8 Ransomed

Andy gets home from the supermarket later than he meant to. There is little time left to finish the work, and none at all to properly relax.

The house is quiet — the kind of quiet that should feel peaceful but instead feels heavy.

On the kitchen table, the stack of essays waits where he left it that morning, red pen resting on top like an accusation.

He drops his bag beside the chair and rubs his eyes.

Andy likes teaching. He truly does. But tonight the stack feels endless, like a tide that never quite goes out.

He picks up one paper and starts marking it.

A few sentences in, his mind drifts.

He notices the irony of it.

He spends his days encouraging young people to believe in possibility and freedom… yet most of them will grow up to enter the same machinery he feels trapped inside.

Deadlines.
Debt.
Mortgages.
Work schedules that eat up the daylight.
Stress that disrupts sleep.

He glances around the room.

The house is comfortable. Respectable. The kind of life people work toward.

And yet the thought creeps in again — the one that has been haunting him lately.

It doesn’t feel like freedom.

It feels like a contract he never consciously agreed to.

The more he plays by the rules of the system — career, property ladder, sensible life choices — the narrower the path seems to become.

He flips another paper over and marks a paragraph automatically.

Ownership.

The word drifts through his mind.

People talk about owning things as though it means independence.

But lately he wonders if ownership is simply a more polite form of obligation.

You own the house.
But the house owns your time.

You own a career.
But the career owns your days.

He sighs and leans back.

The essays blur in front of him.

The red pen slips from his fingers onto the table.

For the first time in a long while he allows himself to think something that feels almost dangerous.

Maybe the rules themselves are the trap.

Maybe the whole idea of freedom inside systems built on ownership is an illusion. Wasn’t that what Sarah had tried to tell him all along — through her tales of shapeshifting Elves and the Draco starnation interfering with human DNA?

His eyes close for just a moment.

The exhaustion is deeper than the day’s work. Deeper even than the job.

It feels ancient.

The stack of papers remains half-graded.

Sleep arrives suddenly, like a tide pulling him under.

And when the tide recedes, the room is no longer there.

The smell of ink and paper fades.

In its place comes the smell of salt wind.

Cold air.

And the distant cry of ravens over a black Icelandic shoreline.

Andy slept at the table beside the fallen red pen, but the man who opened his eyes was standing in a field of wind-bent grass nearly four hundred years earlier.

The wind moved across the hillside in long breaths, flattening the coarse grass and carrying the smell of the sea inland from the fjord.

Þorsteinn straightened slowly and wiped his hands on his woollen trousers. The scythe leaned against the stone wall beside him.

His shoulders ached with the dull persistence of years spent working unforgiving land.

He pushed his hair back from his forehead.

Once it had been bright and sunlit like fresh straw. Now the colour had deepened into strawberry blond streaked heavily with grey. The straight strands refused to lie flat, pointing in different directions as though the wind had never quite stopped combing through them.

He had shaved that morning, though the habit mattered less now than it once had. His face felt leaner every year, the skin lined from weather and worry.

Thirty-three years.

He no longer counted them, but his body remembered.

The day the corsairs came had divided his life cleanly in two.

Before, and after.

The gate creaked below the hill.

Þorsteinn turned.

A neighbour’s boy came running up the path, stumbling slightly on the uneven ground.

“Þorsteinn!” he called.

The boy slowed, breathing hard.

“They’ve come from the harbour.”

Þorsteinn said nothing.

He waited.

“The ship from Copenhagen,” the boy continued. “The one that carried the ransom silver.”

Something tightened behind Þorsteinn’s ribs.

“And?” he asked quietly.

The boy hesitated.

“They brought a woman back.”

The scythe slipped from Þorsteinn’s hand into the grass.

For years he had bargained with men who spoke of human lives as though they were livestock — a price to be measured, weighed, and agreed.

And yet no silver in the world could measure what had been taken.

The wind moved across the hillside again.

He began walking toward the farmhouse.

The turf-roofed building crouched low against the slope as it always had, smoke curling lazily from the chimney hole.

Yet something inside it had changed.

He could feel it even before he reached the door.

Voices murmured inside.

Children whispering softly.

