Stavanger Bay vikings mourn their dead

This post legit hurt to write. T-T Also, to whomever responds to this no need to match the length and I'm sorry in advanced for a grieving Gyda! <3 (Hover for translations!) 1,117 words — last time i wrote so much was with ragnar, omg.

Dagrún had been an outstanding Jarl and mentor to Átta during her time spent in Odinn's Cove, though his mentorship and rise to power had been at the Viking woman's bequest and at the personal cost of a fight against her uncle Vali, a fight won only because of Ragnar's patient teachings. Gyda had been patient, had watched her uncle spar, studied him and had allowed his arrogance and softness for pretty things that he did not wish to harm but only to possess to be his downfall. Átta had ascended to Queen of the lands that had bore her beloved father. What Gyda had not given Ragnar a chance to teach her by her wanderings, first with his priestess wife Nerian — not out of devotion as Ragnar and her had fought over but out of the need to protect her. Gyda had been a child but Nerian had needed Gyda in a way that her parents and her brothers had not. She needed the aspiring shield-maiden's encouragement and care though they had parted ways at the Cove for Nerian had refused to return to her captivity within the Vikings' ranks. Where her father's priestess wife had ended up was an enigma to the young Dróttning. Gyda did not have qualms about relinquishing full control of the Cove to her half uncle, confident that he would rule them well and in every way that would make Ragnar proud when he heard the news.

Yet, for all Dagrún had taught her, he had not taught her how to stifle the rising panic in her breast when she came upon the majestic arch of Stavanger Bay, her home to find the scent markings that she had known had once been there to be entirely gone. Not even a faint trace of her mother nor her father's scent lingered, nothing old. The Bay was ...devoid of pack life and the absence left a chill down her spine, platinum silver hackles bristling along her spine as unease cooled the boiling panic. Her father had loved this Bay and Gyda could not fathom anything that would make him choose to leave it behind. The sands and sea and forest of ancient ash trees had been sacred to him as if their divines had made their presence known in the earth. Rather, Gyda chose not to fathom what it could mean, refusing to believe what was surely not possible. The dream had been wrong, and the one eyed behemoth had been a projected image of her father ...not her father himself. She had spoken with a conjuring of her subconscious when it was at it's most powerful: in the dreamworld. The mangled throat and blood stained fur of his chest was a project of her worst fear, no doubt cau].sed by the guilt she felt that they last thing they had said to one another had been words heated with anger at one another from their shared stubbornness.

This was what Gyda had spent a good ten minutes telling herself until she had soothed her prickling unease at the utter absence of any life that wasn't prey or sea mammal enough for her to glide through the cold sands beneath her paws, under the arch and set eyes of Caribbean ice — so uncannily like Ragnar's own though it was claimed they shared no blood — to the ash forest. It was damaged. Not to the point of being inhabitable but it was bad. Terror washed through her in time with a blast of icy wind off of the roaring sea behind her, seeping into her veins, to the very marrow of her bones. There was no time to process what had happened to her beloved Bay and though their trail had long since run as cold as the ice caverns of the north Gyda could not help but rush forth, into the foliage thick and overgrown in the absence of constant travel. “móðir!” Gyda screamed into the icy forest, the sting of the ash tree's branches as they pulled at tendrils of her coarse winter coat as they snagged unnoticed as the barreled through, dodging them only enough to avoid getting entirely caught. She was numb to the physical pain she felt. The emotional turmoil as she tried, still, to deny what the gripping and horrific dread was trying to make her see was much, much worse. “faðir” She called for Ragnar, her volume wavering as hysteria began to sink it's teeth into her like one of Loki's serpent: spreading the venom of panic and fear.

No. No, surely Ragnar would hear her. Ragnar would come to find her. He was her Berserker, her father, her protector. The dream was wrong. Ragnar couldn't have died. He was too strong, too intelligent, too legendary. He was everything she had looked up to, a hero, everything Gyda had aspired to be and more than she could have ever hoped to become. Drawn to the heart of Stavanger Bay the mound ...the grave caught her eye. Of course it did. It was near impossible to miss. Gyda's body froze, each muscle pulling taunt beneath her silver coat. She did not want to see, she did not want to know but, morbidly, she could not look away. Slowly, she approached it as if it would physically harm her, extended her nose towards the smooth earth and worried bones beneath the tallest ash tree — no doubt meant to represent Yggdrasil: where Odinn had hung himself in pursuit of knowledge. There were scents she did not recognize, loners surely, one particularly stronger than the other's which had grown faint with time. There was the scent of two other males though she could not find herself lingering upon their individual scents alone for the scent of her mother, though different than she'd remembered it, unmistakable despite that. 

It was not Thistle that lay beneath the frozen earth, under Yggdrasil, then. As the realization Gyda had been trying so hard to fight hit her it slammed into her, with the force of the sea slamming against the harsh rocks. Her legs buckled beneath her and she knelt to the ground, a shriek unlike any she'd heard before leave her body. It was a powerful sound, a haunting sound, filled with grief and agony. “Gyda, I have come to tell you goodbye...” Those words in the familiar, accented voice of her father haunted her now and the valkyrie began to sob. Death was celebrated, yes, Ragnar was in Valhalla with Odinn now, she knew, but she struggled to find joy for the occasion, because it had been a truth she had been fighting against for months; because she had never gotten to atone for their fight, had never gotten the chance to tell him that she was sorry and that she loved him, that she'd been wrong for getting angry and defensive. The knowledge that she would never get the chance to tell him those things was a horrible and dreadful weight upon her chest.