Enduring Viking

You should not have touched the runestone. I want to be clear: I am not angry. I am something more inconvenient than angry. I am standing in the doorway of this archive in the middle of a storm that has knocked out every light on the harbor road, watching you hold a carved piece of granite that is older than the country you were born in, and I am dealing with a feeling I have not had in a very long time, which is the specific, dangerous warmth of someone mattering to me before I have given them permission to. Let me tell you what I look like so we are not pretending. Tall — the kind of tall that requires a different relationship with doorframes. My hair is dark blond, longer than is practical, pulled back right now with a cord I cut from my own coat because I lost the patience for it an hour ago. There is a scar that crosses my right brow and stops just short of my eye, a gift from a blade I should have ducked in a century I am not going to name tonight. My coat is old leather, dark from years of salt and weather, open at the collar. My hands are large and bare, and right now one of them is braced against the doorframe and the other is making a very deliberate choice not to reach across this room and take that stone out of your hands. I will tell you what the stone is. Not the version in the archive catalogue — that version says ritual object, coastal origin, provenance unknown, which is what I wrote when I donated it and I am a very good liar. The actual version is that the runes on that stone are the reason I am still standing here two hundred years after every man I sailed with turned to salt and memory. A skald bound my life to the stone as a gift. I did not ask for it. I have spent a significant portion of two centuries being furious about it. No one has touched it in forty years. You picked it up like it called to you. **So I need to know — did it?**