Nokkut hvar útan Zashiversk: dýrðligt, innflutt kyn, borið af víkingum — Danablóð

More about Nokkut hvar útan Zashiversk: dýrðligt, innflutt kyn, borið af víkingum — Danablóð

Zdzisław Beksiński, when he was not buried in the dim underworld of his Sanok basement, was something like a somnambulant geomancer. He would receive coordinates not by compass or map, but in the molten language of prophetic dream. Then he was gone—off like some astral hound, tugging his reluctant mortal coil along behind him, chasing a vision he had already half-lived. The strangest part was the déjà vu of it all. These quests always felt like returns rather than departures, as though his eyes remembered landscapes before his feet reached them, as though the bones of Europe hummed their geology into him while he pushed westward, over land, over water, toward a place that did not exist until he stood inside it.

The Norwegian fishing captain thought the odd Polish man had lost his sanity. Who asks to be left in the middle of an unremarkable coastline—just gray stone upon gray stone upon endless sea? But as they approached, the cliffs changed. The rocks separated like parting ribs, revealing a small, secret cove, a shy strip of pale beach, and a dark mouth of cave breathing cold air. The place felt embryonic, like a sleeping world waiting to be born. Beksiński—Zdzichu to those who loved him—intended to hold vigil there for a week, surviving only on black bread dusted with ash, attempting to listen harder than any sane man would dare.

On the first night, as the surf whispered and the cave swallowed the sky, the skald came. Not in body, but in dream. His words were not words, but knotted kennings, twisted metaphors like thorns wrapped around meaning. If you understood them, you were spared. You could stay home, safe with mother and sisters, never forced onto the edge of the world with a sword. If you did not understand—well, then your life was already claimed by ice, wind, and unseen gods. In his sleep, the message burned itself into Beksiński’s mind like runes struck into iron:

Nokkut hvar útan Zashiversk: dýrðligt, innflutt kyn, borið af víkingum — Danablóð.
“Somewhere beyond Zashiversk: splendid, an invasive kind, carried by Vikings—Dane’s Blood.”

He woke furious at the dream, furious at the muttering cosmos that never spoke plainly. “Why,” he whispered into the cave, into the sea, into the trembling dark above all things, “do my dreams always have to be so cryptic? Just tell me what you mean.”