Curse Of Blood: Gods & Monsters

Chapter XVIII - Epona

Danu — The celtic goddess of creation and earth.

It had been nigh a sennight and Aila, although imbued with a strange new steadfastness of heart that suited her well, was yet mourning her brother and husband. She was not wanting for company, but Epona's and Eirik's were all she sought. The rest were often turned away. Erelong, Ragnar, Ívarr, Eydís, Gudrun, and any other would-be commiserators — who had been calling in all hours of the day — curtailed their visitations altogether when she would not see them no matter how often they tried. She needed time.

All the better, Epona thought. She had become misanthropic since coming to this hated land that she was now forced to adopt as her own. If not for Aila, she would long ago have risked her life and fled. 

When a horde of neighbors had descended upon them this morning to simper and condole, she had taken herself off to the cliffs, under the guise of foraging, but really all she had craved was peace and solitude. But on returning, she had remarked with satisfaction that the longhouse was once again devoid of strangers. 

Her errand had not been for naught either: she came away with a brace of fattened auks, that she'd stoned with her sling, and in her apron she carefully carried a clutch of eggs purloined from the seabirds on the cliffs.

After handing over her catch to another slave, she checked in on Aila and the babies, but seeing that the lady slept soundly, she left the chamber with a child on each hip lest they, who were now on the verge of incipient fretting, awaken Aila. She took them outside once they'd been fed — for Epona was breastfeeding Heida as well — and laid them on a woolen blanket beside the smokehouse to gaze at the sky while she worked.

As she neatly lay the fish and ribbons of dulse to dry across the racks, she was arrested by a sight as almost stopped her heart! There, as impossible as it was unnatural, appeared a diurnal moon that hung in full force just above the southern horizon, as if glaring mockingly at the sun that hovered in the north.

This land was especially peculiar. Before today she had thought this more to do with the seasons than anything else, but after witnessing the fleeting sight of two heavenly bodies occupying the same sky...? In the end, the sun endured and the moon, that had emerged only briefly, once again subsided.

What type of omen had she just beheld? What could it possibly mean? Would that that were all, but gods help her, the seasons were just as confounding and improbable! Still and all, summer, with its mild days of unremitting sunlight, was at least far more welcome to her than its counterpart: the wintery weeks of perpetual darkness.

Such was nature. Who better than she, a priestess of Danu, the earth mother, could appreciate that to every male there was a female; after the darkness came the light; and for every death...there was rebirth. She glanced towards the infants and was struck by yet more philosophizing. Just as with the seasons and the cycle of night and day — sun and moon — there was a duality at play even in her own child.

Brenna, who might have been revered in the south, was now and always a slave to the north. She who was the blood descendant of Epona's land, her veins suffused with power, was now, diametrically, just as much a child of this one that was peopled by her own oppressors. One half druid and the other ovate; yet wholly without esteem or rank.

But the dichotomy did not end there. She transferred her regard to Heida. And you, she sighed, are one half raven and the other eagle — clan royalty. The child was of both heaven and of earth; valkyrie and mortal. The tragedy of it was that she would never know who she was and would be forever the outcast bastard who did not fit in with the nobles or the bondsmen, but somewhere in between.