Karnilla watched with the one eye that they had possessed her with so far. Somewhere in the muddied roots of Urdr’s well, the other blinked, attempting to see through the mire. Nothing but the sting of muck greeted its sight.

“Shh,” Verdandi hushed again at the girl’s half-formed yelps. She drew the needle beside her cheekbones, slipping a ruddied thread between the torn pieces of her skin, stitching them together. “Beautiful daughter, calm now.”

“You will be beautiful, ” Skuld spread her small, impish grin–teeth amid her cherubic features. Her bite came down beside Karnilla’s knuckles, latching onto one of those ruddy-red threads and snapping it down at the skin. The seams glistened, blood-red, then bluer to purple, finally shimmering to an ultraviolet that vanished into smooth layers of flesh. “You will be clever,” Skuld simpered on with her promises, “and you will be strong. We will make you so.”

“We are making you so,” Verdandi cooed, stitching in another loop of bloody thread.

“We made you,” Urdr dipped her hand into the pool at her knees. The waters were mixed, blackened and swirling until she lifted her hand. The rivulet of liquid that slipped down her hand spun into a single line, shining red amid the dark.

Karnilla sniffled with one nostril, and the half-nose sewn onto her face caught the sharp tang of copper in the air as Urdr stirred the waters, spinning new threads for their work.

“You were born of our strength,” she said, twirling the blood-thread through her fingers. “Were brought forth of our design. You were made of our labour,” she plucked the strand up from the pool, spooling it around her fingers, “and our love.”

Karnilla tried to focus both her eyes on they dyeing process Urdr continued. It still stung to try, and she found only the eye closest to Verdandi’s cradling bosom could see anything clearly. Verdandi stitched the pieces–she saw as those caressing fingers set themselves lower to her chin. Below that, the thin twig of an arm jutted out in half-fleshed pieces, the ends draping dangling red strings. Her torso was piecemeal, riddled with missing patches that oozed in burgundies and blacks, confounding the blood-dribbling threads with the dark of Yggdrasil’s shadow she knew must arc overhead. She tried to flex her toes, unable to see from her curled, coddled angle in Verdandi’s lap whether they extended to the ashen sand around the edges of the Norn’s well. Nothing–she could sense nothing, not toes or feet or even knees.

“You will step into the world again soon,” Skuld, so full of promises, set her toothed kiss to Karnilla’s cheek. “You are going to stand taller than ever.”

“We spun you strong,” Urdr confirmed. “Gave you the power you asked for.”

“The power to change the realm,” Verdandi drew out the needle from side of Karnilla’s chin, extending the thread to Skuld’s waiting teeth. “We stitch within you, body and soul.”

“You will set things right,” Skuld snapped up the strand, severing it from the skin, “you will mend the weave whole again, will make those who tore it pay, and you will be loved for it.”

Karnilla made to yelp, but with half a tongue and no lips to her face, there were no protests she could make beyond her malformed, inarticulate sobs.

“You were made with love,” Urdr nodded solemnly as she drew more thread from thin-dripping ichorous waters. “Knitted together with the strands of fate at conception, rent and carded from pain at birth, and woven as our greatest work. Our daughter.”

“Our daughter,” Verdandi echoed, setting the needle aside for the moment as she reached beside her. There was a wet plunk of her hand into the shores of the well water, and as her hand rose again to reclaim the needle, she shifted a blood-soaked sack of flesh, struggling to blink muddied lids over a bleary, violet eye.

“Our daughter,” Skuld agreed, reaching between the two of them to thread the needle.

Karnilla could no longer tell what was blood and what were tears.

——–

Her pillow was wet as she clenched her hands into the fabric. Her waking no longer came in starts, but in that unsettled rise through the thickened air of dreams, as if trying to swim to the surface of the ocean from the dark pressures of its depths. What felt like clawing her way up was merely a slight tightening of her grasp, and what had seemed a gasp now only came as a single, long inhale.

Karnilla shifted, sitting upright in her bed slowly, raising a hand to her face. The tears were there, running hot and wet down her cheek, and as she brought her fingers, tingling with a latticework of blue-white flame within the seams of her skin, she set them beside the dampness of her cheek.