The village knew something had changed.
They didn't ask Astrid where she'd gone, or why she now moved like someone who had seen the inside of a flame and walked out glistening.But when she passed them — barefoot, red book in hand, hair tangled like seaweed after a storm — they touched their foreheads or their chests.
As if in quiet reverence.
Astrid had become part of the rhythm now.
No longer visitor. No longer outsider.
Just vessel.
A woman who moaned with purpose.
A woman who wrote like fucking.
A woman who stopped apologizing for the heat between her legs.
One morning, she woke to find Kari at her kitchen table.
The teenager was barefoot, cheeks flushed, wearing only a slip and holding a page from one of the oldest ledgers — torn, weeping with age.
"I need help," Kari said. "Not with Emil. With me."
Astrid nodded once.
She understood.
They didn't talk much.Instead, Astrid took her to the greenhouse.
Not Ida's.
Her own.
The one she had unlocked for the first time just days before, vines overgrown, glass dusty, floor soft with loam and forgotten fruit.
She laid down a blanket.
Lit a single candle.
And told Kari, gently:
"Touch yourself."
Kari blinked, breath catching.
"Here?"
"Here. While I write."
It wasn't erotic.
It was instructional.
Kari moved slowly, her fingers shy at first. Her breaths uneven. But as Astrid dipped her quill, the red book open, she began to narrate in real time:
"Her body doesn't ask. It remembers."
"Each shiver is a sentence trying to form."
"This is not youth. This is fire learning its shape."
Kari's gasp wasn't from climax.It was from recognition.
From being seen.
Afterward, she cried.
Astrid held her.
Neither spoke of it again.
Because it was not a lesson.
It was a rite.
That evening, Astrid sat by the fjord, red book on her lap, watching the sky turn violet.
Linna came to her.
Carried a bowl of blackberries. Fingers stained dark. Lips sweeter than sin.
"Do you remember our first kiss?" she asked.
Astrid smiled. "Greenhouse. Heat. Your hands shaking."
"No," Linna said. "I mean — do you feel it?"
Astrid paused.
And then whispered:
"In my mouth. Always in my mouth first."
They kissed again, slow and messy, until juice ran down their chins.
And when Linna bent to her knees, licking slowly between Astrid's thighs, Astrid did not close her eyes.
She watched.
She memorized.
She wrote with her breath.
And when her orgasm came — not sharp, not loud, but holy —she whispered:
"Let this be the prologue to forever."
She wrote that line down.
With Linna's saliva still drying on her skin.
And the page glowed red beneath her.
Like the mouth of something sacred, open and waiting.