HELSAWEEN 2025

She closed her eyes and let her spirit merge with the Nature around her. But not the patrons of the tribe, something else, something alien, has come to meet her calling.

A ghostly white wolf circled around the fire, howling with her song, its weightless paws leaving no footprints in the snow. Elsa sprang to her feet, threatening the beast with an enchanted dagger made of whale bone.

It was a foreign spirit, not of their forest, but, surprisingly, she sensed no hostility. Only longing. Only sorrow. The wolf stopped, looking at her pleadingly, then disappeared into the forest.

Elsa set off after it. The wolf looked back at her, leading her somewhere.

Towards the glacier at the edge of the forest. At the last aspen, the wolf took one last look at her, and merged with the purple shadows. Elsa stepped forwards cautiously, and fixed her eyes on the glacier. There, inside the frozen river was a young man, frozen into the thickness of blue ice.

He looked like the people from the Fjord Lands, from the stone houses. Those whom the people of the Forest, her people, have always feared. He was handsome, this stranger. He had a mane of long red hair and freckles on his high cheekbones. He wore a fur cloak and a tunic of fine grey wool, and had a beautiful silver torc around his neck, and an iron sword.

So that's why the wolf spirit had called her to save its master, Elsa realised. So the man was a sorcerer, since he had a spirit helper? She didn't really feel like doing that, but could she leave a man helpless, even if he was an enemy? She couldn't. The Spirits wouldn't approve of that. So she went to pick her things she left behind, and made a new fire by the glacier.

She sat and watched the prisoner of the ice, and waited. When his body went limp, she laid him closer to the fire, and rubbed his strong chest and broad shoulders with a cloth and warming herbal ointment to draw fire to his heart, and then she drew a healing rune on his heart, dipping her forefinger in reindeer blood.

The ice man opened his eyes, and Elsa thought they looked like the youthful leaves of April aspens. "Where are they? Who are you?"

"You are in the Northuldra lands. We are alone here."

He sat up and stared dazedly at Elsa. At her white fur coat and beads, whale knife, drum, and loose hair. "Who are you?"

"I am Spirit Talker. Who are you? I saved you, you owe me the truth."

The man's eyes flashed mysteriously. He squared his shoulders.

"I am Hans, the thirteenth son of the konung Magnus. My brothers wanted to get rid of me. And it seems they have almost succeeded." And he told her about his family. Of the cruel father who kept many women in slavery, and of the children from them, all sons, each of whom tried to surpass the others in strength and ferocity so as not to end up at the bottom of the pyramid. In the place of the youngest. His.

"Why are they doing this to you?" Elsa couldn't imagine how a brother could hate his brother enough to bewitch him to die a cruel way like this, imprisoned in a block of ice.

"Because I'm not like them. I'm different." Hans replied in a low voice, glaring at her with a heart wrenching yearning. "I see I can share that with you, O Spirit Talker." He meant her white hair, and colourless skin, and almost invisible eyelashes, and eyes the colour of ice, everything that made her so different from her family; from all people, in fact.

"My people never hurt me because I was different," she shook her head, "But they thought I was born...this way for a reason, that I was marked by the Spirits and should belong to them, not to people." An honourable duty, but so lonesome. Elsa knew the forest and the mysteries of Nature's magic much better than human warmth and love.

Hans smiled strangely, the firelight dancing a wild dance in his eyes. "Then we are not so different, after all. Once people see your true face, they reject you and run in fear."

"True face?" Elsa raised an eyebrow.

A huge white wolf ploughed her down into the snow. His eyes were as green as a spring forest and its bloodthirsty mouth was bright red. Black claws dug painfully into her shoulders. He snarled.

"So this is why your brothers hate you..." she exhaled, fearless. "Will you be the monster they think you are, Hans, son of Magnus?"

The wolf blinked, and after a moment returned to his true appearance. Or was it the other way round, and the human form was a disguise for the wolf son...? Hans lay on top of her, his lips an inch from hers, his quickened breathing sweet and warm, his hands pleasantly heavy on her waist and hips. A strange longing echoed in Elsa's chest. She imagined them alone in her lonely lavvu, naked, buried in lush reindeer and fox furs, and his caresses on her body a hot, liquid fire.

"Is Spirit Talker your true name?"

But she had no time to utter it. Hans pressed a kiss on her lips, and after a few agonisingly sweet moments he was a wolf again, leapt off her and raced off into the darkness of the forest.

She sat up and listened to the echo of his howling. The winter moon was full that night, round and yellow as amber, and its call was one that no living soul could resist.

"It's Elsa." she said.