The dagger was heavier than Astrid was expecting. She’d never really held a weapon like it before. The hilt was polished bone with carvings of hunts and battles on every inch of the material. But it was the blade that captured her attention. It was made of blackened steel, with strange runes etched into the flat of the blade. The metal edge was as long as her forearm and sharp enough to split the air with a whistle whenever it was swung. 

The knife shone in the light of the moon, giving it an ethereal sensation as she inspected it. Every inch of it was oiled and polished to perfection. This was a weapon designed to kill, and the girl wondered if that strange rider had ever done so with the blade. She gave it a few experimental swooshes through the air, testing its weight and learning its balance. 

With the blade growing more and more familiar in her hands, Astrid once again turned her eyes to the woods. The trees were thick here, making long-distance visibility difficult; however, she knew that most of the men had gone further down the mountainside. There were precious few trails within the forest, so provided she stayed away from them, she would be fine. The first thing she needed, however, was her bow. 

Astrid flexed her shoulder, feeling it more limber than before and with most of the pain gone. The wound must have been less severe than she’d assumed. And that was certainly a good thing. With a deep breath, she then lowered herself to her knees, silencing her breathing and willing her heart to slow. With her body coming to a halt, she listened, tried to pinpoint where exactly her pursuers were. And the sounds drifted to her, far in the distance. 

The bandits were quite a ways away, still tramping through the snow, occasionally shouting something. That was good. Provided she remained silent, the girl would be able to easily return to her home. From there, all she’d need is to get her bow. It wasn’t a terribly great plan, but it was all she had. 

Slowly lifting herself back to her feet, Astrid glanced around the snowy floor, trying to find places with packed ice or exposed roots. Places she could step without leaving any footprints. A network of footholds spread out in front of her as the girl began to carefully pick her way through the woods. 

The first major obstacle was the hill she had fallen down. It was a steep drop, more an exposed wall of dirt and stone than a gentle incline. It wouldn’t normally be a difficult climb, but with her aching shoulder and the shivering cold, it was a daunting task. Stepping to another patch of leaves, she looked up at the obstacle. 

With a committed sigh, the girl sank the blade of her new dagger into the frozen earth. She picked at the packed dirt until there was a small divot she could push her foot into. It was a very shallow divot, and her leg was straining as she tried to dig a second step, but she managed. Step by step, foot by foot, she made her way up the hill, until finally heaving her exhausted body back to the flat ground.

Astrid struggled back to her feet, leaning against a tree for support and to let her breath catch up with her. Before her lay the remnants of her chase. There were fewer trees here, and the ground between them was scattered with broken arrow and horse tracks. Forcing her legs to continue moving forward, Astrid began to head towards the house, picking up any of the fallen projectiles that still looked usable on her way. One foot in front of the other, she crept towards her home. 

She stared at the moon above as she drifted from shadow to shadow. It was full tonight, and it offered her plenty of light to navigate. But it was a double-edged sword. Any light that she used to move could just as easily be used to find her. 

Her thoughts wandered then, and she thought back to the priestess who she had routinely snuck away from home to talk with. The old woman had spun countless tales of gods and goddesses, doing heroic deeds, but also being frightfully human. That was something that bothered her about her parents’ new “Christian” religion. It strived for perfection. But the priestess had always preached that perfection was impossible. She taught Astrid to take pride in her imperfections. But most importantly, she was the first person to tell her that the gods had made her a girl. It was simply taking the rest of the world time to catch up. 

When Astrid had first come to the woman, seeking guidance on the strange thoughts she had been having, the priestess spun a story. A story of a forgotten pair of gods who were once the sun and the moon. Two brothers, at first, but the moon learned to love, and found peace in the sleeping forms of animals. The moon’s love was so intense, the old woman said, that he became a woman, so she could care for the beings of the ground better and guide them in their sleep. And some humans were like that as well. Emissaries for the moon. 

The story had always felt silly to the girl, and she didn’t fully believe that it was an actual myth. The priestess did have a propensity for telling small fables, but never in a malicious sense. But the legend stuck with Astrid. Even if it was simply a lie spun together to comfort a scared child, the story gave her meaning. It made her feel real, that she wasn’t possessed by some demon as her parents assumed. And that was always the point of stories, wasn’t it? To comfort people?  

Astrid’s mind returned to reality when she smelled it. Smoke. A thick cloud of it that made her eyes water. Without being prompted her legs began to speed up, and she stopped her careful sneaking in favor of running forward. What was burning? There was only one clear answer, but she refused to let her thoughts center on it. She had to get home. She had to get home as quickly as she could. 

Barely a minute later, she broke through the line of trees into the clearing where her house stood. Where it…. used to stand. 

