Chapter Text

Part I

She was an old, weathered thing, more draped, threadbare fabric than skin and hair.  The dark folds of her shawl reached all the way to the ground, pooling like an oil slick at her feet before disappearing into the thick shadows of the hut.  That darkness seemed to cling to her, entangling her like trendles born of darkness and mist, despite the orange-red glow of the roaring fire in the far corner.  It flickered, causing the shadows to dance and the cauldron suspended above to boil noisily.

Old as she was, there was a fire in her eyes and wisdom in the crooked set of her thin lips, and when she looked at Steve, he was sure he felt the weight of ages crashing down upon him.  It petrified him, like a tree branch bleached by the wild sea and the burning sun, and for a moment, Steve forgot how to breathe.

Few could stand before the Völva and not feel the urge to turn tail and flee.

Steve postured and squared his shoulders, steeling himself against the fear he felt.  He was no coward, and he was not a regular man.  He was born under the right moon and stars to parents of the highest standing, and so he was one of the few welcomed into the darkness of the witch’s home.  All men of importance had to take the journey through the forsaken wood and to the old crones’ hut.  It was tradition, a rite of passage of the highest esteem, and Steve had a great destiny looming before him.  He needed the blessing and guidance of the Fates, not only for his sake but for all those in his care.

Or at least, that was what the royal advisors claimed with their books and revered rituals.

“You ask for things you do not desire,” the woman cooed from her seat, stitched of bear and wolf fur.  Steve could see the way her throat muscles flexed with each raspy word.  They seemed to cause her great pain to say, and the way her eyes flicked up and down Steve’s body had the young king’s fingers itching to feel the hilt of his sword.

It wasn’t many who could call a king a liar and expect to live past dawn, but the Völva was untouchable.  Protected by the gods and the voice of their intent made solid on earth.  Steve had to grit his teeth and bear it.

After all, her snarled words spoke only truth.

When he’d come into her earthen hut, and she’d turned her fiery eyes on him, Steve had done what was expected of him.  He’d bowed deeply, and when asked for his boon, he’d recited as all those before him had.

“I seek the future,” he’d said.  “I seek the way of the world, the direction of my life, and the bride that will sit by me through all.”

The witch-mother had called his falsehood the moment he’d opened his mouth.

“It is forbidden to lie,” the Völva continued, the words flowing together in a mess of abhorrence and disgust.  Her shoulders rolled forward and hunched as she drew wetness from somewhere deep within her body and spat it to the floor with a hiss.  It was a curse, wild and destructive and the way she looked up at Steve from between her thinning eyelashes turned his blood cold.  “To travel three and seven days and scratch at my door with untruths is to beg for damnation.

“You take, take, take.  In the light.  In the dark.  All you do is snatch and claw and keep and lie.”  Steve gulped.  He couldn’t pretend to understand, but the venom of the woman’s words had him feeling shamed nonetheless.

When she stood, it came paired with the creak of bones and a sigh so deep that Steve felt it all the way down to his core.  His bones ached in sympathy.  She moved like a corpse reanimated, all jolted motions and trembling steps.  But the ferocity was still there in her eyes, and she flashed them towards Steve with such malcontent that Steve knew he’d be haunted by them for the rest of his days.

“Speak your truth or be gone,” she snarled, the sounds hissing between her cracked, chapped lips like a viper.  “Time waits for no fool.”

Steve felt himself freeze.  This wasn’t how this was meant to go.  His father had guided him on the practice as a small child, and the royal advisors and even the wizened old alchemist had schooled him in the rituals of the witch.

Ask for the way and accept the boon; live as Fate decreed, and all would be well.  

Yet. 

For a long time, Steve had known that he was different.  That his gaze lingered in directions that it shouldn’t; that was not until after he’d sired an heir.  After that, he was free to choose, or so history suggested.  But before then, Steve was not his own and was not afforded the luxury of choice.  It was the way of things.  His duty and his purpose; to kin, country and subject.

Steve breathed in deep, tasting the drying herbs above the fire, and the blood splattered across the altar in the corner, and the Gods only knew what else on the humid air.  The hut was an assault on the senses, and the crone’s eyes were still tracking every shift that Steve made.

