An erotic retelling of the Norwegian fairytale “Prince Lindworm”
by T.C. Mill as part of the Frisky Fairytales zine project. (Read the full zine HERE – coming December 2026.)
(4,500 words)
Eivind wondered if the princesses had the more enviable end of the bargain. After all, they went to bed, after a day of celebrations, well-loved—certainly well-pleasured—and never woke again.
The rest of them faced the ugly questions. The absence, and the blood smeared on the bedding and his lips. Lips which had been sealed to the late princess’s cunny all evening, then pressed tight, his knuckles against them, as he lay beside her until he could no longer resist the tearing hunger. Until he opened his wide jaws and unfurled his long, powerful tongue one more time. True, he had resisted less with the second one. Eivind was a monster, and he knew of no way to change that.
Though nervous, given the rumors about her predecessor, even she had been soothed by his kisses. Then roused, shocking herself with newfound desire. Then very tired.
This third one, sitting beside him at the wedding banquet, wasn’t a princess. Some shepherd’s daughter, Eivind’s father told him. Perhaps she was taken as punishment for poaching. Then, she was one of the Orlendar, the foreigners who had settled in this kingdom over the past few generations; perhaps the King’s council, tasking with producing a solution, had found her simply disposable.
She had no family present. The others, coming from faraway kingdoms, at least had ambassadors they could glance at across the Great Hall for a reassuring smile.
Evind had no one to look at, either. He looked at her, the figure draped in white with work-strong, long-fingered hands wielding knife and spoon, an oval face framed by the wedding veil, thick black lashes around bright eyes.
When their eyes met, she nodded, unsmiling, but not unfriendly. She’d stood before him in the wedding ceremony with perfect composure. She must know why they chose her, and she didn’t know the pleasure she had in store, but she didn’t show any fear. Returning to her meal, she chewed a bite slowly. At that steady pace, she’d managed the entire feast, sampling each dish. Orlendar shepherds taught their daughters excellent manners. No doubt it gave her something to concentrate on, and she disguised her terror as a bride’s nervous appetite.
Eivind’s stomach twisted with worse than human hunger. He’d felt that, too, in his childhood creeping among the castle corridors, sometimes begging scraps from the servants, the prince his parents would as soon ignore. The unasked-for freak. They had no idea how freakish until he came of age.
This mixed with—lust. She was lovely. That her body, swathed under wedding fabrics, seemed to have full hips, a straight back, broader shoulders and more powerful arms than the princesses’ added to that loveliness. That she didn’t shy away from him made her all the more fascinating. Perhaps Eivind’s lust was as simple as any human’s. He looked forward to sharing it with her, at least.
But part of him was so hungry that his jaw felt loose.
“For you, my lord and lady. From your brother.” A servant leaned between them, closer to her than to Eivind, setting down the dish Erling sent along the high table.
“Thank you,” she said.
It was a cake nearly buried in candied rose petals.
Eivind’s eyes stung as if grains of sugar got in them, and bitterness twisted on his tongue. Erling had reason for the sarcastic gift: he would have married his lady-love a year ago if Eivind had not emerged from the shadows to demand his due. Let Erling wait a while longer; Eivind had lived a quarter century without recognition, but he was the eldest and he needed to be wed. And wed again, and again.
Unless Erling had the cake poisoned. That would be one way to end Eivind’s unquenchable hunger. The bride would die tonight anyway, Erling might figure. Disposable.
Quickly, Eivind pulled the platter toward him and spooned up the soft cake. He ate. Moist, though a little grainy, and tasting of roasted nuts, nothing worse.
He scooped another serving for her.
“Thank you,” she said again, with the same smooth courtesy she’d shown the servant.
Something in Eivind thrilled at that. It unraveled through him, stronger than the relief at learning their food was safe: the way she spoke as if he was there to do her favors.
She turned to her cake, but not too quickly. She had neither gaped at him nor flinched from his appearance. When Eivind kept his mouth closed, or just slightly open, he looked human. There was the texture of his skin, the fine scales across it, how they glinted gold and green. His eyes were too round, and the pupils not round enough. He shared Erling’s beautiful blond hair, but was longer-faced and thinner, still like a gangly youth. From across the room, people sometimes confused the princes, and ambassadors and visitors often seemed attracted to Eivind initially. Up close, or from far enough that they saw how he moved with a predator’s unfolding of sinuous limbs, they found him repulsive.
