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  [OPENING SAGA OF: FREYA]

  [SAGA TITLES: INDEXING…]

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  [SUMMARIZING...]

  [SAGA OF: The First Valkyrie, She Who Taught Odin Magic, The Goddess of Beauty]

  Sat on the edge of her desk, Freya smiled as she read through Eirik’s curated situation report, whilst Kai's group had indeed been attacked as she feared – they had not only still completed their mission, but had also killed several of the hounds that had been harassing the supply groups. This would make it both easier and safer to send groups through dangerous terrain. Most interestingly, in Borik’s detailed report on their supply trip, was the mention of the human girl Athena using Vanir frost magic, despite having no training that they knew of.

  “…it should also be noted that 'Athena' produced what can only be described as Vanir frost magic during resting hours. Given that this individual arrived with the others through the portals and has (assumably) received no formal training of any kind in Asgardian magic, the origin of this ability is, in this soldier's assessment, worth the Commander's review.”

  Someone had, at some point, given this young woman a foundation in a magical system that had no business existing in her head. Intrigued, Freya called for her current Valkyrie runner, Geira, to summon Athena, intending to find out the truth of the matter herself.

  A short time later, Geira returned with Athena in tow. “Commander, I have brought Athena”.

  “Thank you Geira, you’re dismissed.”

  A short salute later, Athena was left standing alone before Freya, who was languidly sat behind her desk, examining Athena with eyes that gleamed from her ‘Spell of Insight’.

  During the entire duration of the scanning spell, the girl Athena remained calm in the way that people are composed when they have decided, before walking into a room, exactly how composed they must be to survive. Freya recognised it immediately. She had worn that particular calm and calculating expression herself many a time. Of course, this was long ago when she was still weak, in places where the person on the other side of the table had considerably more power than she had.

  The scanning magic finished: no Giant-blood. No divine energy beyond the normal. No active magical restriction or enchantment was working on the girl's mind. She was purely Human, or close enough to make no practical difference.

  Dismissing the inspection magic, Freya indicated to the chair in front of her table.

  “Well, my scan tells me that you aren’t a spy of the Giants... So why don’t you tell me a little about yourself, what kingdom did you grow up in on Midgard? And where did you learn how to use frost magic?”

  Slowly taking a seat, clearly buying herself time to think, Athena replied carefully: “Well... first of all, I’m not from Midgard.”

  Raising an eyebrow, Freya replied with interest, “Oh? Were you a full-blooded human who grew up in Alfheim? I didn’t know there were any fullbloods left.”

  “That's not right either, I’m not from your Nine Realms, I’m from a planet named Earth.”

  Upon hearing the word ‘Earth’, Freya sat upright in her seat, her relaxed demeanour vanishing immediately as her face hardened.

  Freya was, by any reasonable measure, very old. She had outlasted civilisations and pantheons and geological events that had reshaped entire planets. She had been truly surprised fewer than a dozen times in her entire existence, and all but two of those had been deeply unpleasant.

  And Freya was, at this precise moment, very surprised indeed.

  Underneath the table, her hands glowed as she prepared spells to subdue Athena, depending on the answer she received to her next question.

  "That," she said carefully, "is not possible. All passageways between Earth and other dimensions have been sealed. For a very long time." She let a beat pass, watching Athena for a reaction, but her poker face remained blank, giving nothing away. Impressed despite herself, Freya decided to be direct: "Who told you about Earth?"

  “If it helps, I wasn’t brought here by a person. I was teleported... or rather, I fell, I guess - through a kind of wormhole, and before that there was some kind of system. It said that I was ‘chosen’. We all were actually, Kai, Theo, Patchy, and me. We were pulled through a kind of wormhole, I think."

  “...”

  Freya let the spells in her hands fade away; she was sure Athena was telling the truth. No human could control their body and lie to her so perfectly.

  Freya fell into deep thought, she was sure Athena was telling the truth, but she couldn’t figure out how she could have survived passing through the sealed passageways. It wasn’t possible to transit through the primordial realm alone as a mortal, so someone with divinity had to have guided her here, but who would have the power to both enter and leave dimensions...? And whoever that was, they had apparently done it four times over. Even Odin himself couldn’t leave the dimension at will.

  There were now four humans supposedly from Earth in Asgard. One of them even casting Vanir frost magic with no training.

  ‘Who’, Freya thought, ‘has that kind of reach? And why are they sending them to Asgard now?’

  She did not ask this aloud.

  Freya's problem was not a spy of the Giants or other forces.

  Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

  Her problem was considerably larger than a spy, by a few orders of magnitude.

  Freya sent Athena away with a cup of tea and a carefully vague set of instructions to continue as she had been, and then she sat alone in her tent for a long time.

  ‘It can never just be straightforward, can it.’ Freya grumbled to herself as she finished her own cup of tea with a single gulp.