Truth?  If there was one thing that Steve was painfully aware of, it was that truth was subjective.  It was in the eye of the beholder and formed on the tongues of the powerful.  The truth was what he decreed it to be, and he could hide and smother and kill his own realities with little more than a look, a smile and a kingly wave.

None of that would help him here, though.  The crone could see all, and Steve had the unsettling feeling that she already knew everything.  Deep down he knew it didn’t matter what he said.  She knew, and she was testing him.

“I see eyes,” Steve finally admitted.  He’d never said any of this out loud before.  It was not his place to dream of the future or to clutch feeble desires to his breast.  He was sworn to rule, and to rule was to be forever in servitude.  To his country, his people, and those that looked to him in their direst hours.  To the great line that stretched out behind him; the series of favourable matches that had produced offspring, leading right up to him; the golden child, born of the sun and light and the guiding star hovering above the moon.

“In my dreams,” he continued around a thick swallow.  “Eyes of silver and starlight and hair dark as the night.”  Beauty; was the word left unsaid.  The darkened counterpart to his own shining light.  The shadow to his sun and his compliment in every way.

But that was not all, and Steve drew a deep breath through his nose.  This time it carried the acrid tang of rotting mulch, animal entrails, and the stench of unwashed cloth.

“They are not the eyes of a princess,” he sighed.

A twisted smile tore at the old crone’s lips, the expression grotesque as it stretched leathery skin just shy of breaking.  Steve was sure he could see blood pooling beneath the surface, ready to burst free from its paper-thin confines.

“And?” The Völva looked positively lecherous, her eyes gleaming with the colour of fate weaving and stretching and breaking apart countless futures.

Steve swallowed thickly, his eyes flicking to the relative safety of the fire.

“I yearn,” Steve confessed.

“For what?”  Prompt?  Command?  Irregardless, it was another hiss and another undeniable instruction to continue.  Steve didn’t want to.  So much of him wanted to turn on his polished boots and run; flee to his horse and manservant waiting outside, and ride into the sunrise.  Drench himself in the golden light that he was said to be born of, and forget this dark, foreboding place.

“To touch,” Steve said through an exasperated sigh.  He’d come too far to run, and maybe – just maybe – the old woman would be able to help him.  It was her fate, so maybe she wouldn’t turn him away and curse every step he was destined to take.

“To touch and to feel and to hold.  Soft darkness and yet so much strength.  I see a man chosen by Fate in my sleep, and it keeps me wakeful and restless and empty.” 

The woman’s eyes burned Steve, and he felt his cheeks flush with heat that rushed all the way to his ears.  He shuffled his feet, conscious of his unease as his eyes once again flicked to the side, determined to look at anything other than her.

It was a jackrabbit, Steve decided.  The dead thing pulled apart across the great stone of her altar near the fire.  A hare gone to the knife, and he could see it now.  The ears bloody and matted, and the paws severed and tied with rope.  He’d heard of lucky rabbits’ feet before but never contemplated how they’d be made.  The torso was still mostly intact, white stained with red, and now that Steve could see the scene for what it was, he found himself transfixed.

He was no stranger to blood or death.  He was a king, after all.  When not at war, he hunted, and he could skin and dress his own game with ease.  But there was something different about this.  Something dark and seemingly forbidden that made his stomach churn with uncertainty.

“Lust; life; all the same,” the woman brushed Steve’s confession off like it was nothing, and the strange clicking sound she made in the back of her throat brought Steve’s attention back to her.  “You do not pose me with a question, child king,” she snarled, “only fantasies of a mind weighted with shadow.”

Questions?  She wanted questions, and Steve didn’t know what he was meant to say.

His lips, tongue, and heart had a different opinion, though.

“Will I find him?” Steve asked into the darkness of the hag’s hut, so sudden and surely that he frowned the moment they were out.  They seemed to echo around the room, ringing in his ears and reminding him of all he was putting on the line.

“Can I find him?” he finished.

Steve had long contemplated the vision of his desires.  The man with the wild hair and the eyes that held the stars.  He was winter-born, always hooded and cloaked against the cold, with his half smiles existing only for Steve and his dreams.  He moved like one raised from the land, sure-footed and with a hand seemingly always out to trail over the bark and leaves that surrounded him.  And in his mind’s eye, Steve saw those plants respond.  Saw them twist and bend and grow into those pale fingers.  He had hair that curled around his collarbone, sometimes wet with humidity and sometimes flecked with white specks of snow.

