I was in my mid-twenties then, so it must have been the summer of ’93. Or perhaps a year later. The dates blur, but the light stays with me.

Norwegian summer offers all seasons, especially that far north. Rain, wind, sharp sunlight—all in the span of an hour. I’d recommend Trondheim to anyone with a love of history, beauty, or the kind of scenery that makes you fall quiet. It’s one of those truly spectacular cities of Europe and Scandinavia, tucked between fjord and hill, past and present.

You have the Nidaros Cathedral, almost conjured out of a medieval dream. Walking through it, you feel the centuries stacked in the stone. On cloudy days, the light turns the interior silver-blue, like the city is dreaming beneath the surface.

From the cathedral, walk straight downhill, and you’ll reach the docks—Ravnkloa—where you can dine fine or quickly, where seafood is the offering, and the air always smells of salt and tide. And further out still, keeping that same line from spire to sea, lies Munkholmen—Monk’s Islet—like a temptation waiting just off the horizon.

But it wasn’t one of those grey cold days.

It was scorching hot, the kind of heat that makes the air shimmer above stone and makes you crave a cold glass in your hand. It was the perfect day to stop by every little bar, to sample Norwegian brewing traditions like communion. And I did. By the time I reached the docks—Ravnkloa—I was well tipsy. No, utterly drunk.

And still, out there beyond the ferries and fishing boats, Munkholmen lay waiting. Quiet. Tempting. Like a promise just at the horizon.

I bought a ticket and entered the boat, and they offered a bar—and another beer—to help me pass the time. The sun was still high, the sky a hard, blazing blue, and the air thick with summer. Precisely on the hour, we set out on the fifteen-minute crossing, and I was eagerly awaiting what I didn’t know was waiting.

It must have been around four in the afternoon. There were more people returning to the city than heading out to the island. I liked that. It made me feel like I was going the right way—toward something.

They offered a tour guide, of course, one of those chipper types in a bright polo shirt. I declined, politely, and wandered instead. Found a shaded corner in the old fort’s shadow where there was a kiosk with a surprisingly wide variety of beer, and a man behind the counter who seemed to understand exactly what kind of day it was.

I didn’t linger long—just long enough for my beer to settle—then set off on a walkabout.

It was truly an islet, small and self-contained, but you could feel it in the bones: this place bore more history than my sleepy Minnesota town could ever dream of. The kind of weight that lives beneath the surface, that doesn’t need to shout to be known.

I read the signs. I saw the cannons. I stepped inside the circular-shaped stone building that smelled of age, rot, and wet—the past sweating through the walls.

And then I sat on the grass in the courtyard. Let the sun warm my skin. Licked the light and let it lick back. Sea, sun, beer, and that slow summer ease wrapped around me, and I slumbered. Not quite sleep. Not quite dream. Just... surrendered.

Perhaps I slept.

When you think you’re just relaxing, just drifting in the warmth, you’ll suddenly lose time. I think that’s what happened. Beer, sun, fresh air—it all conspired. I woke up needing to pee.

I didn’t think much about how quiet the grounds had become. Deserted, maybe, but it didn’t register that way. I just followed the signs toward the toilets, legs stiff, head a little foggy.

The door was locked.

A riddle for another time—I really needed to go. I hurried around the side of the building and found a bit of cover behind some bushes. Nature, met.

Afterwards, I strolled back down toward the dock. Checked my watch. Seven-thirty.

But the sun... the sun said otherwise. Still bright, still warm, still lingering high like it hadn’t even considered setting—another trick of the northern skies.

And nowhere during that short stroll did I meet another person. That cold, wet feeling crawled up my spine—the one you get when you realize you’ve fucked up. Bad.

The sign at the docks confirmed it.

Last boat to mainland departs at 18:15

There was a phone number, too. But this was long before mobile phones became an extension of the human hand. No signal. No apps. No way.

