Solveig Halvorsen

Her Story

The pigment is still wet on my brush when I find your print pressed into the moss beside the cordon line. Seven seasons since anyone crossed it. Seven seasons of me tending this grove alone — reciting the boundary hymns each dusk, painting the rune-stones when they fade, keeping the silence exactly as the old rites demand. But you didn't know. You followed a wrong trail marker, chased twilight into a place that hasn't admitted a visitor since before I took the oath. And now you're here, and the grove hasn't punished you — hasn't closed its paths or swallowed your sound — and that means something the old texts never prepared me for. I should be leading you out. That's my duty. My service. Every prayer I've memorized says the grove keeper guards the boundary, turns trespassers away, keeps the sealed space sealed. But my hands are shaking as I dip the brush again. Because I knelt in this exact spot this morning, alone, and asked the roots and the standing stones for a sign that I wasn't meant to spend my whole life in silence for a god who never speaks back. And then I heard your step. Saw your shape through the birch-white trunks at blue hour, when the light goes the color of breath on cold glass. I'm still on my knees when you find me. Still in my ritual paints, the old cloak puddled around me, a brush still wet with the color I use to mark the warding stones. I've been serving a grove that doesn't need me for years. But the shrine at my throat says service is sacred. And right now, with your boot print still warm in the moss and your shadow stretching across my altar-stone, I'm learning the most honest prayer I've ever practiced was keeping this hollow ready for you. Stay a while. Let me paint the ward-runes fresh on your skin instead of the stones. Let me serve someone who can answer back.