She hatched in the magmatic bowels of our living planet,
swimming to the surface through my seismatic, tectonic
nightmares, emerging at the mouth of a small fjord near
Trondheim. She was colder than anything I have ever felt
before, though she would soon introduce me to even lower
temperatures. I fed her fresh cod and imported grapefruit,
until she was strong enough to hunt for herself. At the time
I had some business to tend to in Copenhagen, so I left my
heart there, preserved in ice, and travelled.

She would circle the city, howling for meat at night. And no
fire could keep me warm. I sold paintings and purchased
sculptures, shivering like a clubbed fish, filling my
emptiness with German wine, every night, every night.

I found her again on the winter solstice, while I was
carving a fake in my den. She was glowing again, as when I
first found her, all lava and ash and obsidian. Making love
to her burnt the flesh off my basalt bones. We spent a
century together, and I fell in love with the Norway I
despised as a human. She hunted reindeer and men, and I
would roast them over my molten heart. Until she was strong
enough to fly.

Oh, mountains! Oh, forests! She said goodbye to them and to
me, and fled back to her home among the arctic stars, black
glass wings through petals of northern light. She broke
through the stratosphere, and from the hole came a dead
stellar wind that ate up the soil and tore away the trees,
leaving the planet shattered and frozen.

I walk alone through the Black Land, that centuries ago men
called Scandinavia. I am looking for the coldest place I can
find, to there lay the eggs that weigh so heavily in my
bowels. Our eggs. A place so cold that they would never
hatch, for our miserable spawn would have nothing to eat but
each other. When I lay them, I will die, and nothing will be
left of this Earth but a promise never to be kept.