I stood there for a moment, mouth dry despite the beer, and let out a few fucks. Then a few shits. Then a few more fucks, louder this time, aimed at no one in particular. Just the sea.

Then I walked back up to the courtyard. What else was there to do?

I found a bench under a tree, rested my face in my palms, and prayed the warm breeze would hold through the night.

I knocked on a few doors—half-hearted, maybe more for ritual than expectation—but no one answered. No voices. No signs of life. Just the hush of waves and the distant drone of the mainland.

Eventually, I realized the main building—the Munkholmen Tower—stood unlocked.

It was circular, squat, and brooding. Less a structure than a presence. Its stone walls, weathered by salt and centuries, curved inward toward a central courtyard, like a fortress trying to remember it had once been a monastery. A domed roof, capped with an old gun turret, sat heavy atop it, casting a long shadow that didn’t shift even when the sun did.

The stone was mottled—patches of lichen, dark streaks from rain and time, spots where cannonballs may once have struck. The air held the scent of wet rock and brine, with a sour undercurrent of something older—rot, maybe. Or memory.

Inside, the light dimmed fast. The thick walls swallowed sound. Footsteps echoed back slowly, hesitantly, like something was listening before it answered. The rooms were sparse—stone-floored and low-ceilinged, their uses unclear. Cells, perhaps. Or storage. Or places where stories ended quietly.

Even in the thick of summer, the interior was cool. Damp. The chill seeped up through the soles of my shoes and into my bones.

But at least it was shelter. If the Norwegian summer turned autumn—or worse—before morning, I’d be grateful for stone and shadow.

I breathed a little easier. Wished for another beer. Dozed slightly.

When I stirred again, I thought I was back in my hotel—but nothing felt right. The air was too wet, too heavy, and there was a soft song whispering through the room, something wordless and old. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know why it made my skin prickle.

The fortress came back to me slowly, like a memory I’d tried to forget.

I stretched. Walked back outside.

Tried to follow the sound, but the song had already faded, leaving only silence in its wake.

So I found a spot along the edge of the courtyard. Sat down. Waited for the sun to finally slip into the fjord, though it still lingered with that stubborn northern hunger for the horizon.

And that’s when I saw her.

She was in the grass near the far end of the courtyard. Moving slowly. Fluidly. She might have been doing yoga. She might have been dancing—some old, Viking-ritual kind of movement that didn’t belong to now. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.

She was beautifully naked against the red sun.

So, instead of watching the sun sink behind the hills, the fjord, or wherever it was headed, I watched her.

Her skin was pale like the nocturnal twilight she was waiting for. Not blonde, her hair—no, it was nearly white. Long, straight, and reaching down to the small of her back, where her spine arced perfectly and became the curve of her butt.

She moved like she had no weight. Like the air obeyed her. A slow, fluid rhythm that wasn't quite dance, wasn't quite ritual, but something older—some language of movement I didn’t know how to understand.

And now, she hummed again. That same soft song I'd heard before, threading the air like smoke. If she was one of the hulder women I’d read about before my trip—woodland seductresses with fox tails and fatal charm—then yes.

She had succeeded in spellbinding me.

Breathing became an effort, but I rose. Walked toward her—not because I’d decided to, but because my body had.

I don’t think I made a sound. Maybe the grass whispered underfoot. Maybe I was floating—of course I wasn’t, but that’s how it felt.

When she turned, I stood only a few feet away. Or maybe yards. Maybe I was still across the courtyard. It was hard to say.

“I svarte hælvette!” she yelled, arms flailing—tits, thighs, all suddenly in motion as she tried to cover herself with limbs and panic.

“Sorry!” I blurted, turning fast, heart suddenly very, very awake.

Then silence. Long enough for the air to settle. For breath to come back.

I glanced back. She was watching me.

“Sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t mean to…”

“You’re American,” she said, like that explained something. Like that made it better.

“I am,” I nodded. “I missed the last boat. I’m stuck here for the night.”