And however beautiful he found those around him, his attraction was something he only indulged with the women he was married to. Coward, he accepted what he was brought.
The petals on the cake were red and white. Some poison in Erling’s gift after all: barren, their mother had sought the help of a witch and disobeyed her instruction to eat only the red or the white rose that bloomed suddenly in her garden. She took both. So she gave birth to two sons: the youngest was the lovely heir she wished for, and the eldest was a dragon in almost human shape.
Greed was in the blood their family, and was punished.
Eivind’s bride ate the cake. Her mouth opened like a bud blossoming into a full-blown rose.
He licked the inside of his own mouth and cut his tongue on his teeth.
Photo by ABDUL MUSTAFA on Unsplash
Toward the end of the banquet, she slipped out. He followed, keeping to the walls of the room. As a grown prince, he no longer went invisible, but people remained eager enough to overlook him. And no one wanted to cause a scene by stopping her, he imagined; perhaps they expected he would.
Eivind kept to the shadows in the courtyard, too. The torches had been lit; she stood under one near the gate, speaking to a man with dark hair going white at the temples.
“I promised you a poem,” he said, squeezing her hands. “That if you ever married, I would give you a poem. I have one ready.”
“Save it for tomorrow,” she told him softly. Perhaps the flickering torches tricked the eye, but she seemed to smile.
Eivind wondered at the extent of her ignorance. Or else she just wanted to spare herself, or her father, the heartbreak of a farewell. Again that rasp in his eyes, a twisting in his chest. He wouldn’t want to witness it either. But he was touched that the shepherd had come, after all. He hadn’t sold his daughter or abandoned her.
“As I told you,” she said, “the old woman—”
A man made a disgusted sound beside him. No one was foolish enough to be so open in their response to Eivind, so he knew, turning, that it would be something else. His father’s favored councilor, Stephanus, glared at the two figures.
“The brazenness of the old man to come here,” he muttered.
“He has a poem,” Eivind said.
Stephanus spat. “Those people always have poems. He can say it over her grave, can’t he?”
Eivind had not sat in on the councils, but he suspected whose idea it had been to take a disadvantaged woman in their own kingdom rather than try for another princess.
Stephanus stepped forward, an arm lifting to point the shepherd away. Or to summon the guards; he’d no doubt enjoy the sight of them brutalizing the man, tearing him away from his daughter, and throwing him out the gate.
Eivind grasped the shoulder of his robe. Stephanus was one of the king’s younger councilors, in his early forties, but the demands of the job were not physical, and by his expression, he’d never had anyone lay hands on him in his life, however easily he directed the seizure and disposal of others.
As Eivind dragged Stephanus toward an empty workshop off the courtyard, the councilor realized what it meant. “You can’t—! Be reasonable, you fool—I’ll be missed!”
“And she won’t be, is that it?” Eivind unhinged his jaw.
It wouldn’t settle his hunger, he knew that even as he started eating. His curse demanded satisfaction from someone he desired, and though he’d admired men on occasion, Stephanus had never been one of them. Still, it sated something in him, if only rage. And it kept his bride’s farewell with her father from being interrupted. The best wedding present Eivind could offer.
After arranging himself and blotting the blood from his chin—his tongue had caught most of it before it dripped onto his wedding doublet, which was in any case scarlet—Eivind returned to the Great Hall. From there, he was swept up by his family in a solemn procession upstairs. His bride already waited there; he’d been a long while disposing of Stephanus.
His insides still clenched around a cold, hollow feeling.
The bedchamber was in a tower, comfortably furnished, too high and remote for anyone to hear screams—not that there ever were screams, but Eivind was the only living being to know that. His escort left him at the door.
Within, the attendants had completed their preparations and vanished, too.
She sat, a white-clad figure on the bed.
The room smelled sharply of lye. It must have been scrubbed, though Eivind thought grimly that should have waited until morning. Before the low fire, a steaming tub was draped with linen to hold warmth in. If she wanted to bathe first, he had no objections. He wondered if she might let him bathe with her, or bathe her—to offer that favor, too. Running his hands over her body, slow, gentle. He’d never done anything like it before.
Several basins waited near the tub, brimming with white. Milk baths were popular among the court; supposedly they kept skin soft. In their speed to depart, the servants had forgotten their broom, a jumble of willow rods in the corner. Though Eivind had spent his childhood creeping around the castle, observing servants at work, and none of the brooms they’d used had such odd shape.
He was trying to distract himself from the beauty in his marriage bed. As if he was the one afraid.
