Unseen icy fingers close around mine. I watch helplessly as my hand is guided across the embroidery. It stops on the name Karina and the thought of her tugs at my mind, as if she’s stitched a part of herself into the material. I reach for where my necklace should be and feel a pang of regret, but the thread pulls harder, demanding my focus.

A figure steps out from the shadows. She scowls a moment, then smiles. My shoulders drop with relief. I grin at her, then touch the next name – Gerd – and a tiny old lady with long flowing hair appears. I touch more names: Trine and Solveig and Astrid and Britt. My fingers trace the thread like a blind person reading Braille; each stitch tells a story at once familiar and strange.

More and more women appear, until I am surrounded. I look from face to face and my heart overflows with gratitude. They came back for me!

Karina points to the bed. There’s a square of fabric next to the axe. It must have fallen out when I opened the roll of material. I turn it over to see a vertical line crossed by a diagonal one. The same symbol Hel showed me.

‘Karina, what does it mean? What am I meant to do?’

She replies in Norwegian.

I leap from the bed. ‘But I don’t understand!’

She tugs the fabric between my fingers and somehow I know that she has stitched it for me, for this moment. Taking a deep breath, I place my palm over the rune.

Karina intones a deep sound – ‘Nau-dizzz’ – that I’ve heard reverberate in my head before. The other women join her in a circle and the word becomes a chant, swirling around me as they raise their voices in a vortex of energy. I find I’m singing with them. My feet root themselves to the floor as courage rushes up through me, straightening my spine and expanding in my chest. I feel the strength of twenty women.

Suddenly I know what to do.

On Mormor’s bedside table is an embroidery and a small pair of scissors. I take them and scratch the rune into the blade of the axe. Remembering what Hel showed me, I grit my teeth and pull the sharp edge across my palm. I wince in pain, then squeeze my hand and watch as blood drips onto the markings, making them glow white.

I look to Karina, hoping I have done enough, but her image is fading. The women’s features have gone, just like they did after they created the bubble to save me from the draugr. Karina shakes her head, and I know that she cannot stay. I look around the circle and watch my ancestors disappear one by one, like light bulbs going out.

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