Hearth Talk: Timber and Bedbugs

Darth Farter

I came upon the hall of White Finch and laid hands upon the treasures of his so-called barn, though by Odin’s beard, no barn of honest timber ever held so many soft comforts, trinkets, cushions, and suspicious luxuries. This was no barn. This was a jarl’s pleasure-hall wearing the skin of a shed. There beneath its roof I claimed a bed and slept as a conquering king. Yet when dawn split the darkness, I rose not alone. An army of tiny blood-drinking fiends had feasted upon me through the night. Bedbugs! Crawling bastards of Hel! They had taken me as kin without oath, invitation, or ale. I left White Finch’s hall richer in stolen goods, poorer in blood, and sworn never again to trust a mattress beneath another man’s roof. Thereafter I turned my hand to the noble craft of slaughter. Thirty-two necks met the judgment of my blade. Thirty-two heads fell from thirty-two shoulders and rolled upon the earth like cabbages cast from a farmer’s cart. I carved no tally upon stone, for the ground itself remembered, and the ravens had counted well enough. Let lesser men make monuments to their deeds. Mine were measured in silence, steel, and severed heads. Then strange tales reached my ears. Men whispered of shameless exhibition, indecent exposure, and deeds committed without tunic, trouser, or proper fear of the gods. Rumor spoke of a maiden wandering unclothed through fern-gilded forest floors, blissfully unaware that every pine tree, deer, troll, and wandering warrior had been granted a spectacle for which none had paid admission. Whether maiden, forest spirit, or ale-born hallucination, I cannot say.