Viking Mock-Up 2

Eir Ørendislauss

Motes of burnished copper light swim across Eir’s eyes, dancing rays of fading sunlight sparkling up from the cold water splitting across Dǫgun’s bow as the creaking, cargo-laden longship hisses through the surf towards the harbor just ahead. Dǫgun — ironic she’d be leaving a ship named for the new dawn at dusk. Then again, perhaps it was only fitting for so incongruous a…woman. She was a walking patchwork of contradictions — named for the goddess of healing and medicine, only to have carved her name into the world in such a brutal fashion that it would have seemed a festering wound were it not for the scorched ruins of razed villages burning hot enough to cauterize the blighted lesion that spelled out her sadistic legacy.

Standing but a handful of inches shy of seven feet, towering over many of the deckhands scurrying around her even now, and bulging with enough corded muscle to rival most of the raiders gathering lines as the ship nears its destination, she strikes an imposing, intimidating figure. But even that, as with nearly everything else in her life, can’t go unchallenged; in spite of a body so perfectly sculpted for violence, Eir sports a long, thick braid of pale, golden locks, her aural mane framing a face that might have been called beautiful on any maiden, but is more often considered ‘handsome’ when taken in along with the rest of the woman’s frame. And while her brawn, the silver lines of old scars, and a tightness to her expression perhaps detracts from a conventional femininity, there’s a generosity to her bosom that precludes even the merest hint of confusion over her sex in its own right — the point hammered home even more impactfully by the breadth of a pair of hips that demand to be grasped onto, hauled back on, even, in some primal attempt to press into the bountiful density of her steatopygous rump.

The corner of the once reaver — now swellsword’s mouth twitches upward in a skewed approximation of a smile, that twitch echoed somewhere under the leathers strapped to her legs, as she remembers a few of the times people had been inebriated enough to answer that call and try their luck with her, only to find out why she had been called Digr-Siglutré first hand. That had been before the sickness though, of course. Before she’d been run through, before something within her had been severed, to rot and suppurate like some sort of heavensent curse for tarnishing her divine namesake. Back when she’d worn her hair dark with the ashes of the firestorms that so often marked her passage, back when she’d danced through flames and screams, hacking with axe and sword, crushing with club and hammer, piercing with spear and dagger, littering the ground with corpses and salting the fields with the sanguine leakings of those that had once tended them. Back when death at her hands was a blessing, a boon that the few who were spared learned to pray for as soon as the reality of the incessant, torturous violations and excruciating mutilation they suffered at the mercy of Eir’s reavers sank in. The sight of that coal blackened crown of wild hair cresting a hill or glimpsed through the trees had been an omen of destruction at best, and a promise of ceaseless torment at the worst, once.

But all of that was years in the past, and a thousand miles away by now. The reign of terror — the decade and a half of bloodletting she’d visited upon any city, town, and farmstead she’d thought might have even a scrap of lucre she could pillage or enough people to entertain her — had ended abruptly four years ago when, drunk with a lust for carnage and the cunt before her, Eir had failed to notice the loose boards beneath the table she’d had a woman pinned down upon. It had been an oversight, one that had resulted in the raider’s penetration, even as she’d readied herself to take the wailing whore thrashing about in front of her; one moment the brute was yanking down her leathers and withdrawing her violently erect, cunt tearing, womb crushing slab of sweltering rape, the next, she was slipping forward as the floorboard underfoot dropped out from beneath her. It wouldn’t have been so bad, if it weren’t for the spear that had risen out of the darkness below, stabbing up into the reaver’s groin, splitting the bare flesh just above and to the right of her throbbing tumescence, plunging through viscera as Eir had stumbled forward, the scarlet tip of the blood warmed spike erupting from the woman’s lower back even as the neck snapped somewhere inside her.

In the days that followed, the boy who’d held the lance and his mother that had just barely escaped being raped in that moment would come to wish they had simply died that day. Unfortunately, while Eir might have been the worst among them, her bloodletters weren’t a merciful bunch, and their leader would later shiver and sweat, racked with fever in the cramped confines of a völva’s hutch, but she’d be warmed by the flayed skin of that pair of malcontents through the entire ordeal. The witch healed the raider, but whether by some poor roll of the dice or an angry goddess’ retribution, Eir had woken from her sickness after a fortnight with an increasingly apparent loss in mobility, and while that would pass to an extent, her newfound flaccidity seemed there to stay. Unable to twist and whirl her way through her dance of death, she had been abandoned, waking one day to find her band gone, alone but for the sorceress that had saved her life at the cost of the two things Eir lived for.

In the months the marauder spent recuperating in the cold bog with the völva, she had reflected, planned, and gathered her strength, all while the witch had taught her of pleasures she’d had no time for in the days when her cock had been nearly as deadly as any weapon in her arsenal. In those months of confinement, Eir bore witness to dark crafts and perverse magiks the likes of which she’d only heard of in ballads — and in her weaker days, she’d not only seen, but even felt just what the enchantress was capable of. After four moons worth of augury, ensorcellment and conjuring, the wild haired marauder had gathered enough strength to leave the swamp without purpose beyond distancing herself from nearly half a year of memories still buried and repressed, even after all these years.

She was without a crew, without a home, without the physicality to reclaim the space she’d fought so hard to rip out of the world for herself. The blackened stain of old fires long faded from her hair, her frame perhaps somewhat withered from a half a year before, she set out on an uncertain path toward an uncertain future. She was still known and hated, far and wide; it wouldn’t do to strike out towards lands that knew her name, lands that still bore the scars of her passing, and so she kept to the woods and the wilds. With a limp and a shooting, stabbing, burning line of agony blazing through her guts, it had been hard enough to hunt for food and the prospect of returning to a life of battle was one she’d had to set aside, for a time. Wandering through valleys and over mountains, alone, broken and slowly mending, she’d taken a new name for herself — Eir Órval, the dregs of what she’d once been — and carried that title for another year and a half, a constant reminder of what she’d lost, that she only shed once she’d rejoined the world of men.

The last pair of years had suited her well; she’d lost her limp, returned to fighting form, even if her movements were more brusque than they’d been at the height of her strength. And while her fatal dance had yet to grace the world once more, she was more than capable enough to fetch a high wage guarding caravans and ships; a reality solidified by the weight of the coinpurse handed to Eir Ørendislauss as she gives her client a final nod and steps from the ship to the dock. It wasn’t her place to unload, she’d earned her keep slaughtering half the crew of the battered ship that still lingered behind Dǫgun, lashed to the aft the ship and towed these last three days. No, her job was finished, she’d had her fill of murder, for the time being — it was a different hunger she’d have to feed now, a craving she’d thought herself unable to satisfy after the slackened loins she’d been left with, but the witch had showed her other ways to satiate those desire, opening the gates to a world of possibility. As the Sun dips behind the mountain, a final flash of dusklight flickers across Eir’s eyes, briefly illuminating those icy sapphire orbs as her heavy footfalls thud across the frosted planks of the wharf, a crooked, foreboding half smile twisting the fighter’s lips as she idly wonders how much she’ll need to empty the pouch at her hip to get her fill of mead, company, and cock.