5. The Icy Breath of Yule
The world had dissolved into
gloom and silence. After the mystic outburst that shattered Helheim’s
foundations, Eirik awoke at the frozen epicentre of Yule, the primordial knot
where existence and fantasy intertwine. Behind lay the suffocating atmosphere
of the realm of death, that relentless cold that sought to extinguish the soul;
the air of Yule, though freezing, now vibrated with the promise of rebirth.
Above, the sombre clouds dispersed like smoke from chimneys in a gale, giving
way to the oneiric image of the moon shrouded in mists and the aurora borealis
sashaying amidst its emerald-green veils.
The prelude to twilight seemed to tint the edge of the moon on its sixth day with gold and bronze, like a scythe half-hidden behind the haggard leaves of the oaks, in a sky where the northern lights peered out shivering from beyond the horizon, intoning an age-old chant about the stories of the ancestors. As ancient druidic lore dictates, that vision was no coincidence: the waxing moon and the fading sun mark the precise moment when the earth's secret life awakens from its ashes.
(Eirik’s annotations. Yule, 21st
December)
The spectres had already departed, clearing in their path
his consciousness, which had been lost in the trance into which that nightmare
had completely plunged him. He knew what he had to do from now on.
My mental power rose like a sword called to war. It was the
21st of December and, with a reverent hand, I detached the sprigs of mistletoe
from those copper-coloured oaks. It was the perfect night for the rite; the
firmament itself had woven a pact to reveal a waxing moon on its sixth day, its
arch forming a golden sickle in the deepest darkness of the year. I covered
everything around me with those branches, as a carpet. I scattered them across
the white surface of the frozen ground, covering it with that dull green of the
plant's tiny leaves and the waxy drupes.
The image of Hel—a gash of darkness and cold in his
memory—still persisted like a splinter driven into the soul. He remembered how
the world dissolved into the gloom, and now the sensation was that of being a
mote of dust adrift in a limitless void, beyond the very breath of the cosmos.
In the midst of that hallucination, his gaze remained absorbed by the trembling
of those small lights that occupied the entire angle of his vision, forming a
latticework impossible to encompass in a single glance. They seemed like stars
reflected in the mirror of a dark lake’s surface, in silence but in continuous
vibration. Or perhaps they were shimmering globules of hail scattered over the
dark branches. Or shed tears. Possibly, his own tears scattered through the
moss of the earth, dancing to the rhythm of his heart’s beat. And there he
began to remember those moments from the previous day, plucking the strings of
his magic harp in an evening half-sleep.
And then those tears dried and dissipated, and the stars
hid in the absolute darkness of the firmament. The sun departed hand in hand
with the aurora borealis, and the moon waned again in its solitude until
returning to its dark phase. Only a void, as vast as an abyss. Possibly,
outside of time and space. The beginning of everything. The silence. The
nothingness. Complete darkness once more.
After moments of lethargy, suddenly, a protracted crack
exploded in the middle of his forehead, piercing his eardrums like thunder,
leaving behind a trail of new silence. And then, as if returning to that
reverie for a moment, he heard a weak beat of his heart, almost imperceptible.
And a second. And then one more, until reaching the rhythm and timbre identical
to that of a distant drum, resonating in the distance lost amongst the branches
of the forest oaks.
The murmur of the wind brought with it sounds of old, from
places far away and hidden in memory. Its echo still appeared veiled, as if it
had been trapped in a giant, empty skull that occupied the entire firmament.
The wind bore a scent of sea salt and wet sand mixed with the mistletoe. It was
as if he were witnessing an ancestral rite, where the dance of the oracle wove
itself. He visualised the universe as a gigantic bubbling cauldron, suspended
over the frigid threshold of the abyss, melting the very fabric of existence,
slow, inescapable, erasing reality with its icy breath.
Intuition dragged Eirik towards that fiery heart opening
before his eyes. It was a titanic crucible that drank in all of existence in
long draughts, leaving out all that was perhaps condemned to cease
existing—strands of shapeless matter and languishing energy, which unravelled
as they moved away, until dissolving completely into the infinity of the
distant abyss. The stars themselves, which still retained the snowy appearance
of hail, glided in rows towards that rift and disappeared inside, one after the
other, abandoning the black firmament.
I stared fixedly at the centre of that black hole in the middle of the vastness of space, half-understanding what was happening.
At the gates of that cleft, I began to discern diaphanous
spheres turning in a hypnotic circle. As I fixed my gaze, I perceived how a
silver thread, as fine as a moonbeam, pierced each drop, binding the drupes of
the mistletoe to the very fabric of the firmament. It was as if the Norns had
descended to anchor my own steps to the stars, transforming the dark branches
into a tapestry of unknown constellations; knots of light where those spinners
had raised the milestones of my own path. I could not tear my gaze away.
Captivated, I saw my own reflection in that distant moment when I returned to
the village under the dark solstice, with the doors adorned with holly and
mistletoe.
The ancient vitkar, guardians of ancestral runic magic,
told that mistletoe is the supreme protector of past memories and the great
revealer of the uncertain destiny of mortals. They called it 'Urd’s drop', for
they believed that within its white drupes lay trapped the frost of what was
and the mist of what is to be. Yet it is, in turn, the architect of the
transformation of all that walks upon time. When its small sprigs release their
scent of old oak resin—an essence stolen from the tree’s memory—and the waxy
drupes gleam like the clear pearls that fall from the sky during a storm,
Yule's golden twilight becomes the magical portal that gives way to the beyond.
The beyond—a realm where existence is a simple reverie, where the end and the
beginning of everything clasp hands once more.
For a fleeting instant, I understood that those ethereal
bubbles were but canvases painted by my own invention, illusions framed by the
crystal of my tears. Tears born of the burning longing that those were, not
visions, but real experiences of mine. And the agitated beats of my heart
confirmed to me that they were memories of my true past.
Upon wiping them away, those images disappeared in a slow
spiral turn, and he found himself again before that immense, sombre hollow,
with the absolute conviction of what he was experiencing. He recognised in it
the gateway to his inner universe.
That portal began
to light up little by little. The magnetic cleft began to seethe with a sacred
fire that, without consuming what it touched, restored everything to its purest
essence, brimming with life and renewed energy. With the glow reflected in his
dilated pupils, a pressing intuition pushed him towards the threshold. In his
thoughts, the frigid figure of Hagalaz rose like an inscrutable sign, an
implacable beacon indicating the path he must follow. Without a shred of
hesitation, his arm extended with an irrepressible impulse, and inertia dragged
him towards those glowing jaws. He let himself be devoured. Now his body was a
shadow merging with the fire, only to vanish.
- I. OVERTURE: My Name is Eirik
- II. EXORDIUM: "MYTHOS", Symphony of a Wandering Soul
- III. RESONANCE: My Story and the Secret of the Shadows
- IV. PRELUDE: Eirik's Dirth
- CHAPTER 1: Eirik and the Secret of Avalon
- CHAPTER 2: Discovery in Atlantis
- CHAPTER 3: In the Shadows of Hades
- CHAPTER 4: The Pull of Niflheim
- CHAPTER 5: The Icy Breath of Yule
- CHAPTER 6: Return to Mabon
- CHAPTER 7: Eirik and the Mystery of the Sirens
- CHAPTER 8: The Mirror of the Lake of Shadows
- CHAPTER 9: Finale
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