Eira’s back ached. Her head hurt. She felt weak, as if her heart’s blood had been drained. She had mostly healed from the torture and depravity they had subjected her to back in her first prison, but her body still carried the heaviness of it. Her first prison was one made of walls and locked doors. She and her comrades were confined together so that the increasingly terrible treatment of one could strike fear in the others. She had been there for exactly one moon’s turn. Somehow, she had survived the torture when the rest did not. The scars on her body from that prison had almost covered the runic tattoo that was carved on her chest on a fateful night many years ago. All of it almost felt like a different lifetime.
Her new prison and punishment was another one entirely. She did not know how long she had been here, days and nights turning into each other endlessly in the constant darkness. The only nourishment her body had received since being thrown into this pit many moons ago was rainwater. She slept on cold and clammy rocks, confined to wither away in a cavernous but suffocating confinement. For a long time she had not cared. But something had shifted, she had remembered that she was still living on borrowed time, time stolen from the Gods. So she had to escape. It had to be today. She was running out of time. She was running out of life.
The creature was somewhere close to her, its body coiled through the cave’s jagged tunnels. The darkness of the night made it almost impossible to see, but she had heard the scaly, dragging sound of its movement across the stone floor just moments ago.
It had taken Eira a long time to get a sense of the creature. When she was first thrown into the cave, her capturer had warned her that if she even thought of escaping, she would meet a destiny worse than Sigurd. She knew already that her fate had been woven in a pattern similar to that of the famed end of Sigurd. Being guarded by a creature as vile as Fafnir was just the tail end of it.
The creature was an ancient thing. Large, like Jörmungandr itself, it snaked around the cave in loops and bounds, never sleeping. It was slow, lazy when undisturbed. Yet upon her smallest movements, it would writhe forcefully fast to her location, breathing its damp and rancid breath over her. Baring its teeth, it would warn her of her death if she tried to flee. Those teeth were what had kept her awake at night, what made her skin crawl when she thought of what might happen if she tried to find her way out of the cave. The teeth were longer than she was tall. Sharper than the sharpest spear she had ever seen. Rugged and uneven, they would not only sink right through her, should it strike, but leave irreversible, unrecoverable damage upon their retraction.
The cave, too, was cold and ancient. The rocks creaked with the weight of time. It felt endless. And it felt alive.
She had moved around a few times, when the creature had left her to slither around the cave doing Odin knows what. It had felt like the shape of the cave had shifted with her movements. As if it warped just at the corner of her eyes, taking a foreign shape every time she looked over her shoulder. There seemed to be no way out.
Eventually, she had resorted to staying put. Sitting completely still, preserving her energy and listening. Listening, at first, to the damp echoes of the movements of the creature. The drops of falling condensation. She sat like that for what felt like days. And then, the more she listened to the silence, the clearer she heard it. A vibration almost undetectable, like a hymn from the core of the earth. Before the time of man, the bones of the slaughtered Ymir had become all the rocks of the earth. And here, in the endless quiet and waiting, she heard it. The primordial force of Ymir’s bones, of the creation of the Nine Realms, humming inside the walls of the cave. She sat in stillness, listening, learning from the cave. She didn’t know for how long - days, weeks, it could have been years. Her body grew weaker, but she slowly started to piece together the plan for her escape.
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When her eyes opened that night - she never really knew if she had slept or just ceased to think for a time - she knew with a sudden resolution that it had to be now. She could no longer lose herself in the endlessness of the cave, the depth of its destitution and her own. Time had stalled for too long, and she had to act.The stones had been singing for her, urging her on for a long time now.
Slowly, Eira began to hum with them. Barely a sound. The hum was low, steady, laced in something she could not name.
The creature did not stir. The endless stillness of the cave continued, but for the raw sound from her throat. She was perfectly still. Matching her breathing to the very breathing of the cave, to the shifting of the stone. She hummed with the patterns of dampness and drips of water in the cave. Hummed in tune with everything she had heard inside her cavernous prison.
The cave stilled, like it was listening to her. And the creature was listening as well. It was looking directly at her with eyes that shone dimly like embers in the darkness. It watched her as she leaned into the ancient energy of the cosmos, inside Ymir’s bones. Her voice moved like a thread through honey, pulling memories, dreams and things unspoken and untouched through the ages.
And then, her guardian, the beast that never slept, closed its eyes and began to dream. Its breath slowed as it coiled inward on itself in a protective self embrace, its massive form pressing her to the walls of the cave.
She felt the shift before she saw it - as if the cave breathed a breath of relief. Something loosened in the air, the shadows shifted nervously in the darkness. The cave was listening. And slowly, as she kept humming, it opened up to her. A shadow moved, revealing a crack in the stone walls, a path that was not there before. A space just wide enough for her to slip through.
Eira did not run. Not yet.
She knew that she could not move too fast, could not exert her power. There were watchful eyes in the sky waiting for her to make herself known. She stayed there for a while, humming. After what felt like an eternity, she stirred. Stepping past the scaly coils of the creature, her feet careful on the damp stones. Finally, she slipped through the crack, stopping for a moment to wait breathlessly, testing the universe. But everything remained still. Then, she began to move down the twisting, suffocatingly narrow path in front of her. She did not look back again. She was being guided now by something she did not know, did not recognise. Not memory, not logic, but something else. Perhaps the cave itself.
And then - cold air hit her face. The salty scent of the ocean, the night sky yawning open above her. The earth beneath her feet frozen. She stayed still for just one more moment, gulping the frosty crisp air greedily. And then, she ran.
She kept running until her lungs hurt from the fire in her chest and the ice in the air. She did not know where she was running to, only that she had to escape, not only from the people who had imprisoned her, but from the Æsir themselves. When she finally stopped, she took in the landscape laid before her, as cold and barren as Jötunheimr. Looking up, she saw a lone raven set against the starry cloak of Nótt. She watched as its large, dark wings drew slow circles around the clear night sky. And the raven watched her back.