Eir
Help. Mercy. Healing that comes not as force, but as quiet return.
Her name means all three.

She is counted among the goddesses. And sometimes among the Valkyrjur.
A servant of Frigg. A companion of Óðinn.
A presence at the side of Menglöð.

But above all.
Eir is the one who chose who would live.

While others rode to battle to gather the slain,
Eir rode to gather the ones who would stay.
She did not claim them for death.
She called them back to life.

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It is said she lives on a sacred hill.
Lyfjaberg, the hill of healing.
There, she tends not alone but among other maidens of mercy.
And when the folk came to her,
they came not in fear but in need.
Blót was offered to her
not for victory or vengeance
but to keep sickness far from the hearth.

She is remembered in white flowers and copper bracelets,
in steam rising from stone saunas,
in the red thread of blood,
and the green breath of herbs.
She is the mortar and pestle.
She is the hand that soothes the fever.
She is the whisper in the dark that says,
You are not lost yet. Stay with me.

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Before men built halls of sterile power and called them hospitals,
the healing arts were kept by women.
Not as knowledge stolen or written,
but as breath passed down hand to hand, womb to womb.
Eir is the keeper of that line.

Not just healing, but right healing.
The kind that sees the soul as well as the skin.

Some say she is a Norn.
Some say she is a Jötunn.
Some say she is a name for woman herself.
And all might be true.

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For Eir is not one thing.
She is every hand that ever lifted a dying child and prayed.
She is every mother who tied red thread on the door to keep plague out.
She is every woman who knew the woods well enough to find what the body needed.

Call to her not in panic, but in presence.
Offer her not just need, but gratitude.
And if you feel a hand on your back when your breath returns,
if you see a copper glint in the corner of your eye
you are not alone.

Eir walks the thread.