────────────────────── [ HERETIC ] DAGMAR ─── oath keeper " the gods I pray to are dead. "
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and it's my whole heart weighed and measured inside and it's an old scar trying to bleach it out and it's my whole heart deemed and delivered a crime i'm on trial, waiting 'till the beat comes out i'm on trial, waiting 'till the beat comes out who's a heretic now?
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I. When Dagmar was born, her Father left her to the gods.
Small for a newborn and incredibly delicate, the babe was unnervingly quiet in her mother's arms. She wouldn't cry, not like her sister had when she was born over a year prior, not even when she was ripped from her mother's arms and handed off so that Esther could bring a wailing Finn into the world just moments later.
One of the village healers, with Dagmar in her arms, went to where Mikael waited and told him with an unwavering conviction that the babe would not survive the trauma of her own birth-- that she was not strong enough to do much more than breathe shallowly. So, lest his wife grow attached to the child that would die when there were two others who would need her, He walked out far into the woods and laid her in the moss, praying to Frigg that the girl's death was painless before leaving her for nature to reclaim.
When He returned in the morning for the body, however, He was met with a screaming, living child and the feeling that something in the woods was watching him.
Mikael then took the babe home and named her Dagmar, meaning Maiden, in honor of the goddess he thought had saved her.
(Not knowing that the eyes in the trees were crows.)
II. Five years later, the consequences of birth came for them.
The siblings had been playing in the snow behind their home when a woman emerged from the thicket with twigs in her hair and eyes black as coals. She assured the children, in a voice thick like the honey the adults used to make mead, that she was an old friend, and that she'd like to speak to their mother. Dagmar, naturally suspicious of all things but especially those of the woods, had been the one to get Mother once pressured by her siblings, and the one most startled when the Woman greeted their Mother with hostility. They spoke to one another in a language that none of the children would come to understand for some years and then, before any of them could figure out what would happen, the Woman took Freya in her arms and returned to the trees.