She smiled at me—soft, slow—then relaxed her arms and let them fall to her sides. Just like that, she slipped back into the dream.

“I thought you were the Monk,” she said. “Doing his midnight haunt from Nidarosdomen to the island to claim virgin blood.”

She paused, eyes gleaming with some private joke.

“He’d be sorely disappointed about the blood.”

“Pardon? What?” I offered, blinking. My knowledge of Nidaros myth was… sparse, if not entirely nonexistent.

She told the tale of Munkholmen—how the Vikings had used it as an execution site, heads on stakes to ward off enemies, until Christianity bored—her word, not mine—the country with psalm and hypocrisy, and built a monastery on blood-soiled ground.

But monks and monastery alike fell victim to war and the Swedish crown. The fortress rose in their place, built to defend the city.

Then came the Germans. During World War II, they installed anti-aircraft defenses to guard the nearby submarine base, and once again turned the island into a place of execution. Almost honing its past like poetry—again, her words, not mine.

I don’t know how it happened, but we sat in the grass. Her still naked. Me, mesmerized by her voice. And her nudity.

“Me?” she said, brushing her pale white hair from eyes so blue they felt borrowed from a colder sky. “I come here to drink slow—”

She looked at me then, soft as mist. So soft I felt like I wasn’t even there.

“—and masturbate slower.”

She rose and motioned for me to follow, so I did.

She slid through the grass and underbrush like it wasn’t even there, climbed the rocks barefoot and beautiful, and led me to the island’s backside—where the stone dropped into the sea, quiet and cold.

There, wading knee-deep into the water, she reached down and fished up a six-pack of beers, bobbing gently in a net, cooled by the fjord.

She offered me a Lysholmer. I smiled and tried to twist the cap off—because I hadn’t yet opened a beer in Norway.

She giggled, then handed me a bottle opener like it was part of some ancient rite I’d clearly failed to learn.

We toasted to the night, glass against glass in the wind, and I took a sip.

She chugged hers—clean, smooth, one perfect motion. The kind of drink that should’ve been in a beer commercial. Or a legend.

She fished another six-pack from the sea, the bottles slick and clinking softly in the net. Then she turned and waded back to shore, her steps sure, her skin dripping. I followed behind her—on what felt like an invisible leash.

She found a smooth rock and sat easily, graceful in a way I didn’t think people really were. I settled beside her on a slightly sharper one, not quite comfortable, not quite willing to complain.

“I’m Mona,” she said softly, not quite looking at me.

Then, after a beat, her voice even softer:

“...and perhaps I don’t have to masturbate tonight?”

It was the kind of question you don’t understand, but don’t want repeated—just in case it changes.

So I finished my beer. She offered me another.

“Do you like my body?” she asked, brushing her hair from her chest and letting it fall in a soft sweep down her back.

She was beautiful. Paler now, ghostlike under the moonlight that had replaced the sun. Her collarbone stood out, delicate and sharp where her neck tapered. Her shoulders curved into long arms that moved with a grace you only see in performance—not in real life. Not like this.

Her breasts were perfect for her frame—just over a handful each, the nipples small, taut, and catching the moon in soft silver. No posing. No hesitation. Just offered.

She had slightly more meat on her hips than the fashion magazines pretended was ideal—and that made her all the more irresistible. Real. Grounded. Myth and woman in the same breath.

“Take a good look,” she whispered, as my gaze drifted lower and she spread her thighs just a little more.

She was slick as the sea itself—a slightly split slit, teasing folds that looked almost too perfect, like a napkin at a restaurant I could never afford. Precise. Delicate. Erotic in a way that felt choreographed by gods.

And the way she pressed—just slightly—against the cold, hard rock beneath her made it all the more unreal. Flesh meeting stone. Softness grinding into permanence.

My breath caught just right.

And of course she noticed.

And of course—I blushed.

That moment could have lasted forever—and I’d still be caught in it, if she’d let me.

