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OOI. "the bastard runt"
*warnings for infertility, blood, and referenced child abuse*
987 A.D.
With the bite of a blade, Dagmar watched, brows knit, as her blood ran down her wrist and dripped from her fingers into the fire below her, sizzling on the hot coals.
Smoke rose above her, billows of silvery-white tendrils that filled the vast room more than they did escape through the hole in the hatch roof, leaving behind a sticky-sweet haze which made each blink burn more than the last. She felt a little vacant, like her mind was unknitting itself like milk mixed with whey, as she got lost in the flickering of the fire, eyes fluttering half-closed in a daze.
The visions became clearer as she grew older, but the things she saw never lasted long, and, even though she'd been cursed to have a mind that remembered nearly everything else, they tended to escape her as soon as they came. No matter what, little remained when she woke but fragments seen through eyes that did not belong to her. Sometimes, it was the dead. Bodies of all kinds, waxy flesh rotting and sloughing off bone, swords sinking to the hilt through skin then fascia then muscle, and mouths hanging open with silent screams. The prices that needed to be paid for eternal life in Asgard. Others, she saw women like herself, her mother, and Ayana. Völva sat around open flames, their eyes rolled back into their heads as they chanted spells in a language that Dagmar did not understand.
Most of the time, though, all that came to her was crows. Crows perched in the evergreen trees of a homeland that surely did not miss her as much as she missed it.
This one was like most.
Before she could pursue anything more than the sight of corvids looking down on her from above, their black eyes glittering with wisdom older than herself, her mother was yanking her back to consciousness.
"Dagmar," Esther's voice was sharp, her hands warm as they held Dagmar's wrist firmly, "what did you see?"
It startled her, slightly. Everything felt too dark around her as she blinked and stared at her mother with furrowed brows. "Birds. I saw birds."
Esther's face fell. Dagmar didn't know what she expected.
"The powers that be want you to find deeper meaning."
She knew that she was meant to find a deeper meaning. She just did not know where she was meant to find it.
She wasn't even sure whether these were premonitions or something that was, somehow, more sinister.
"Perhaps the gods just think it's amusing to mess with me." She drawled, wrapping a cloth around her wound.
Her mother, in response to her spiteful correction, looked at her scathingly, but Ayana cracked a smile. When Esther saw that Dagmar was fighting a smile of her own, she turned on her heel to face the dark skinned woman, and the both of them sobered up quickly.
