I will never be anyone's beloved again, it feels. I'm banished from the places of true glamor and shining light. My words, long practiced, long polished, are for dung, so it seems. Hacks and mediocretins gain their multiple accolades, but wondrous beings won't even look my way. Cursed, cursed, cursed. I howl at the moon. I am tied in place by Halfdan's bonds. I rescued her for nothing. Nothing! The wind is more giving than her words! How its blue lips blow ice-kisses upon me more freely! What? What do you mean there's a sword in the underworld? And how would I, a wretch roped ‘round an oak, be concerned with such trivia?
O moon, if I could be as crazy as you, I might not go mad, but as it is, I stare, and my eyes lie the darkness before me, for even light is darkness without her immortal spark bespeaking blessings on my worthless charade of a life. Are these tears? Ice falls from my eyes in this blizzard, crashes, falling dust in the snow. Therein a multiple hundred times in fragments I see your shining face, O moon, see you, and wish I might fly so high and smooth like gliding white against the small pin-pointed-broken black. Your words fall out as snow crystals, strange letters, twisted, falling. I see strange patterns in the sentence-blizzard. Are you speaking to me, O moon? What strange adventures you call me on!
Who said I was an elf? Mine own glow seems to shade, self-swallowed by shame and grief, a mere mortal in the eyes of a swallowing world, engulfed. Why not implore me fall within the depths, O moon, why not? For I am there already. If you asked me how much lower I could go, why I could not begin to answer. Thus, indeed, I take your charge, and downwards thence shall go. A blade? What cuts more than this pain? A blade? The wind is sword the more for frozen slash! And mere suggestion that this blade delivered -- though how to heavens high above I'll heave I cannot fathom -- might enwoo me single kiss of she who holds the world's enchantments in her charm, the blossoms woven in her starlit hair of awesome might, pours magma, embers hot from smithy's forge, within these bones-made-ice and melts my stillness. A thousand blades I'd buy with track and tread of feet to win that single kiss -- if sole she would, if sole she'd give to me a single glance, most blossom-bosomed bursting lovely maiden of the heaven's hills!
Yet fetters, mere flax before, now woven, plaited into binding hands of twine that let their grip go not install me, frozen, to this tree. How shall I free myself? Yegads, what say ye, moon? What will and wish within, what say ye? Song within my breast? A song to dash the fetters? Yes! O yes, I say! Within my breast! Indeed! O sorrow had forgotten me this special spell implanted there so long ago by fallen mother! Then what shall say we? Flaxen fetters, or sorrow much the more? For sorrow, seems, was fetters more than flaxen plaited ever was! What binds or blinds me from my memoire, glade of silken, silver songs and dreams, is bondage deeper than a rope or iron manacle! I shall sing, and singing, flee! Flee this wretched place, adieu ... Exeunt.