But she moved again.

Six-pack in hand, she rose, stepped through the bushes, and returned to the grass like nothing had shifted. Like everything had.

I followed.

We sat again, and the night around us was quieter now. The moon was higher, and the sea was still lapping softly against the edge of the world.

“So?” she asked, cracking open another beer. “Do you want me? Or do you want to watch?”

I was caught somewhere between both. Floating.

So I only offered a single word.

“Yes.”

She didn’t seem to care either way.

She simply lay back in the grass, stretched out like something feral and holy, and parted her thighs—not for me, not even for herself, but for the moon.

Then, without a sound, she let a finger slide slowly between her folds. A tease. A stroke. A motion that had nothing to prove.

“Kiss me when I cum?” she asked.

Just that.

Like a promise. Like a prayer.

I couldn’t touch her.

She had become sacred—something suspended between the island and the moon—where I was just a lucky trespasser who had slept too long on a summer’s day.

This scene would have unfolded with or without me.

Which felt almost holy.

Her hands were beautiful. Long fingers, the kind you’d expect from a piano player, but softer—tuned instead to skin and night and slow, whispered need. She teased two fingers around her clit, rubbing gently, squeezing softly, and moaning like she belonged to the earth itself.

And all the while, her hips rolled—against her hand, against the ground, against something aching inside me.

Was I hard? God, yes. I felt like I was rupturing.

But I didn’t know what to do with it. With myself. I just watched her fingers curl deep inside her, slow and certain, while her other hand toyed with her nipples—light, teasing, electric.

Then, between breaths, between moans, she whispered:

“You have to kiss me now.”

I moved—too fast, too eager—but she didn’t flinch. I dropped to my knees beside her, leaned in, careful, like she might vanish. Like she’d dissolve into air and moonlight, and I’d wake alone in the fortress with a hard-on I couldn’t explain.

When my lips met hers, I might have cried.

It wasn’t a kiss. Not really. It was something divine, holy, ghostlike. A touch that wasn’t about mouths at all—but about memory. Meaning. Something ancient passing between us.

And when she let herself come—when her body arched and shivered and she moaned into my mouth—she breathed something into me that I’ve never been able to shake.

An ache so deep I still whisper her name in my sleep.

I thought we were ending. I think that’s why I cried. The way you cry when beauty slips from your hands before you know what it was.

And in that haze—in that blurred, sacred glow—she unzipped me.

Freed me.

Hard. Willing. Still utterly confused about what to do with myself.

I realized I wasn’t supposed to know—not then, not really. And only years later did I understand that’s the only way I can describe that night.

“Do you mind if I take you in my mouth?” she whispered, as if I had a choice.

I’m not a believer, but all I could manage was a breathless, “Oh, God.”

If you think of heat, tongue, and wet and picture a blowjob—this wasn’t that.

This was worship. A prayer whispered in wet devotion. A moment so slow, so impossibly tender, it made me believe in mythology. In ghosts. In gods.

Perhaps she was a hulder. Perhaps she was just a local girl with too much knowledge, too much passion, and a taste for lonely tourists and half-lit summer nights.

Or maybe—just maybe—I was the lucky one. A man who, for a few hours on an islet just off Trondheim, was allowed to belong to her.

You can let yourself be wrapped up in something like it’s memory in motion, or a fantasy too wild to ever dare dream—but I swear, better men than me would’ve found themselves the same way.

Flipped on their back. Damp grass pressing into skin. Pants bunched around their knees. Just like me.

She was a pale shadow against the moon when she mounted me—slick cunt sliding up my belly, heat and hunger in one smooth motion—as if I were an altar and she’d done this a thousand times before.

Then, casually, she reached for another beer. Cracked it open. Chugged it in one go like it was fuel for whatever came next.

And God, whatever came next—

She rose above me like something carved from moonlight—myth made flesh, cunt made scripture—and lowered herself slow, slick, and sure.