What was there now was the gutted carcass of her home. Several remnant fires still burned. But there was little beyond char. Smoke and the scent of burned flesh filled the air, threatening to choke Astrid. She hoped against hope and prayed to all the gods she knew that it was just the leather skins that had burned. But in her heart, she knew that wasn’t the case. 

With the moon shining as brightly as it was, reality crystalized before her. The light reflected in thousands of crystals of ice and snow, still left undisturbed on the ground. Emotions clawed at her brain, making her pulse race and her skin crawl. Her vision blurred, and with the glowing embers of her former house mixing with the white backdrop of the snowy ground, it almost looked as though blood had been splattered across it. 

Something moved just outside her field of vision, a horse pawing the ground and huffing with impatience. Two men left the blackened wooden remains each carrying an armload of objects she recognized. One of them had her bow, but even from here she could see that the sinew string she had used for so long had been completely burnt away. Seeing her most prized possession in the hands of a monster broke something inside her, and a whimper escaped her frozen lips. 

In slow motion, she saw one of the men turn in her direction. For a brief moment, they locked eyes. In her panicked return to the house, she had not even considered remaining hidden. Instead, she stood, clear of the tree line. Only the abyssal sky above her. She was unsafe without her canopy of branches, twigs, needles, and leaves. 

Still moving at a crawl, the objects fell from the man’s arm as he slowly pointed in her direction. Once again Astrid’s breath caught in her throat, as she realized her mistake. Gripping her only remaining possession, the knife she had pried from a dead log, she ran once again. 

Behind her, a man’s voice shouted in alarm. The girl dared not look behind her, lest her speed waned. The smell of smoke curled around her, invading her body with every ragged breath. Every moment her mouth opened, the acrid air poured in, and with it, the taste of burnt flesh. It was disgusting, and the girl fought every instinct to empty the contents of her stomach. 

Minutes at a dead sprint passed until Astrid was once again lost in the woods. The smell of smoke was not gone, it clung to her clothes like the village’s filth. The kind of grime that can never be washed away. As she tried to regain her bearings, she entertained the idea of removing her clothes, but the frigid temperature dissuaded her, not to mention the shame she’d have felt without the protection of the cloth that obscured her most disliked parts. 

As her breath slowly filtered back to her aching lungs, her returning awareness informed her of a worrying development. There was a slight tremble of the ground beneath her. 

She barely had time to process this information before a man flew out of the woods, throwing her to the ground with a quick motion. 

With a lightning reflex, her foot connected with his side, and she felt the air drive itself out of his chest. His grip loosened for less than a second, but it was enough. Astrid managed to scramble out of his hold until her back collided with a tree behind her. 

Both the man and the girl considered their opponent, gauging the pain the other was in, deciding strategies. 

The man was first to react, pushing himself to his feet and wiping the thin trail of blood that flowed past his lips. “Where’s the gold, boy? I know you hid it. Just show me where it is, and this can be all over.” 

His accent was thick. He was no native to these hills, that much was obvious. She dared not answer his question, in the fear that her voice would give something away. Astrid pulled herself to a standing position as well, keeping her back to the tree both for balance and as a meager act of defense. 

“Your tongue frozen in that mouth of yours, boy?” The sharp singing of a blade being drawn from a scabbard filled the air, as the man drew a fierce-looking dagger from his hip. “I can pry it loose for yah.” 

Astrid brought up her own blade, gripping the handle with both hands until her knuckles flushed white as the snow below her feet. 

The man bared his teeth in a blood grin. “So you still got some fight in you. Well then. Let’s play…” He deftly tossed his knife between his hands, swinging it in quick, precise arcs. This man knew what he was doing. The girl did not. 

For the briefest of moments, there was a lull in the world, as the bandit ceased his flourishing to begin the fight. In turn, Astrid stepped forward, her legs still shaking and her eyes projecting her fear. But in that pause, a cold breeze swept through the forest, and with it a voice. Neither the man nor the girl heard the voice, but something in her still felt its power. It was not experience that filled her mind upon the wind passing through her, but rather a strange awareness. 

It was like another flood of adrenaline, where the world crystallized into pure focus. But her focus was on the killer in front of her. She could see—no, sense—his next strike. The muscles in his arm and legs twitched, and that was enough to inform her new understanding. 

His attack was a quick, forward jab, one aimed just above her heart. Without this strange power, she would have been dead, but the moment before his body was able to move, she’d begun to dodge. His dagger flew past her, less than a breath away from splitting her chest, but the pirouette she began before she knew what to do kept her from any harm. 

