The rocks were warm from the day's last sun, but the air had turned silver — the kind of northern cold that kissed rather than cut. The fjord, still and glassy, shimmered under the full moon like a mirror too honest to look away from.
They came in silence.
Nude.
Some alone, some hand in hand. Old and young. Lovers, parents, friends. Even the children were with caretakers tonight, as the grown world gathered for a ritual older than marriage, older than shame.
Astrid stood at the edge of the flat granite plateau overlooking the water, her feet gripping the mossy stone, her skin bare beneath the linen wrap she had draped loosely over her shoulders. Her pulse was steady but loud. She could feel it behind her eyes, at her wrists, between her thighs.
The Blotnatt.
The sacred night of body remembrance.
A circle slowly formed, candles placed in recesses of stone, the smell of cedar and honey burning in the wind. No one spoke yet. They touched only when invited — a hand at the shoulder, a head resting in a lap, a back pressed gently to a chest.
Then the Widow Åse stepped forward.
Wrapped only in her hair and an ancient shawl, she carried a bowl of saltwater from the fjord. Her voice, when it came, was not loud — but it carried.
"Tonight, we remember the flesh. Not as sin. But as scripture."
Her eyes met Astrid's for the briefest moment.
"We offer what we carry. Grief. Hunger. Shame. And we take what is offered. Comfort. Warmth. Touch. Release."
She dipped a birch branch into the water and anointed the stone at the center.
"Let no desire be judged. Let no touch be taken without answer. Let no part of us be hidden. The fjord sees all. And still it holds us."
The circle breathed together.
And the night opened.
The linen slipped from Astrid's shoulders.
A breeze caught her breasts like soft hands. Her nipples tightened, not from chill, but from exposure — the sacred kind, not the shameful. A different kind of ache settled between her hips. It was not lust. Not exactly. It was permission. And it made her tremble.
Elise appeared beside her.
Not from the forest. Not from sound. She simply was there.
She reached out a single finger and traced Astrid's collarbone. "You came."
"I didn't know if I should."
"You didn't need to know. You just needed to want."
They didn't kiss — not yet.
Instead, Elise led her down to the edge of the rock where others were laying out animal skins, soft blankets, and baskets of warmed fruit and wine.
Leif was there, nude, his thighs smeared in ash and oil, eyes lowered in reverence.
Ida, her stomach full with the slight swell of another child, lay between two women, letting them press her with lavender-soaked cloths.
Kari and Emil lay entwined on a fur rug, his hand open against her breast, her mouth slack with what could have been sleep or surrender.
And somewhere farther down, Mattis offered his wife's foot to another woman's mouth, and laughed when she took it with her teeth.
Astrid knelt on the sheepskin Elise laid for them.
Her heart thundered.
Elise looked at her, serious now. "Do you want to be seen?"
Astrid nodded.
"Do you want to be touched?"
A pause. "Only by you."
Elise smiled, but it was not playful. It was worship.
She leaned in, her hands slow as prayer, and pressed her lips to Astrid's knee.
Then her inner thigh.
Then, with a pause that pulled the stars into Astrid's breath—
Her navel.
Astrid's back arched involuntarily.
Her hands gripped the fur. Her mouth opened.
But Elise didn't rush. Her fingers traced the curve of Astrid's hip, then ran down between her legs — not touching her sex, not yet, but cupping the inside of her thigh, where heat pulsed and ached.
All around them, the sound of breathing deepened.
A moan to the left.
A soft cry to the right.
And the fjord — glass still — waited to reflect it all.
Elise's mouth finally reached Astrid's breast.
The soft flick of her tongue, the slow suck, the gentle scrape of teeth — all of it made Astrid groan.
Not because it hurt.
Because it unlocked.
Unlocked what?
The past.
The tightness she'd carried.
The silence she'd learned in London bedrooms, in writing retreats, in bookstores where sex was always metaphor and never blood.
Now?
It was blood.
And salt.
And tongue.
And the lake didn't just reflect her. It witnessed her.
When Astrid came — and she did, on Elise's fingers, held from behind like a prayer being answered — she didn't cry out.
She exhaled.
Deeply. Like someone drowning who has finally broken the surface.
Elise held her afterward. Not in possession. Not in demand.
Just... held.
As the night moved around them.
As moans rose into the pine-sweet air like hymns.
As touch became language again.
And Astrid, for the first time in a long, long while, forgot who she had been.
She remembered only the now.