“Well,” she said.
Eivind faced her. “Hello, wife.”
Her rose-bloom mouth curved in a small smile. “My name in Lina.”
“Lina.” He bowed. “I am Eivind.”
“What shall we do now, Eivind?”
His mouth opened and closed silently a few times before he got out words he hoped would widen that smile rather than shock her. “There is a tradition on the wedding night…”
“Yes.” With soft laugh, Lina pulled back her wedding veil, releasing her hair. Thick black waves tumbled to her hips. Full, plush hips, though muffled in her gown and underlinen. As if in armor.
His fingers ached to sink in it, to find the shape of her beneath. Or to stroke through her hair.
She still smiled at him. Perhaps she even smiled wider to see his admiration. Oh, if only he could stay married to this one for the rest of his life.
“Lina—”
He took a step closer, and her smile faded. He steeled himself for the terror. Instead, Lina’s expression became stern.
She pointed at her feet. “Kneel.”
Eivind began to sink down.
“No.” Her mouth twitched. “Not halfway across the room. Come to me and then kneel.”
That was easy enough. He wondered what game she was about, but delighted in there being a game. What shall we do now, indeed. Perhaps she was more practiced than Eivind, with just his two wedding nights’ experience. Or maybe she wanted to make the most of her first and only time.
He would help her make the most of it, gladly. From where he knelt, Eivind smelled hints of musk, sweat, warm spice between her legs. He could almost taste her. Hope was stronger than the blood on his tongue.
Lina’s hand passed over his hair, so lightly as not to stir a strand. It curved down his cheek, and she frowned. She must feel the texture, drier and harder than human skin. Her fingertips went toward his mouth, and again he wondered at her ignorance. It took Eivind’s heart in a fist, this glimpse of what could have been between any two other people.
“Won’t you undress?” he asked.
“Won’t you?” Lina replied.
Their words weren’t playfully flirtatious. Nor was she as stern as she’d been when telling him to kneel. But her question was warmer than her courteous thanks at the banquet.
“I’ll need to stand again to get off my trousers.” Eivind’s face heated; when he blushed, he’d learned, it was a strange blend of pink and silver-green, as in the petals of some roses.
“Then do that.”
He got back to his feet and pulled off shoes, stockings, trousers, doublet, and undershirt. His cock swelled in his smallclothes. Her dark eyes danced from his soles to the crown of his head, flickering now and again—at his groin, yes, and all along his thighs, his narrow waist, the lines of his shoulders and the curve where each met his neck. His blushing cheeks, too.
Lina took off her wedding gown. She had already undone the laces at the back, or had one of the servants help her, so she merely had to step out. Eivind wished he’d had the privilege of helping to untie it. The white silk, surely worth more than her father’s entire flock, dropped to the floor.
In her throat, free of the high white collar, her pulse throbbed. He glimpsed the bones in her wrists, bared by the shorter sleeves of her undergown.
“Take that off, too,” Eivind said.
One of her eyebrows jumped, then settled in an arch that seemed skeptical.
Understanding what she required, he bowed his head and stripped from his smallclothes. He stood before her naked, firelight touching on the scattered brightness of scales, his cock ruddy and curving. His hands scratched at his thighs as he fought to keep for reaching from her. That idea had never seemed so good to him before, but he knew it was not his place.
“Fair enough, Eivind.” Fabric rustled. A linen gown fell between their feet.
He looked up to see she wore another undergown beneath the first. A startled laugh caught in his jaws, along with a groan of disappointment.
If she wanted to draw it out all night, he could understand.
“What should I do,” he asked, “in return for you taking off the next?”
“Remove yours, Eivind.”
Each time she said his name, it was like someone grasped one of the golden curls above his ear and pulled. He trembled.
“I have nothing left.” His hands lifted a little, like a surrendering warrior showing he had been disarmed.
“You have your skin.”
It crawled on his bones, scaled and impenetrable. As he’d grown, past the first shock of his existence, the servants learned he looked uncanny but posed no real threat to them. They’d often moved him out of the way with a push or a kick. He’d never bruised. Then he grew older, and most of them stopped. He came of age and opened his jaws, and they began to retreat down corridors instead of brushing past him. No one touched him, whether in harshness or kindness.
Snake’s scales, some had hissed. Worm’s scales. They shed their skins, didn’t they, snakes and worms and drakes? But no one had ever told Eivind to shed his.
“I don’t know if I can,” he said.
