I glance back at Silje, she is so innocent, caught up in a nightmare, but now in her trance she looks peaceful. I can spare her any more suffering, I can provide for her, in my way.
Am I crazy?
After everything I’ve been through, all the suffering and violence.
I swallow the lump in my throat and touch the ice of my husband’s face, keeping my hands cradling him even as the cold blisters my skin. A patina of frost now covers them.
“Yes,” I whisper to him, fresh tears running down my weatherworn cheeks and stinging the damaged skin there.
“Yes,” I say again and kiss him.
The pain is intense. But this is my husband. I thought I’d lost him, and now in this cursed place, I can fill the hole that was made when he was torn away from me.
He wraps his arms around me and I begin to shiver as my body temperature drops. The light cracking I can hear, like that of a frozen pond, is my skin freezing.
It’s hard to breath.
He breaks the kiss and my lips break apart, having frozen to his face. They quickly crumble apart. I’m wreathed in a green aura. The pain dissipates but the cold remains, a deep harrowing cold that seeps into my marrow.
Mark takes me by the hand and leads me slowly, carefully to the well, and down the steps, all the while the green fire consumes my clothes and floods over me, through me, inside me.
We walk down the spiralling steps, deeper, towards her realm, toward Helheim. Where I will be remade. And for a brief wondrous moment, I’m not in a barrow under a mountain walking into a nether world, I am on a field with Mark, as he was, beard unkempt; we are young and in love, like in the early days, and we are running hand in hand, just for the love of it. For the experience. So full of joy.
This is my last thought as we descend, before we are together.
Forever.
—EPILOGUE—
THE WINTER CHILD
Of my transformation in Helheim I remember little. Fragments. Chief among those fleeting dream-like memories is that of making love with my husband as the spirits of the dead refashioned me with permafrost. Just as they’d given Mark antlers in the tradition of their near lost culture—a sign of prowess and strength; so too do those spirits adorn me with delicate finery; for I am the embodiment of their queen, their mother.
Mark’s touch stops hurting and soon we caress one another with the familiar need of old lovers, rediscovering one another. New flesh, new desire.
When I return to the realm I once called home time has passed though I am unsure as to the exact duration. The spirits stripped away any clothing I had left, I do not need such things any further. The cold will not harm me, for it is now my natural element. I stand nude, proud and uncovered in my glorious new form, with my husband as my consort at my side.
The honour guard await us patiently, and fall in step before us, anticipating our route.
The dead have been busy. Heavy equipment dragged in by the horde is being used to drill, dig and blast the narrow barrow tunnel wider. The corpses that filled me with so much dread, twisted war-forms of weapons and chains and barbed –wire, no longer seem threatening. Now they bow to me.
Mother of the Dead.
They have begun to remake themselves now too. Much like the Jotun, or Stallo depending on the myth, that I faced in the ruins of the scientific camp, some of the dead reassemble themselves into huge humanoid forms of ice, flesh and stone—living war engines.
At the mouth of the barrow Silje waits for us, a smile on her young face. She is still wreathed in the Aurora, her eyes sharing the same colour now as that eerie light, and her hair a beautiful silvery white. She is not possessed, nor a corpse-risen. I would sense it if she was. Instead she has been given a dark blessing.
As I approach her, she calls me mother and I pull her to my bosom. There is no fear in her anymore. There is only love. She is my child, and a child to all the teeming spirits of the dead.
As my army shouts and howls in glee, as we ready the Final Winter, their shouts are not for me, but for Silje, who will inherit our wintery kingdom.
For she is their Winter Child.
And with her comes the storm.
About The Author
Rogue author and Scotsman Benjamin Knox is best known for his short creepy fiction. His work has appeared in places such as both Suspended in Dusk anthologies, Bloody Parchment and the Lovecraft eZine (issue #38).
One day he will have that island fortress and army of genetically engineered super-eels he has always dreamed of.
For further strangeness visit: benjaminknox.net
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