#verthandi

Model references for Verthandi: To Our Future Selves - Aether Gazer

Johan Egerkrans, The Norns, Urd, Skuld, and Verthandi, 2017. In Norse Gods, trans. Susan Beard (B. Wahlströms, 2017).

Send “blood on their hands” for your muse to find mine standing next to a corpse, covered in blood

Ekaterina barely remembered what happened.

One moment a pack of fairies, no bigger than toddlers but lighting-fast and bearing wicked teeth and claws, had pounced on Dmitri. And the next, Ekaterina found herself holding one of the vile little things by the leg, shaking it like a pouch of marbles. 

Pakhta stood before her, the one of fairy’s bat-like wings in its jaws.

At the sound of Dmitri letting slip a pitiful cry, she hurled the writhing fairy against a tree a few paces away, scampered to Dmitri’s side, and dropped to her knees beside him.

“Are you okay?” she murmured.

Dmitri whimpered, but nodded. “I-I think so,” he peeped.

Ekaterina pulled him into her arms and tucked his head under her chin, rubbing his back. He was trembling.

A few moments later, the sound of something - Something bigger than both she and Dmitri! - making its way through the underbrush reached her ears.

Dmitri pulled away from her and scrambled to his feet, iron bar poised. Ekaterina followed suit, and Pakhta, who had been clawing at the fairy, bounded over, growling at whatever was coming.

Then a woman emerged from the forest. Pakhta stopped growling, and Ekaterina and Dmitri lowered their rods.

The three stared at the woman for a long moment.

Then Ekaterina realized what the scene must have looked like: A little boy littered with bites and claw marks, a wolf with flesh caught in its teeth and blood-stained paws, and a tiny human-like thing twitching not far away.

Ekaterina gestured to the somehow not-dead fairy. “That wasn’t a person,” she said, then gestured to Pakhta, “And it attacked my brother, not the wolf.”