with four eyes Astrid wept tears of red gold at the cost of their shame.
Hours later, she sits on the banks of the Fyrisån leaning against her Flygja, staring blankly at the currents, mumbling repetively that nothing had changed.
It wasn't a lie if she forced herself to believe it.
((
@CoatRackRanger A few months ago, you asked for messy. This was the messiest thing I could come up with at the time. Reveal was going to be the season after the wedding, my wife[who hates forum games but loves soap operas and the show Vikings] was gonna make an SV account just to bring in the character.))