He seemed just as otherworldly as Steve’s dreams, and there wasn’t a single part of Steve’s known world where this man could exist.

The woman before him hacked a cough that sounded like it hurt, then shuffled her old body towards the fire.  For a moment, Steve was sure that this was it; she was done and going to return to her seat and send him on his way.

She changed her course before the chair, and the flash of firelight made her skin seem almost translucent.  For a horrifying moment, Steve saw bone, a skeleton walking, wearing the guise of stolen skin in order to remain among the living.

How old was she?  Steve knew it wasn’t something to be asked, but he also knew that stories of the cold crone stretched back as long as his family lineage.  Uncounted winters and wars long since passed; the Völva always there, mentioned in the lore of his people and held in the highest of regards.

It was to the altar that she turned, and to Steve’s shock, it was the butchered rabbit that her wrinkled fingers and blackened nails found.  Without hesitation or apprehension, she grabbed the torso and a knife of twisted iron and bone and ripped what was left of the hare apart.  There was something primal about her movements; vicious and strange and contradictory to how Steve would usually dress the spoils of his hunt.  Where he cut with precision and methodically peeled, she scratched, shredded, and ripped until the tiny heart was held between her knobbly fingers.

The crone brought the organ to her lips, and she licked it in a way that turned Steve’s stomach.

She swished the blood in her mouth, siphoning it between the gaps in her teeth and aerating it before swallowing the bloody mixture down.  Steve felt the heat from his earlier flush disperse, and the hut seemed to grow cold, the mud and stick and earthen brick walls marching in to smother them all.

With one last look at the wretched thing, the Völva dropped the heart into her left palm and with a strength that her frail frame shouldn’t have possessed, she crushed then flung it into the pot of boiling liquid hanging over the fire.  The brew hissed and spluttered, and for a terrifying moment, Steve was sure he saw the outline of a wild hare formed in the steam.

Next, the old crone turned her attention to the intestines.  She pulled them out like a rope, twisting them about her fingers and knuckles and flicking the sinew with the thick, off-coloured nail of her thumb.

“The heart was strong,” she said as if that meant anything to Steve.  What was that supposed to mean?  How did that relate to the questions she’d pried from his unwilling lips?

Her bloody fingers shifted along the entrail, pushing and prodding and feeling for something that Steve couldn’t even imagine existed.  He’d gutted his food before, and he’d never found the way of the world or the voice of the gods in the process.

She hissed again and flicked more blood into the fire before her, and when the flames roared and hissed and spluttered, her head lolled to the side.  And then she laughed.  A deep but hollow rattling sound that chilled Steve’s bones like no winter storm ever had.

“Darkness,” she finally said, and Steve wasn’t sure what he was meant to make of that.  Darkness could mean so much.  The end of a golden day and the start of night; but wasn’t even night illuminated by the light of the stars and moon?  Or maybe it was an end.  The end.  The nothingness that came when the body died.  The monks and priests of home spoke of something more.  Golden eternity or scorched penance, but even they still sought the advice of the Völva.  Didn’t that make their faith and ideals weak and unsolidified?  Was it not all connected, at least in some way?

“There is darkness before you.  And black and red and the blue of bloodless lips.

“You stand on a wheel,” the woman said.  Her weathered fingers again sank into the incision and came out dripping afresh.  This time she used the blood to draw a circle on the stone of her hearth, the line broken by the craggy divots in the rough rocks, and the smoke-dried moss clinging to the crevices.  It all hissed and steamed with the heat of the flame below.

Steve felt his eyebrow raise on its own accord.  That didn’t sound promising.  Not in the slightest.

“But know that the spider will bite,” she said while stirring her pot.  Steve wasn’t sure what she was talking about, and in his discomfort and paranoia, he glanced at his left shoulder, then his right, just to ensure there were no creeping familiars.  “Red like the colour of blood; black like your desires.  But life will be short.  The venom is strong, and the poets will recite your name for years upon years to come.”

She drew herself up then, her shoulders squaring as best they could.  It seemed like even the threadbare fabric she wore tried to pull her down with its weight.

“So beware the east,” the witch warned with a shake of her finger, “beware the spider.”  It seemed to rattle and flail unnaturally like the bones had long since given up the fight to hold together.

