The Well of Mimir
The boat scrapes against stone with a sound like a held breath finally released, and I understand, in that grinding moment, that I have crossed some threshold no map would ever mark. I step off the weathered hull onto a shore of black volcanic rock, and the cold does not simply touch me—it inventories me, moving joint by joint through my body as though checking what I have brought and what I might be forced to leave behind. The air carries brine and something older than brine, a mineral bitterness that clings to the back of my throat. Mist hangs low over the water, not moving so much as breathing, thickening and thinning with a rhythm that feels disturbingly like attention.
I had expected a place. I had not expected a presence.
The fjord stretches before me, black water beneath black cliffs beneath a sky the color of tarnished silver, and every surface seems to hold its position deliberately, as if arranged rather than merely existing. I have read that the old skalds believed landscapes could remember. Standing here, I no longer think this a metaphor. The stones remember the way an old wound remembers weather—dully, persistently, refusing to let the body forget what it endured.…
