Katja heard voices only dimly as she sank to her belly, consumed by the nebulous stars that dripped down around them. Like a thick black oil they seeped into her bones and she trembled, gasping, but opening her mouth only allowed the star-liquid to flow into her, freezing cold and choking her. "They want to know what you see," a deep voice observed to her. She lifted her eyes to the speaker to see a grizzled old battlescarred male - a coat of reddish brown long since gone to gray, one-eyed and yellow-toothed, but with the burly build of a warrior who has not gone soft in his age. She had never seen this male, could not comprehend him. "I saw many children," she gasped aloud through the slick star-night. "The line of the Finnvi repeated back and back, and on and on. As my cousins were born, god-touched and sacred, so shall we be reborn again."
"Yes," the battlescarred male answered her back thoughtfully, "I have seen thusly as well. Do you know me?"
A mute shake of her head.
"Oh, but you do, as I know you... You are sworn to Freyja, Katja Finnvi." He stalked forward to stare deeply into her wide silver gaze. "But she answers to me, ulfr. You will do as I bid you."
The stars left her with a rush to race cackling for the sky, and the moon-serpent curled about her cousins as air filled her lungs and sight returned to her once again. The grizzled male stepped over her, touched his nose to Laufey's and her pale tall cousin dissolved with a bright scattering of stardust. He dropped his one eye in a solemn wink, and the stardust coated his form, leaving only Laufey standing there gleaming from within. Katja lurched to her feet. Everything she had seen coalesced, the sudden bright light of understanding illuminating the visions like dust motes in a sunbeam.
"I know who you are," she spoke to the creature who had borrowed Laufey's form in a low gravelly voice, her hackles spiking wildly in superstitious alarm, as though a bolt of lightning had struck her. "I know what I must do." On legs that shook as though she had run the length of the continent and back, with eyes that were more pupil than they were silver and the air thick with dreams she could not flee from, she turned and bounded away into the shuddering darkness.
-exit Katja-
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