Warmly, Lina told him, “Try for me.”
He looked at her face and his skin felt loose, a burning beneath it.
When she commanded it, it became possible. Slackness, release, spread down his body. The first rent opened on his back—a sharp line as air touched him where it never had before. Eivind pinched a wrinkle near his elbow and it folded, then peeled away. It didn’t hurt, but it would have been alarming if he had been alone.
He gathered the shed skin and set it on her discarded shift. Smiling, Lina took off her next undergown. There was another beneath it.
“One more skin,” she ordered.
This time, he shook with it. A moan escaped his mouth. As this skin’s weight left his muscles, he dropped to his knees.
Lina let her linen gown fall beside him. It was not the last she wore.
Eivind writhed on the pile they had discarded. It offered little cushion, and the floor was shockingly hard. Goosebumps prickled, though if anything, the room felt warmer, the fire fiercer, his blood rushing. Yet he knew a chill of anticipation.
“Shed another,” Lina said.
So he did. Each time becoming more tender. His new skin was slick, sweating. Tears dripped from his eyes. Was this how nakedness felt to humans? So raw and undefended? He no longer saw glints of green on the backs of his hands; he’d turned dull gold blotched with pink. Eivind feared he was shapeless, but Lina didn’t look at him with disgust.
At his moans, her lips tightened. Her eyes went wide. She didn’t move them from him.
She lifted one more shift up her muscular calves, her round thighs and rich hips. Black curls between them. Some curve to her belly and more to her breasts, brown nipples taut. Lina stood over him, bare as someone new.
She crouched and touched Eivind, running a finger down his tear-damp cheek, his chest heaving with each breath. It blazed a line that sank through his nakedness, into muscle and bone, slicing through the hollow, insatiable places.
Then she rose and went to the tub. She pulled off the linen covering it. The pungency of lye became stronger. Taking one of the willow rods—not a broom, after all—she lowered it into the lye-imbued water.
Eivind’s heart lurched.
He could have crawled away. Or gotten to his feet and struggled or tried to flee. He didn’t want to. She had ordered him free of his serpent’s skin. Whatever she wished to do, he would accept.
It whistled as it came down and struck him with snap that stung his ears more than the first blow stung his flesh. The second was sharper, a lash of white that spread, heated, grew red inside him. The third layered on it in a rich weave of pain.
On the fourth strike, Lina’s willow rod snapped. She took another one from the armful and continued. Her breath came hard with the effort. Eivind rolled to present her with unmarked skin to whip.
Whatever she wished.
Even in his old skin, this would have hurt. The small remaining rational part of Eivind’s mind knew this must be punishment. Certainly he deserved it. It was right for him to suffer worse agony than either of the princesses felt as their lives were cut short. If this was a drawn-out execution—but was it?
He dared to hope Lina wanted more than to beat him to death. If she wished—but she went at it with deliberate effort, not vengeful ferocity of the kind he had just unleashed on Stephanus.
At his sob, Lina paused. After Eivind sucked in another breath, let it out, then one more, that was when she drove it from him with the next blow. She aimed away from his face, though she could have blinded him or split his mouth. She avoided his erection, too, if only from maidenly delicacy. She struck his ass, though, and laid stripes across his back, his chest, his long limbs.
If only because of the lye, Eivind remembered how the castle laundresses beat dirt from the finest fabrics. More than that, he remembered seeing his mother scrub a streak from his brother’s face, so hard Erling winced. Care and cleansing.
Even in his tender new skin, Eivind bore up under what Lina did to him. Stroke after stroke of clean, sharp fire. The harmony of new blows and the lingering smart of old ones blended. He became proud of his endurance, what he offered her. And he admired how she continued aiming and delivering. Each broken willow whip became a shared victory. Until Lina took the final one from the corner, and it snapped over his shoulder.
Eivind only became aware of that when the fresh pain stopped. The old pain swelled and throbbed, filling where he had been so hungry.
His cock was still hard, weeping across the floorboards and wrinkled linen beneath him.
He cried. Aching, satisfied, yearning, fearing. Lina knelt beside him and reached out. She put her palm to his cheek. Her other hand rested on his chest, over his heart. Perhaps she would kill him after all. It felt as if she could reach inside his remade, tender body and pull him apart. Eivind knew it was just, but he didn’t want to die. He would, if she chose.
“Lina,” he whispered, her name the only word he had, meaning everything.