“Beware the spider,” Steve repeated back, a childlike notion of someone learning and committing words to memory.

“Arwk,” the crone hacked, the sound half patronizing and half like she was struggling to breathe.  She repeated it again, and this time her body did convulse grotesquely.

“Children repeat,” she snarled, and Steve somehow knew he’d done the wrong thing.  Offended her in a way that he’d never understand.  “Mimic and copy.  Men should listen, yet only kings understand.”

Steve wanted to hiss himself; growl his own frustrations into the oppressive air of the hut.  It was claustrophobic and stifling, and the longer he spent in here with the scent of mould and decay and whatever was bubbling over the fire, the more uneasy he felt.  His head was starting to spin; his eyes starting to blur, and he found himself blinking rapidly to keep the old crone in focus.

“Your destiny is in the east,” she huffed.  The words all ran together, trickling from her mouth of broken teeth like water over rocks, and the hurried tone marked her waning interest in Steve’s affairs.  “Eight legs, jewelled crowns, and a shroud of gold and silk to sit upon your tomb.”

Steve frowned, the words rolling through his head in confused loops and twisted meanings.  Before he could ask the questions his tongue couldn’t seem to form, the crone turned to him once more, and her drawn face seemed different somehow, dragged down by more than just her years.

“To the east, you should go,” she proclaimed.  Her words were soft, hardly spoken whispers of breath that had Steve leaning in so close he could smell her.  She was soil and earth and decay; the sweetness of blood and rot on her lips, and must in the voluminous folds of her robes.  “To a place cold and white, where red and beauty await you.  As is foretold.”

“But you said that—”

“Not all destinies are long, child,” she interjected.  “And less than half of them remarkable.”

She huffed as she sat herself back in her chair.  The old thing was made of half rotten wood and lashings of fur and leather long since frayed, and to Steve’s eye, it was remarkable that it didn’t give way under her weight, slight as it was.

“Perhaps you are destined for nothingness.  An end of quickness and death and to rot within the earth – why must you be great?”

Why?  Because he was king!  Steve may be confused, and he may be conflicted about his desires, and his dreams might haunt him long into the light of day after waking, but he was still king!  The son of the sun and the herald of light.  Golden of hair and strong as the summer winds off the great sea that his ancestors had once crossed.  Steve was destined to be great, just like his father and his father before that.  It was foretold!  And yet this old hag wanted him to journey to lands that apparently marked his demise? 

Steve huffed, feeling ire rise, and then his tongue – once so tied and languid – formed words that had been sitting heavily in the pit of his stomach from the moment he’d come in here.

“Witch!” Steve spat, the word more an insult than an observation.  “Yet you tell me nothing, old crone!”   

Where was the wise woman of old?  The one that had guided his ancestors and forefathers?  The one who had set them on their paths to greatness and sowed the seeds of opportunity?  The Völva who was said to have driven a hundred kings and whose advice had won a thousand wars?

“You speak in riddles and peddle nonsense.  And you say naught of use.”  The words were coming unbidden now, the result of pent-up frustration and a low simmering rage that Steve hadn’t known was inside of him.

When he’d set out on his journey to this hut in the middle of the darkest of woods, he’d been sceptical.  He’d never really believed; not in the old gods and not in the new.  Steve put weight and value in the actions of the men around him and the cries of the people he ruled over.  He found strength within himself and his convictions and judged right from wrong not through the lens of divine intervention, but through the impact his actions created.  The actions of the living had always meant more to Steve than any prophecy.

His lips parted to say more, to curse the woman with the power of the sun that Steve was meant to be born of, and yet the words died just as quickly as they’d come.  The look she sent him chilled Steve to the bone.  It was cold and icy, distant and yet laced with such malice and discontent that it burned like fire.

Steve had never knelt before anyone other than his father, but under the crone’s gaze, he felt his knees seemingly pulse with the need to fall to the floor and plead forgiveness.  Forgiveness for his petulance, for his self-righteousness and his disrespect.

“East is where you need go,” the woman said, the words a repeat of her past advice.  This time, though, her tone left little to be questioned or argued, and her gaze pierced Steve like a sword.

