Dark Elf Valentine

Dedicated to my sweetie Lorena and best buddy Ethan.

Author’s Note: This holiday tale is a supporting character’s back-story for Fulla’s Temple. I’m currently writing chapter 7  and should resume posting soon! 

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Every morning, my mother poisoned me. That was just her way of showing love, I guess.

“Eat up, son,” she said without inflection, “before the gruel gets cold.”

Mother seems particularly cheerful today, I thought as I sat. Her features were relaxed as if in boredom, but she stood bent over the table across from me, leaning on forearms. Had her dark hair been loose like mine, instead of tied in a bun, it would have almost dipped into my bowl. She was close enough for me to smell the gin on her breath, and I saw pupils so dilated as to almost obliterate the gold of her iris. Never seem too interested when you’ve slipped them a dose, she always taught. Never let them see your eyes. Eyes cannot lie.

Seeing her so eager as to break not one but two of her rules, I patted my belt to make sure all the antidote vials were there. They were.

Fulla’s Temple – 1

Trigger Warning. Sexual Content. Fertility rites.

 

I was so young, barely a woman, on the day everything changed.

Those descended from the royal line of Nerthus are gods among my people. I never wanted to be a goddess, but that choice was not mine to make. By order of our Queen, I was sent to the remote plains of Northern Vanaheim with a single servant – to be the local goddess among common folk who had not seen me grow up.

My temple was a large hollow mound, with standing stones all around. Within it I reclined on my couch, sipping smoke from the long stem of a white clay pipe, and awaited my supplicants. A dim orange light infused my hall from the wind-eyes[1] all around; holes covered with thin vellum leather, stretched and oiled.

Beaten gold coins hung as jingles from my breast-band and belt. Below those, a blue string-skirt hid what little modesty I had left.

My dark-haired handmaiden led the couple in, all of them wearing only breechcloths[2]. The pair clutched each other, nervous as they peered through the misty hall. He was a bare-cheeked lad and she a young woman, recently married no doubt. They showed identical braids of light-brown hair down the middle of their backs, as they approached the tripod brazier on the left side of the room.

“An offering,” he said, taking herbs from the bowl beside the burning coals. “To please the goddess we honor, that she may bring us fullness.” The fumes rose as he cast them, with tentacles of smoke spreading their heady scent through the room. He inhaled and stepped back.