Her hair fell around him, whispering across welted flesh, as she bent to kiss his forehead. Her lips were strong and soft and searing.
She grasped one of her discarded gowns and dipped it in milk. She bathed him inch by inch, clearing away sweat, tears, a few ribbons of blood where a lash had opened this final, innermost skin. Again, Eivind tried to offer parts of himself, raising limbs and turning over to make it easier.
She came around his hips and stopped.
“I’m sorry.” He desired her and couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. But he didn’t wish to appall or offend her.
“Not at all,” she said. “Come, get to your feet. I’ll help you, but I can’t carry you to the bed.”
In this, he was able to obey her, too.
He lay in her arms for a time, both of them getting their breath back. The sweat on her skin stung the wounds on his. Her nipples were so swollen they hurt him to look at. Her lower lips were swollen, too, so much that their slick pink-brown showed through her black curls. He smelled her arousal.
He moved his head to kiss the slope of one breast. Lina stirred under him, then hummed.
“Please?” he whispered.
“Yes. Go on.”
He kissed and licked in a tightening spiral up to the sweet bead, which he sucked into his mouth. Lina surged up toward him. One of her hands, on his back, curled until the nails clawed. The other tangled in his hair.
After a while, she said breathlessly, “Do that—elsewhere.”
If he were in a teasing mood, like they had seemed to be for a few moments as they stripped, he might have suckled her other breast next. But he knew where she most wanted him, and he wanted that, too. He lowered himself, kissing her stomach on his way to settle between her legs. There he drank from her dew, flirting his tongue between the folds of her. Lina trembled. Her grip on his hair tightened; she used it to guide him.
Her hips rocked up as he found the hard spot and let it roll back and forth across the tip of his tongue. He nuzzled closer and pursed his lips around it. With a strangled sound, Lina fucked his mouth. He opened it wider to let her have his wetness and warmth.
But only so far. His jaw had a new shape, and there were things he would never be able to do with it again. Eivind wept with gratitude at the thought, and he showed her how grateful he was.
His tongue was still long and powerful, and he put all of it to use.
Her legs closed around his ears. Her fingers ran across his scalp. He remembered her touch on his face and chest earlier and the fire of the memory joined the warmth of her seizing him now. He’d never been touched the way she touched him.
She used him as tirelessly and mercilessly as she had flogged him, until he ached. Her sweetness choked him, but Eivind kept swallowing. Her pleasure poured down, enough to drown him or wash him, and he plunged into it. He felt it running across his chin and dripping on his chest, richer than blood had ever been.
When his arms could no longer hold him up, she had him lie on his back and straddled his face. Eivind’s teeth had become blunter, broader, less needle-like. He offered their flat surface for her to rub her swollen clitoris against. The sensitivity of it left them both groaning.
She came three times that night. In between the second and third, she put her hand around him and stroked, gently, wonderingly, until he spilled across their bellies and the soft bedsheets. No one had ever seen him come before. Her eyes stayed wide and bright the entire time. His head fell back in ecstasy and she kissed his bared throat.
The next morning, they lay half-sleeping until the door creaked open. Eivind raised his head, and the door wiggled as whoever was on the other side jumped in startlement.
Lina sat up, and the door suddenly swung wide, the threshold beyond it empty. The servant or councilor had run off to tell the rest of the court the incredible news.
“A whole lot more of them will be along to confirm it soon,” he warned his princess in a mutter.
“Ah, well.” She lounged back on her elbows. “This day takes on its shape. We have to pass it somehow until tonight.”
He bowed his head in agreement with her smile.
Erling would want to begin the preparations for his own wedding. That thought lifted Eivind’s heart, though he never expected he or his brother would be friends. And had his father noticed the absence of Stephanus? Eivind would have to see what he could do to ensure the next royal councilor had an appropriate respect for all people in his kingdom.
So much for his family, but then came the happiest thought yet. “We must have someone send for your father,” he said. “I believe he has a poem to recite for you.”
Her brows lifted—he would have to explain, someday, and he trusted she would not turn away from all his explanation revealed. “He does,” she agreed. “And many new ones to compose for us, I think.”
She composed poems herself, it turned out. She began one the next night in honor of Eivind’s rosepetal tongue.
~end~
Author’s note: my source for this story was primarily “Prince Lindworm” at World of Tales, attributed to East of the Sun and West of the Moon by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe. However, the Lindworm tale has many variants across the world—experts theorize it originated in India and the Near East before spreading to Northern Europe and Africa.
