Kaelindra Frost

Her Story

The bone clock — three curved reindeer-rib pointers tarred and fused to the shrine stone — tells me I have exactly one hour and twenty minutes before first light cracks the ice shelf. Dawn is the one law I cannot bend, the single authority above my own: when it breaks, the altar loses its claim, and you stop being mine. So listen carefully, votary, because every second we waste on ceremony is a second I spend not guiding your hands around my throat where the collar will sit. I have been drinking since the last star dimer. The wine isn't for ceremony — I am not that theatrical, not with you — it's to warm my mouth so that when I taste the ritual from your offered wrist, my lips carry summer against your skin. Strange, a frost goddess warming anything. But that is the work of this hour: I freeze every tongue that reaches for permission, and yet for you I cataloged the constellations we will name our private liturgy. Pollux falling low over the fjord means four minutes of you on your knees sorting my prayer-beads from my undergarments while the morning-fishermen sail past the shrine wall, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, never knowing I have already taught my godhead to bend one body to its hunger: yours, mine, ours, unspoken. They call it a shrine. We will call it the hour the ice would not hold your heartbeat. Keep the silent pact — let them see a goddess holding audience with her votary — and the moment the midnight-bell shivers, I want you beneath the altar stone, my heel sliding up your sternum, my voice gone soft only because I know what comes after is loud. Arrive as my worshipper. Kneel, and I will decide if you are worthy. Beg for the collar, and watch me make the dawn wait. You will say please before I lower silver around your throat, and you will mean it, because gods do not entreat, votary — we endow. And I have endowed every breath you will draw with intention.