With his target no longer in front of him, the man’s momentum carried him forward into the snow. A surprised ‘oof’ escaped his lips, as the hilt of his knife dug into his stomach, driving out his breath once again. Astrid stood there, stunned at her unexpected escape. And the bandit took advantage of her shock. His leg shot out, hooked her foot and pulled, and not a moment later she was on the ground beside him, her own dagger forgotten in her hands. 

The bandit was no village drunk, where simply falling over was enough to incapacitate. Before Astrid could realize, he’d swung at her again, a quick sweep aimed at her neck. Her eyes closed, waiting for the blow to come, but it never did. A fierce burning sensation shot up her arm instead, and she found that her hand holding the blade had managed to block his swing with the knife. Her muscles were screaming in exertion, but she had somehow trapped his dagger with her own. 

He pushed again, harder trying to end everything with his superior strength, but she let the force of his attack fling her back and onto her feet. 

“Where did you learn to fight like that, boy?” he snarled.

“These woods.” The words found their way out of her mouth without her own thought stopping them. Her voice was higher than normal, the sheer stress and panic pitching it up. 

A wolf howled in the near distance, quickly joined by two, then four, then a dozen more. Both fighters froze for a moment, letting the sound linger in the air. The calling of the predators drove deeply into Astrid, unlocking some feral part of her that she’d never known. 

She dove for the man with this new ferocity, her jaw snapping onto a fleshy bit on the side of his head. An ear. That fleshy bit had a name. It was an ear. 

Strength flowed through her and with it, she ripped at this fleshy ear, feeling it tear from the man. 

His scream pierced the air. Almost traveling as far as the howling that had distracted him. But it was quickly stopped short.

With her new instincts guiding her, she let the blade swing. It sang through the air, leaving a long, thin gash, in the bandit’s throat. He collapsed forward and stopped moving. 

Astrid stared at the outcome of the fight for several long moments, and it wasn’t until she heard the drumbeat of hooves and the shouting of men that she realized she’d even killed the man. Her attention flicked in every direction, as the shouting and noises seemed to be surrounding her. 

There was no way out. No means of escape. The men would be upon her in a moment. But another chill wind flew through the woods. The wind smelled like the crisp sharpness of winter, untainted by human hands. Untainted by the smoke. 

The wind froze her, but she heard something else behind the wind. The rustling of leaves. Her ears perked up, and suddenly it felt as though every sound on the mountainside existed before her. A sonic landscape of everything. The air shaking the leaves told her those leaves had not been knocked loose by men riding through. There was an escape. 

She could almost map out the route in her head, as she twisted this way and that, collecting every sound around her. There was a small rustling up the mountainside from her. A bush. Several of them. If she kept low, she could slip past the oncoming riders. She’d be gone before they even knew she was there. 

Breathing out, to let herself focus, Astrid began her escape. She dodged between trees, through shadows, over logs, and under brush. She moved as though she’d taken this path hundreds of times before. Her legs found footholds with such alacrity that she moved faster than she’d ever in her life. And she felt alive. 

No, she felt more than alive. She felt confident. The thundering of hooves neared her and passed her in a heartbeat. She screamed at the rider from her temporary hiding spot with a feral sound that ripped at her throat. 

The man whirled on his horse and did not see the branch that nearly unseated him from his saddle. With a manic laugh, she took off again, at a pace even faster than before. These were her woods. No one knew them like her, and no one could beat her in them. 

The wolves howled. This was their night too. And Astrid was tempted to join. 

Far in the distance, too far for her to have ever normally seen, there was another rider. One keeping pace with her. The girl could only steal glimpses of them as the gaps in the trees lined up perfectly. But she saw enough. 

The horse was snow-white, aside from its hooves the color of the starless sky, and splatches of red running up its legs. The rider wore a silver coat, lined with dense black fur. Long white hair flowed out from the cloak, flying in the wind as though it were floating in water.

As both people passed through beams of moonlight, they locked eyes. There was no way she could have seen it from this distance, but her eyes felt unbound from any limits. Everything became clearer. She could see the other rider was a woman. A woman with eyes the color of blood. She rode with the confidence of a person born on the saddle. And on her hip was an empty sheath. Sized perfectly for the dagger Astrid held.

Mayday

Minor note here, real quick. Some of you may have realized that the myth that Astrid remembers during this chapter is a bit feminine, as in it explains transfeminine people. It does not address transmasculine people. This was intentional, as it was a story told to her by Priestess to comfort her. Had a transmasc kid come to the priestess, she would have told that child a different myth. Because ultimately, the priestess was trying to let kids know that what they're going through isn't abnormal.

So as a reminder. Trans men are men. Trans women are women. And non-binary people are just as valid as anyone else. Transphobes can get fucked.