Day 134 Writing Short Stories

Spirit

You were never good with words or good with orders. You always believed in nature and the spirits that lived in every tree, lake, and mountain around you, in the spirit that lived in you. There, in the howling night, you had your conviction.

They had come to your lands, to the heart of the trolls and the Näkki, claiming the lands belonged to their God—one with a child, a ghost, and a father. They told you to kneel and drink their blood and eat their corpse as a blessing and a sign of your compliance. You watched as row after row of your people knelt and took the blood and the corpse. You left, returning to the one place that held your ancestral waters.

There you stood, grounded next to the columns of water frozen solid for ten thousand men to walk on. The trolls that guarded the place had curled into boulders beneath snow blankets that sparkled in the dawning light.

The horizon was dyed pink and pastel blue, and you sighed. Your breath swirled up, sending your thoughts to the sky where only the most tenacious birds flew. The snow-covered land was not for the weak or the glorious. It was for the strong, who knew when to act and when to fall silent, possessing only what was needed.

You twisted your fingers around the hilt of your axe and waited for the men in robes with royal insignias to come and claim something that never was theirs, the land that belonged to the spirits and your ancestors.

They came as they were meant to come, little black dots, coming for your food and your ale, and your soul. They came, and the man and his God spoke, and you growled and raised your axe. You drove them to the lake and struck the man robed in insignias down, watching as his blood discolored the pureness of the white. You left him there for the spirits to take, letting their God strike you down through his men. But what had to be done was done.

—

What I got today was a comical historical fiction of a quest written in the second person. I didn’t quite get the comical part, but otherwise, I wrote about the stories I grew up with. Finland was once part of Sweden. We are a relatively new country, having belonged either to Sweden or Russia (in “modern times”) until Russia gave us the right to vote for independence.

The story is about a peasant, Lalli, who struck down Bishop Henry, who came to Christianize the local pagans when we were under the rule of Sweden. Before Christianity, Finland had an animistic religion, hence the stories of nature spirits, trolls, and our pagan gods, which were all to go under Swedish political and military expansion over Finland’s territory. All this happened despite Swedish royalty consorting with Sámi witches, who were known for their “strong dark magic”. (Sámi are not the same as Finns despite us sharing identical Siberian genes. The Sámi were the first to arrive in Finland. Sweden criminalized Sámi religion, too.)

Anyway, long story short. Bishop Henry and his convoy took possession of Lalli’s food and supplies when he was away, and he didn’t like that at all. He sought the bishop and killed him with an axe at Lake Köyliönjärvi. Some stories made him a folk hero who defended our ways, but who knows what is true? Some historians see the legend as figurative rather than true, but Lalli still lives in our stories, and he is seen as one of the good guys. Maybe not by the most devout Christians, but even they want to screw the Swedes over.

Thank you for reading! Have a momentous day, and see you tomorrow ❤