I went to see Hyndla because I'd started bloodwalking for clients. However, the method I had to utilize in order to do it was fairly difficult; I would go to the local lake and stand up to my neck in water, holding onto a handspun thread. The other end of the thread was held by the client, standing on the shore. No doubt some of them were rather bewildered to have to go along with this, although I suppose they mostly just decided that it was part of some weird shamanic thing. But as I live in New England, this rendered bloodwalking impossible for the five months of the year when the local bodies of water were too cold to enter, and often frozen over. I needed a better way to do it, and I couldn't seem to figure it out on my own.

 (I get the feeling that many people, while reading these stories of my experiences, will be vaguely disappointed in the way that I continually fail to figure things out on my own and have to resort to the Gods and wights to help me. I can only say in my defense that I have the limitations I was born with, as does everyone, and I haven't gotten to where I am through the sudden development of great super-powers. Instead, I struggled my way up this mountain on my own, and often I had to ask for help - and still do. I hope that my relating my struggles, especially in areas where my native talents didn't cut it, will be of more help than some fantasy of "I just automatically knew how to do everything, because I'm Mr. Super-Shaman!")

 After a year of bumping my head against the problem, I pathwalked into Jotunheim and slogged my way up the northern mountains. I'd already asked Hyndla for the appointment, and made her an offering, so I was expected. I knew that she has a bunch of loyal storm-giants who guard her cave and make sure that she isn't bothered or molested, and I didn't want to set them off or get in trouble. Since the air was calm and clear, I figured that I was all right - I got the strong feeling that their first line of defense would just be some nice blizzards to confuse and turn back the unwanted approacher.

The Hag of the Northern Mountains was waiting for me. She was tiny for a giantess, old and wrinkled, with long silvery hair that draped all around her, and twinkling dark eyes. She was sitting on a stone platform bed on a pile of furs, and she bade me to come closer. I presented her with a gift, and told her my purpose, which she was already aware of. Hopping down from the bed with surprising lightness for one so old, she circled me and sniffed me like a dog, nodding her head and clucking her tongue. Was she smelling my Iron Wood blood, or my human genes? Both, I suppose. She asked me how I'd been doing with the bloodwalking, and I explained my inability to do it outside of a large body of water on which to project the images. Hyndla chuckled and said something about there being a lot of the Snake in me.

Then she ordered me to climb up on her bed and lay down, and I did, feeling a little strange. She hopped back up on the bed alongside of me, straddling me, and proceeded to poke at my belly in various places, whilst sniffing me further, and keeping up a constant stream of chatter in her creaky birdlike voice, which I will not repeat here. Then she told me that she could give me something which would help with the bloodwalking, if I wanted it. She seemed cheerful about it, rather than forboding, so I cautiously asked what it would cost, and whether it might give me problems. "If you weren't sterile already," she cackled, "you would be after this! That's why most don't want it. Bloodwalking affects the fertility; even doing it yourself without my gifts will slowly make you barren over time, the more you do it. But you're already barren as a winter field, so it won't matter."

So I agreed, and she took her price, and in the process inserted something into my belly. I couldn't quite see what it was, but it was shaped like a narrow cone a few inches long. I can still feel it in me, astrally, just behind my navel. "The place where you are linked to your ancestors," she said as she did it. Then she explained to me how it could be used.

Hyndla's Lesson: Bloodwalking Bowls

Now it is simple - you make a bowl of wood, as big as you can, you paint the inside red, you put the Bloodwalking bind rune on it. Why, you silly thing, where are your wits? It is Mannaz, for the kin and kind, and two of Raido, one on each side, made from the Mannaz and facing in. One for forward, one for back. You should know that. Then you fill it with water, and you prick their finger and let fall a drop of blood into the bowl. And your thread - you know how to spin, of course, so spin thread for this purpose. No, it needn't be red, it can be any color. They will hold the thread, and you the other end, and the middle will fall into the bowl between you.

Then you let your mind go into the thread, and into their blood that soaks it. Yes, I know that it is huge and confusing at first. Start with the parents. Yes, I know, you do not consider them all that interesting. But they are the closest, the most important. Look at them, at the color of the light that you see from their place in the blood-thread. Look closely, because they are the final culminations of their lines, and they combine to make this one.

Go outward, slowly. Slowly. Do not worry if they are sitting there impatiently. This is not to be done speedily, or you will miss things. As your run down the threads, the places where they branch off are like knots, like lights. Sometimes, once in a while, you will find a knot that is particularly big. If you look closer, you will see that there is a third thread running away from it. Perhaps even a fourth, although that is rare. Yes, that is how nonhuman blood gets into yours. You are nodding, you know how that works. Can a whole child of your world be born with only a human parent and a nonhuman parent? Yes, it can be done, but that is even rarer, and they do not live long, they are made wrong and they wither and die as babes.

To track flaws in the blood, that is the next thing. You feel the thread with your hands, you run your fingers down it - not into the water, you will disturb it - and think of that flaw, that problem of the body. You will see it running along the threads like a faint line. Perhaps it vanishes, then comes back in other generations - that happens. You can do this for the unborn child still in its womb, if you have the mother there - let her hold the thread to her navel, see it extending into her. You can see if the flaws in the mother's blood, or the father's, have taken hold in the babe.

Do I mean diseases, when I say this? Yes, that is part of it. But also there are debts, or things done that have made knots in the Threads that the Nornir work, and these can get caught in the blood-threads and passed down. Yes, sometimes they take the form of disease, sometimes ill luck or other things. There is not so much difference as you think. Cleaning those up? That you will have to take up with the Nornir, I only see things.

But the most important thing is that before you do this for them, they must honor their ancestors and make an offering. Such secrets are not to be plundered without giving honor to those who lived them. Have them go out and make an offering; it does not matter what. And the bowl with their blood, that should be carried outside and poured onto the Earth as another offering to those who came before them.