Branjaskr, The Free South
Flickering between two places, two periods of time, two women.
‘Never trust the Gods. Never trust Demons…’
The ebony Demoness rode above him, dulled through expansive miles and glass the purple light gleamed off her sweaty figure. Hands flowed down the sharp dip of the waist.
His hands had shook, the paper crackling in his grasp, disbelief in her death.
‘…Never hold either to your heart or your spirit, my son. The Gods will ignore and the Demons will destroy…’
The Southern leader felt the rapid waves of force, a succession of up and down. Lust seeped from her staring eyes. There was the boy who desired his mother, the man who desired this woman.
Kalle was held hostage between the past and the present. How had he seen her, bloody and sprawled over the vanity. The image did not go away, the cocking pleasure at his hips.
‘…There is only one thing that deserves devotion…’
Black haired Southerner held his gaze at the moving soft figured stomach. The dead gaze of his mother looking back from inside himself.
‘…Family. Family are you Gods. You must worship them, protect them because I damned them. I can never achieve forgiveness. I have ruined them…’
A bloomed frustration, the petals taking shape in Kalle’s tears slipping down his bloodied cheeks. The wounds clawed down his chest, the tight, wet heat gripping him wholly.
He wished he could have been held in her arms one last time.
‘…You make me so proud, you can choose a different path than I have…’
The Demoness moaned, leaning forward and pressing her hands into the marred flesh of his torso. The open cuts decorated her dark skinned fingers. Red paint to reflect flame of the fireplace and the haunting, inescapable purple shining in the north.
His mother and father both taken by slashes across the neck.
‘…Keep the demon woman away…’
Kalle had no firm hold in his mind, his hands betraying him. Cradling the hips, guiding them upon him again and again. Hot breath, half naked and the castle’s cold being warded by the aura of him and her. A Jarl who was lost between two women, one in his mind, one in his tingling eyes.
‘…She is your servant, but she will ruin you. Keep away from her. Family, remember them, fight for them…’
A rushing beating chest, rolling over her, he dominated. A replay of the stone wall now on the fur of the skinned bear. Slammed into her was his rage, his guilt, his shame, and his mourning. He was harsh, his hands were holding her down. The Odinsen dabbled in desire, and its inverse, yet they took him to the same path. Inside her he struck, inside her came all his ever piling struggles and worries.
The empowering euphoria forced his mother’s words to hush and for Zahneri’s befalling stare to feel elsewhere. The Demonic biology pounded inside of him, reveling in his pleasure. ‘I shouldn’t have’. The Demoness unsheathed what had wanted to remain.
Kalle Odinsen, the Jarl, pulled from Zahneri, holding himself the at end of his bed. ‘I shouldn’t have'.
A pause existed, growing between them. He was huddled away and she used her bloody fingers to scoop out the Jarl’s internal struggles manifested as white mucus for her to savor. It was a salty, energizing, aphrodisiac that only pulled on her Demonic nature. Webbed between finger tips and falling from digit by digit, gravity’s influence on the clear coated substance. Her piercing eyes watched, a prey trying to escape before being taken in and suckled down.
The horned woman’s soft moans had the leader of the Southern people shake. Tearfully he searched the floor for his pride, the circlet laying aside and behind Zahneri’s sitting body. Their eyes held contact, her having been able to captivate them to look even as they did not wish to. He felt fetal and weak, the eternal winter’s cold creeping through the fading increased body heat. His clothes had been ripped apart, the remains could not keep him comfortable or sheltered from her sight.
“You are the Jarl, act like it” Zahneri killed the silence, standing. Kalle scrambled on hands and knees for the circlet. It was unscathed, pure. Dried blood on his lips cracked apart with their pursing. From the bed the Succubus watched the Jarl redress himself, the old bits thrown on the floor. A leg slowly crossed and dipped over the other, hoof to rock. The weepy man would not accept his weakness nor his true heritage. She would have to break him again.
Kalle left his room with a harsh pull upon the well-crafted handle, bundled in new furs and wiping the caked on blood from his face, leaving only the small gash at his lips. Stomping through his castle, his mind shifted from pleasure, to emptiness, to being dropped back into duties he must uphold. No guard kept post, his steps echoed through the lonely floors. His people were worn, could he continue trying to recreate the plans? Another woman to come into his mind, but this one he did not let take grip of his thoughts. Her white haired, amethyst eyed beauty, a fleeting thought.
Showing himself out of the arched, double wooden doors of the castle’s entrance, he returned to the eternal winter. The cold stung at his lips’ wound, and the moonlight shot off from the snow to make Brajaskr lighter than it should have been. His ending tears crystalized while he roamed. In the castle’s gates he walked slowly, stomping down on snow amassed higher than mid-calf. Few were tending to the snow’s mass, only rising inch by inch. The people’s hands could only achieve so much. The wintery crunching sounds a humbling reminder for the new leader.
