Bound in Blood

In the heart of the Thuringian highlands, deep within the forests of Hafmír, where civilized man dare not set foot, two twins were being offered to the gods in blood.

"HEAR ME. HEAR ME." 

FSSSSSSSH!—flame burst alight with a thunderous hiss, revealing a wrinkled face drenched in ash and soot; eyes clouded in milk. 

"HEED MY WORDS." 

The figure's voice was rasped in the throat, an accent as ancient as the very chamber he occupied. The Wargaz, seer of the gods. Here, in the subterranean layer beneath the earth, where blood kissed rock, and mighty gods with even mightier appetites were made full once more, a ritual was being performed. 

At the center of this place stood the god-stone, surface reddened crimson by those who came before, brimming brightly against the torchlight. The ceremonial blóttha. 

Villagers from distant lands, stripped of dress and wrist-bounded, were tunneled forward towards the altar's middle. “Ne tvórĭ! Molyu tebe!” a woman cried out, flailing before her captor's feet. The wolf-like man shoved her back with the others. "Do not bark at me, dog of the East!"

"O Wodan, O unseen Hand, let these wretched spirits climb the Tree and fall again. Let them be scattered across all the worlds. Let us offer this fleshed feast!" the Wargaz howled, as the thumping of drums accompanied. "Let the flesh be torn from their cradle, and the gods drink what we spill." —BA-DA-BUM. BA-DA-BUM. BA-BUM.

On the god-stone, two infants lay, tied together by the wrists with elk fibers. They did not cry, nor did they blink, yet they shared a common fate. Bounded in life. Bounded in death. 

"For the old gods! For Wodan, for Tyr!" the warriors roared, pounding their spears against the cavernous walls. "Walhalla mustn't go hungry, lest they gaze more of our kin!" 

"Cradleblood, we offer, to Wodan’s all-seeing eye. Bone to the wolf of the High Ones. Flesh to the hunger of the ancients." the Wargaz raised both arms high above his furrowed milky eyes, a sharp ritual antler grasped in boney hands. "Let the norns entangle their spirits. Let them rise as bind-born, spindled in thread made not for mortal men..."

There, the drums ceased in its entirety. One sacrifice prayed to her own eastward gods.

"...Let them descend into that fatewold realm so that the wyrd may bind them so, and the nineworlds break to make them whole again!" 

The Wargaz's arms came down, and twins were bounded no more. 

⟡

                                 ⟡

⟡

In another world, in another time, a boy stood at the edge of modern suburbia, where every house and every park and every future looked the same, reminiscing his seventeen years.

He stood at the top of Block 6 Overwalk, school blazer waving wildly in the windy night. Below, a frozen river. Still as death. Dark as soot. He looked down for a moment, then closed his eyes. 

Even at this hour, he'd imagined it would've been noisier up here. More traffic, more "Don't leap's!", more, well, anything. But the only sound here that seemed to follow him wherever he went, was that of his own chilled breath, and the crunch of snow beneath his tattered boots. His heartbeat, overshadowed by the shivering of his bones in the cold of this winter. 

He wanted to be unmade. To slip away. Without a name, or a legacy. To leave this concrete world behind, be reborn some place where he felt needed. 

As he stood at the edge, with eyelids still shut, the frost stinging the tips around his ears faintly caught a strange, new presence. A whisper, low and archaic. He'd only heard things like this in his myths and fiction. 

“Dost thou wish to leave this realm?” 

He answered not with words, but with his own silence. And for a second, he could hear nothing at all. Not even his heartbeat, nor the chill of his breath. Merely the presence luring him into that world beyond. 

"Then descend." 

He stepped out.