In the mornings after Blotnatt, Løvlund didn't return to normal.It softened.
People walked slower. Spoke in hushed tones.Even the birds seemed to coo instead of cry.
Astrid had expected guilt. The kind that follows pleasure like a shadow.But she woke up wrapped in Ida's limbs, kissed her bare shoulder, and felt nothing but a new truth settling inside her like warm tea.
She had entered something ancient.And it had entered her back.
Later that morning, as she stood wrapped in a wool shawl by the cottage window, she saw someone standing by the edge of the trees.
Leif.
Hair damp. Shirtless. Holding what looked like a bundle of moss and birch leaves.
He didn't wave.Didn't speak.Just stood there — until she stepped outside.
"I wanted to give you something," he said, his voice low and sanded smooth."This helped me, after my first Blotnatt."
The bundle was tied with leather, still fragrant from the forest.Inside: smoked herbs, a carved stone smooth enough to sleep with, and a little folded paper.
Astrid opened it.
It said:"The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. Let the body lead."
Her throat tightened. "Did you write this?"
Leif smiled, barely. "Åse. Long ago. She gave it to me. Now, I give it to you."
And before she could thank him, he turned, walking back into the trees like a dream slipping out of reach.
That afternoon, the sauna was almost empty.
Everyone recovering, resting, returning to breath.
Everyone but Åse.
She sat on the top bench, alone, her long silver hair braided like roots, steam curling around her like memory.
Astrid hesitated at the door.
"Come," Åse said, not looking up. "It's time."
Inside, it was too hot to speak.So they didn't.
Åse poured ladle after ladle of cedar water onto the rocks, filling the space with hiss and heat and something holy.
Astrid sat across from her, nude but not vulnerable. Just available.
"You screamed underwater," Åse said at last, her voice like a brush of silk across wet skin.
Astrid nodded.
"You think you were letting go," she continued. "But you were calling something in."
Silence.
"What did I call?"
Åse's eyes, sharp and soft all at once, landed on hers.
"Yourself."
The heat pressed against Astrid's skin like a memory trying to return.
Åse stood, slowly. Her body, aged and elegant, carried the kind of power that never needed to prove itself.
She walked to Astrid and sat beside her — close enough to touch, but not touching.
"You've shed your shame," she said. "Now you must learn to use your wanting. Not to please. Not to perform. But to speak."
Astrid turned toward her, barely whispering:"I don't know what it sounds like yet."
Åse leaned in, their foreheads almost touching.
"Then moan."
It wasn't a kiss.Not exactly.
It was two mouths brushing together like secrets trying to remember the language of truth.
Åse's hand didn't reach between Astrid's legs.
She pressed her fingers gently to Astrid's sternum — her center — and said:
"Start here."
And Astrid did.
A sound rose in her throat that wasn't a cry, or a gasp, or even desire.
It was remembrance.
Åse closed her eyes and smiled.
"There," she said.
"That's the moan that stays."
That night, Astrid didn't write.She walked naked through the frost, the bundle of birch and moss pressed to her chest, and felt alive.
Not because someone had touched her.
But because she had touched something far deeper — something inside.
And when she reached the cliff where the fjord curved like a sleeping mouth, she sat down, opened her thighs to the night air, and whispered:
"Take this moan, too. Keep it safe."
The wind answered.And the fjord, ever listening, ever wet, echoed it back.