“But it’s not where you need stay.”  There was blood left on her fingers, and Steve saw it the moment she seemed to remember.  She lifted her pale hand, the skin wrinkled and hanging from the bone in a way that reminded Steve of his childhood nightmares, and then she touched those red-stained fingers to her lips.  Steve half expected her tongue to be forked as it darted out and lapped at the blood, and for a moment – a single, terrifying moment – Steve was sure that the old crone’s eyes flashed and glowed red when she swallowed.

“Die in the east,” she said with a wave of her bloodied hand, “die in the south.  Either way, foolish king, you meet your end.  An end of all things and reflections of dying heavens.”

Deep down, Steve knew that he deserved it.  After his outburst, he deserved the venom of her tongue.  But that sounded far more like a curse than a prediction, and in that moment, Steve felt every choice he’d ever made stack up against the rashness of his previous words.  Was this it?  Was that one moment of uncontrolled anger enough to bring about his ruin and end?

He swallowed deeply, and the royal in his blood saw him lifting his chin defiantly even as he felt his heart sink.  The crone was meant to give him answers, not riddles where every choice was demise and destruction.  How was he meant to return to his court with naught more than a death sentence and curse bearing down upon his shoulders?

“The choice is yours,” the Völva answered his unspoken questions, “now begone from my sight and never return.”

“Well?”

Steve didn’t pause for the blinding sunlight nor the half-pleaded question repeated by his manservant.  He needed to get out of here.  He needed to put space between himself and the haunting eyes of the old woman and the lingering curse between them.

He mounted his horse and flicked the reins, his head turning towards the west.

West was home, and home was safe.  Steve could see his mother again, lay flowers at his father’s grave, walk amongst his people and feel the sun on his face.

No one had to know.

What happened in that hut between him, the old crone and his future didn’t need to spread beyond the twisted sticks and hardened mud that kept the ancient place standing.  Steve could return home, and he could play the part of triumphant.  Spin any tail he wanted to.  Promises of a princess in an unclear future; she must overcome an obstacle before she could be found.  But when she did, they would find each other, and the country would know prosperity.

With no witnesses and no record of the words spoken, he could spin this any way he wanted.

But could Steve lie?

He had tried with the witch.  He’d veiled the truth behind expected words, and she’d seen right through him the moment they’d left his mouth.  But she was the herald of the gods, not a doting mother or an expectant household ready to see in the new chapter of their royal family.  A country and her people would believe the words of their king above all others.

And yet.

West meant something else, as well.  It was undoubtedly denial and secrets, but it was also purgatory.  A life frozen in wait of discovery.  Steve knew his mother; she’d take the Völva’s words as a holy proclamation, but that wouldn’t deter her matchmaking attempts nor stop the neighbouring kingdoms from sending their eligible daughters to Steve’s door.

And who was to say that the spider wasn’t all-encompassing?  What if Steve avoided the east, chose a different bride and met his end all the same?  Spiders, after all, came from everywhere.  They lived in the darkness and in the crevices of the home, ready to strike at their own will.

What was the point of cheating fate if it only prolonged an end sure to happen?

Maybe it was privilege or Steve’s stubborn will to ask for more, but there had to be other options.  There had to be something else out there for him, a life outside of spiders and death and the misery of the in-between.

There had to be.

Eyes of silver and starlight and hair dark as the night.

One thing was for sure; he’d never be able to live with himself if he didn’t at least try.

“Return home,” Steve instructed.  “I must do the next part on my own.”

That had never been specified, but somewhere deep in his heart, Steve knew it to be true.  He couldn’t find himself with an attendant and watchful confidant at his heels.  He would never understand the world and his part in it if he wasn’t left to flounder and seek the meaning of all for himself.

“Your Majesty,” the man started, “Is that—”

Steve cut him off with a lifted hand and words that came quickly.

“It is as she commanded.”

The servant nodded so deep that it was almost a bow and began walking his horse through the dense trees toward home.

Steve turned his eyes to the east and thought that maybe he could lie after all.

Part II:

She paused to reach for her goblet of wine with her right hand, her fingers delicate but sure as they gripped the golden stem.  It didn’t make it any further, never crossing the seemingly endless divide to her lips.  She cradled the cup in front of her, her stunning eyes now locked onto the liquid inside.  Her hand moved, swirling the wine, and Steve saw the slight motion of her lips as she whispered something unheard into the depths of the drink.  A question?  A promise or maybe a spell – Steve would never know.