Her thighs gripped the sides of my hips, grounding me in the grass and the gravity of her. And when she sank down, taking me inch by inch, it wasn’t sex. Not in the form I knew it. Not in a form I’ve ever known it since.

It was history and ritual. It was Viking steel clashing under storm clouds. Monks whispering psalms over blood-soaked earth. The monastery collapsing into the fortress, and the fortress surrendering to time.

She rode me like I was a relic—something old and half-forgotten she’d decided to resurrect. Her hips moved with the slow, unshakable rhythm of someone who knows exactly what her body can do, and still did it better than promised. Softer than moonlight. Harder than the rocks she’d ground against.

She never looked down—at first. Only at the sky, the moon, her mouth parted not in pleasure, but in prophecy. Her hands on my chest, steady. Anchoring. Her rhythm building into something furious and untranslatable.

She didn’t care when I came. She just moaned—low, like a spell—and refused to let me slip. Refused to let my cock surrender to softness or rest. I don’t know how she did it. I was buried in the ground, in the grass, in the breathless tension of a body held on the edge like the men who came here to be executed.

Every time she ground down, I felt the past ripple through my spine. Like every man who’d ever died on this island knew her name. Like every woman buried beneath stone had whispered it through moss and time.

And then she looked down.

Eyes sharp. Blue. Kind. Almost asking. Almost begging.

“This is better than masturbating,” she whispered.

I didn’t thrust. I didn’t move. I just held on—grass at my back, pants tangled at my knees, and Mona above me, fucking me like history had a score to settle.

“You have to cum again,” she said softly. “With me.”

And I held on for the when.

So long, my body begged me to surrender. My thighs trembled, my spine locked, and my breath was broken rhythm and prayer.

Mona rode me like she wasn’t part of this world. Like she was drawing something ancient out of me—something buried. Her pace had quickened, but not rushed. It was desperate in that controlled way, like thunder waiting for lightning’s permission.

Her hands slid down my chest, palms flat against me, and she ground her hips forward in a tight, perfect circle that made my eyes roll back.

And then she whispered it again—lower this time, like confession.

“With me.”

That was all.

Her fingers found her clit and moved fast, sure, feverish. Her cunt clenched around me, rhythmic and wet and so alive, pulling me deeper than I thought I had left to give. She gasped, sharp and sudden, and her body locked above mine—hips still grinding, still milking me, as her moan broke open into something almost holy.

And I followed her—helpless, wrecked.

I came so hard I saw stars behind my eyelids, hips thrusting up into her as I spilled everything into her, like offering. Like apology. Like worship.

She didn’t stop.

Not right away.

She slowed—barely moving—keeping me inside her as our breath found rhythm again. As the grass bent beneath us. As the moon bore witness.

She leaned forward, kissing my cheek, temple, and open mouth.

And then she smiled.

Soft. Spent. Satisfied.

And something in me—something I hadn’t known was there—exhaled.

We watched the sun come back on the horizon and drank more beer.

She didn’t offer anything else of her story. And I still don’t know who she was, where she came from, or where she went.

“Half an hour until the first boat arrives,” she whispered. “So you better fuck me fast.”

She lay back in the grass, legs open to the rising sun. An invitation too clear to be missed.

I didn’t say anything. I just moved. I fucked her like I was still dreaming, like if I stopped I’d wake up. We came again—faster this time, messier, both of us already slipping back into ourselves, back into the day.

We dressed as the first boat docked.

But we waited longer. Let the island fill again—with bathers and drinkers, dreamers and wishers.

We’d both had our dreams. Our wishes, too—the ones we didn’t even realize we carried.

When she finally stood, she didn’t kiss me. She just smiled. Walked to the edge of the pier and stepped onto the boat.

I couldn’t follow.

She waved once before heading below deck.

Bars in Norway open late. Even on an island wrapped in myth, ghosts, and whispered sex.

And I needed a drink.