Sheltered by cross sections of wood, walled by ashlar stone and tended to by a stableman were the reindeers. The Jarl walked under the coach gate entrance of the stable, traveling down the wide barrel vaulted, well-traveled hallway. The smell of manure and foliage entered with the ice cold air in his nostrils, scents he had known since a child.
The Jarl did not manage to speak, he kept his distance, and let the weary Southerner sleeping on the ground simply be. The hooves of his mount clanked and he rushed to the castle gate’s doors. A tug on the reins halted his travel beast and he stared. The Jarl already burdened by the stinging cuts that ran down the front and back of his torso. Charging, he shot through the warded doors to spasm in pain that gave remembrance to what blood ran through him. The fire made him break out into a sweat that stung his new wounds.
Allowed to sit in his thoughts and his pain, the reindeer trotted slowly through Branjaskr. It was eerily empty, not a single soul to crowed the rows between longhouses. Wall mounted torches burned out hours ago, a darkened capital. Everyone was inside, sore, broken, used. As the Jarl, Kalle had to be aware of this. Know the sacrifices his people were enduring. They were honorable, their actions reflected so much of what he admired.
The hooves of the mount clanked up the stonework steps lining Branjaskr’s main gate. Atop he looked out, the layers of snow coming down upon layers, burying everything, blanketing the trees. Kalle lost himself into that nighttime intimacy between him and nature. To scan over the details of winter scenery gave his mind a distancing peace from the thoughts and sensations he did not wish to relive.
But from the distance came a jarring and terror ridden noise, a disturbance to the peaceful image his ice blue gaze could see. His ears picked up the heaving trumpeting roar of a violent demise. It was crude, and vile, sending his reindeer into a tensing panic. The sinking feeling struck his gut, but he narrowed his eyes. The sound pushed past him, going into the dead asleep capital. It did not matter if unconscious ear caught the message or not, for Kalle understood very clearly.
He prayed to Odin, against the judgments of his mother. The Jarl of the Free South was only a man facing a seemingly unstoppable force. He prayed to Odin for the sake of his people.
They were coming.
**
She often joked that the Southern snow and ice were a part of their blood but tonight was particularly too cold. A cold that took into the skin, the muscle and deep into the bones. The cold wanted the body to surrender. Swirling through everything, this bitter cold swept everyone, testing their wills. Kia’s body ached.
This cold was exhaustion. Bundled under furs and quilts and hearing the cackles of large flame telling her to return back to slumber. It was the lullaby she had heard since she was a little girl, the burning of wood, but it wasn’t alone. Her being sought for the same, yet the mind continued to spin. The Landswoman, the leader of the Southern forces had the responsibility of tactically using every fighter to the best of their ability for the greatest fight since their liberation. Maybe it was a fight even greater if the beast mistress dared to think so.
Shuffling to roll away, it stirred two of her companions. One on the wooden headboard adorned in white feathers lightly decorated in dipped dark tips fluttered his wings and bobbed his nodule head in the sudden awakening. Per, the winter owl clutched its talons to the wood, triangular patterned holes set in across the rim of the headboard, the marks of passing years. The other, a woman with brown locks at length just past her ears, and the classic Southern blue eyes honed in with tenderness. Her left hand’s ring finger was banded by a ring of silver, the heat of skin and the cold of metal sliding down Kia’s nude upper arm.
“Liv, go back to sleep” the Landswoman spoke up, the others sleeping in their own beds within the longhouse far too gone, taken by the deep cold. Liv knew too what was on her mind. It must have been obvious, the same thoughts from the night before, and the night before, etcetera.
“Leave those thoughts for the morning” The woman’s voice whispered through Kia’s blonde locks that spilled across fur layers. Kia would not speak, the distance growing between her and her wife was palpable now. The stress, the challenge of having to be Branjaskur’s defender eating away the woman she fell in love with. “You have to” 'If only for the sake of us' Liv’s mind swirling with unease.
Kia stared at the stone walls, a question of their security. How strong could the foundations hold? The rapid flapping of Per’s wings as zipping jagged shadows caught her eye. One of her wolves curled at the bed’s sighed in its sleep, a huff of air.
“I do not think I can” Their Southern Queen had turned blade on herself. Was it only death and disaster that she saw? What was it that she had seen the marching catalyst of things worse than punishment in the underworld?
Something penetrated the foundations of their longhouse, a sound. It was a whisper compared to the burning comforts and snoring companionship. A whisper of brutality, a horn Kia came to realize. The hand that had been stroking her skin held tight, the flesh turning clammy with the passing seconds of the whispery battle cry. The wolves growled, low and the winter owl hooted, nature understood.
“I do not think I can”
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