“Ready for Jόl, shield maiden?” his breath stale with sickly mead.
“After last winter’s warning, I am far from ready.” My response is flat. I can’t shake the unsettling foreboding that hangs around us, picking a moment to pounce. The man grumbles and wanders away to bother someone else. Probably someone who didn’t ruin the music of the lyre and the warmth of the large oak tree with a deep-set fire in its belly. Bodies dance around the large oak as it burns, sloshing ale and mead in hollow tusks and horns.
I take a pinch of dried amanita, chewing the slightly acidic mushroom, hoping to shake off the eerie atmosphere that only I feel. I watch the flames flicker skyward, reaching out and clawing at the dark sky above us. The music of the lyre sounds far away and muted as bodies sway and move like jittering ghosts.

The Jarl leads a goat to the fire. Its horns are like bony branches, twisting like broken bones. The seer, so beautiful and fair, drags a blade across the goat’s neck. It screams and cries until its life fades away, emptying from its body like the blood that fills the bowl in front of the open wound. Before the first flick of warm blood can graze our faces, a bitter wind rolls through us. Whipping out the roaring fire inside the oak like it is a small ember. We are blanketed in sudden darkness and immediate freezing temperatures. The lyre stops. The singing stops. The dancing stops. The world around us…stops. Even the branches around us don’t move with the wind.
People whisper around me, growing more urgent as they struggle to light another fire. Each breath spills into the cold air in a plume of white, catching in the glow of moonlight.
I watch in a dazed state as the oak in the middle of the clan, part burned, part smouldering ashes, splits open. Splintering and cracking. The sound of sharp claws scratching wood as something tries to escape the yule oak.
Everyone steps back. Everyone apart from me. I watch, revelling that the warnings were true. The gods had asked for twelve human sacrifices. Twelve strong warriors or kings to save us. No one had given the warnings any attention—they were, after all, told by an old blind trader passing through on her travels. Why would anyone believe her? But I did.
The oak splinters, allowing a shape to rise from the hot coals. Standing straighter, bones crunching into place as it aligns itself. Deep-set, dead eyes scan the people who watch with fear as the oak has birthed a creature before our eyes. Long hair as black as the night sky drapes like wet soot over the figure. Its skin is translucent in the ethereal moonlight, showing dark shapes of ribs and a skull through its pale skin. Its fingers are black and necrotic, so cold and dead with claws dirty and orange, curving like crescent moons.
“Offer kreves,” the beast growls like a moving mountain. Sacrifice required.
I watch as it swoops its hand forward, grabbing the seer, arms stretching, bones snapping as it draws the woman to it. A frostbitten finger breaks off with a sick-sounding snap! The finger falls to the earth and turns to dust until only the nail remains. The seer’s screams stop as her head is twisted crudely. Once…twice…. Three times. The bones, tendons and muscles are all twisted as her head flops, hanging by tearing skin. She is placed into the oak and the creature grabs the Jarl. The creature rips his head off his shoulders. The sound of ripping skin and wet flesh accompanies the sight of a spine being ripped from the neck hole. The body tipped upside down, being squeezed with those clawed hands from legs to shoulders, squeezing torrents of hot blood into the oak.
It sets those shallow eyes on me.
My stomach drops and twists as it steps towards me. The scent of blood and death and rotting skin envelops me as it drags a claw across my lower abdomen, reaching inside me, rummaging around until it hooks out my unborn child. It snaps off a dead finger right in front of my face and pushes it inside the space where my baby once lived. An eerie smile stretches across ice-burned lips. I watch helplessly as it drops my unborn child into the oak. Taking one last look at me, it dies slowly, crumbling like ash into the oak. The flames roar once again. The familiar scent of burning bodies fills the air.
***
The months that followed that eventful night have left us fearful. Every day my belly grows, even though I know that beast had taken my baby. It had taken our seer and our Jarl. Our soil is poisonous and dead—not even grass grows. We are hungry and struggling to grow crops and keep our animals healthy. All around us is death.
***
Next yule, we sacrifice people of importance. People we coaxed over or took with force. English princes, and monks. Kings of Norway. Queens of France and Spain. We slaughter them like goats, milking their blood, bathing in it to ask for the gods’ forgiveness. But, it never comes. We never miss our yule sacrifices from now on. The beast in my belly claws and kicks from inside me, a constant reminder of how powerful the gods are. I am swollen, aching and huge. Three years of carrying a beast child that is never born.
I look down, holding my painful stomach with necrotic, black fingers.
The final sacrifice…is me.