The low tones of the women.

Þorsteinn paused with his hand on the latch.

His heart beat hard enough to make his fingers tremble.

He pushed the door open.

Warmth met him first — peat smoke and wool and the faint smell of drying fish from the rafters.

His brother stood near the fire.

The wives sat quietly along the bench, sewing forgotten in their laps.

Children clustered along the wall, staring.

And beside the hearth sat a woman Þorsteinn did not recognise.

She was pale.

Not merely fair, but almost luminous in the firelight, her skin untouched by the harsh sun of southern lands.

The corsairs had kept her indoors.

He knew it at once.

Her hair fell loosely over her shoulders in long waves of deep red — darker than his own, closer to the colour of burning embers. Her dress was a loose garment of fine woven cloth, dyed a deep blue that had faded unevenly with time. It hung differently from the woollen dresses worn by Icelandic women, the sleeves longer and the fabric lighter, as though made for warmer climates.

She looked fragile at first glance, yet there was strength in the way she held herself upright, despite the uncertainty in her eyes.

Those eyes moved slowly around the room, searching each face as if trying to place pieces of a puzzle she had once known by heart.

Þorsteinn stood in the doorway.

For a moment he saw only a stranger.

Then she tilted her head slightly.

The movement was quick, impatient.

A memory broke open inside him.

A small girl chasing lambs across the hillside, laughing as the wind tangled her red hair.

His breath caught.

He stepped forward.

The room had fallen silent.

He stopped a few paces from her.

“Gunhildur,” he said.

The name felt fragile after so many silent years.

The woman looked at him.

Her gaze searched his face with intense concentration.

For a long moment she said nothing.

Then, slowly, she rose.

Time had reshaped her, but the red hair and pale skin were unmistakable now that he truly looked.

Her voice came softly, uncertain.

“Are you… my brother?”

Her Icelandic carried a strange cadence now, the words shaped by other languages and distant shores.

Þorsteinn felt something inside him finally break.

“Yes,” he said.

“I am your brother.”

He stepped forward and took her in his arms.

She felt thin beneath the wool of her dress, lighter than he had imagined after all these years of searching.

For a moment she stood stiffly, as if unsure whether the embrace was real.

Then her hands gripped the back of his coat.

The knot of tension Þorsteinn had carried since boyhood loosened all at once.

He closed his eyes and held her tightly, afraid that if he let go, she might dissolve like mist in the morning wind.

“I tried to remember,” she whispered against his shoulder.

“All these years.”

“You are home now,” he said.

But even as he spoke the words, the world shifted.

The smell of peat smoke faded.

For a brief instant another vision flickered through his mind.

Warm seas glowing beneath a silver moon.

Dragons circling stone terraces and crystal temples rising above a vast ocean.

And Gunhildur standing crowned in pale light in one of those temples, her red hair flowing like a banner of fire.

Around her, women stood in a circle, raising energy with the circling dragons.

No chains.

No markets where people were traded like cattle.

Peace — because the concept of war had not yet been invented.

The vision vanished as suddenly as it had come.

Þorsteinn opened his eyes.

The farmhouse returned — the fire, the watching children, the quiet breathing of the family gathered around them.

Gunhildur’s pale face lifted toward him.

And in that moment, he knew something he could not explain.

She had been powerful once — and that power had been a blessing to many.

Outside, the wind moved across the Icelandic hillside.

Inside the farmhouse, brother and sister held each other for the first time in thirty-three years.

And far away — across centuries he could not yet see — Andy stirred slightly in his chair beside a stack of half-graded papers, as though some ancient burden had finally begun to loosen.

Silver had ransomed Gunhildur’s body.
But something far older had come home with her.
And now it had begun to stir in Andy.

As sensation returned to his body, a voice reached him — Gunhildur’s, and yet also Sarah’s… and Anandariel’s.

“Wake up, Sariel. The dragons are returning.”

He sat upright in his chair, breath catching, the room snapping back into focus.

For the first time in a long while, everything felt clear.

And somewhere beneath the clarity, something ancient had begun to awaken.

This chapter forms part of the living mythology behind the Dragon Twin Flame Oracle.