  Outside, the camp moved through its motions. Ice crunching as people walked on frozen patches of ground. The distant clang of the smithy and someone shouting orders to a supply team. The sounds of an army at functional capacity, which was all she could ask for at the moment and considerably less than needed to currently win the war.

  She pulled a report toward herself without looking at it. Her eyes were on the tent wall, focused on the map pinned to the north side, on the innumerable coloured markers that the Valkyrie updated every morning and moved every evening for her.

  The ‘war’.

  She had been forcing herself to call it that publicly with the Asgardians. In official dispatches to Odin, in strategic documents, in the language she used with her Valkyries, she still said the 'war’ or, when optimism was required, the battle. War implied a state of affairs that might become permanent. She could not afford to let her people think in those terms. Not yet.

  But in the privacy of her own thinking, in the tent at the edge of the camp at the edge of the world, she called it what it was.

  Ragnarok.

  Freya turned to the report she had pulled over and began to read through the latest information.

  J?tunheim: Intelligence Summary.

  Bralkin the Frost Giant was consolidating his newly expanded forces. She read that section twice, not because the content surprised her — she had anticipated his ascendance within the giant hierarchy for some time — but because the timeline was faster than predicted. He had absorbed three competing factions in six months. Either he was considerably more capable than the earlier assessments suggested, or someone was helping him, and she could not currently determine which.

  Midgard: Mortal Shroud Integrity.

  The Shroud maintained its integrity, no changes.

  Alfheim: Restricted Area.

  The Elven courts had gone quiet, which was not unusual for Elves, but was a serious concern when they were in the middle of a war amongst their own kind. What could have happened?

  Freya penned orders to prepare an investigatory team if no messages were received within two weeks.

  Vanaheim: Ongoing Assessment.

  The Vanir were managing fine. The worry about cross-realm contamination from the rift and portal activity affecting farming had been proven needless three months ago, and the temporary agricultural disruption was recovering and food was once again being sent to Asgardian forces. That does not mean the problems were solved, however, as the damn hounds and berserkers kept popping up wherever a stable portal formed.

  Breachward Fields: Third Dispatch Report

  The third messenger sent to the Breachward fields had gone missing. It was time to send a proper sveit to investigate the situation until she could free up a Valkyrie Sisterhood to stay and resolve the situation in full, which would take at least another three days.

  She called for Eirik.

  He arrived the way he always did: without ceremony, slightly sweaty from training no doubt, and with the silent expectation of being given difficult orders. He stood in the tent entrance with his arms by his sides, and his expression arranged into the specific neutrality of NCOs everywhere when facing certain officers.

  "Sit," Freya said.

  "I'd rather stand."

  "I know. Sit anyway."

  He sat, with the reluctance of a man knowing what was coming.

  "Tell me about the boy," Freya said.

  Eirik was quiet for a moment. Pausing as he decided what information about Kai would be the most useful to Freya.

  “He's good with the sword. Better than he should be from what I can see, little experience in actual life and death combat but a lot of combat practice otherwise. And it's not just the sword; he reads situations and people quite well.”

  Another pause. "He reads himself too, which is rarer. He knows when he's in over his head and accepts gracefully when called on a mistake."

  "Does he act on that knowledge?"

  "Sort of. He changed his orders to match Athena's tactical advice on the ambush over his own without being asked. He’s... " Eirik seemed to consider his phrasing. "He is strangely both confident in his attitude, and lacking confidence in his leadership at the same time."

  Freya nodded slowly, indicating he should keep talking: "And the problem..."

  Eirik smoothly continued.

  "The problem," he said, "is that he's too comfortable handing things to Athena. She's clearly intelligent, and a strong tactician. But it is impractical to swap leaders in combat, she is not emotionally prepared to make a sacrifice. I think she will collapse in the face of a choice with no right answer.

  Kai thinks in terms of people. Whilst weaker tactically, I think he will be able to at least face those hard choices directly. Right now, he's reaching for her simple solutions when he is capable of reaching for his own."

  "She enables him to avoid leading the group."

  "She makes it easy not to think." Eirik's voice was gruff. "She doesn't mean to. And he doesn't even realise he's doing it. But if he gets comfortable deferring to her analytical read on everything, he's going to find himself unable to trust his own decisions if she isn’t there."

  Freya looked at him for a long moment. "You're telling me she's a crutch."

  "Yes.” He met her gaze and crossed his arms in thought. "I don't know her history, but I know her type. Capable people who can’t let anyone in their circle be more competent than them because the alternative is having to trust someone else’s decisions unreservedly. She'll run herself into the ground doing everything herself, before she'll even consider asking for assistance she hasn't already decided is necessary."

  Freya filed that away. "She needs someone who won't let her be the smartest person in the room."

  "No, she needs someone who makes it safe not to be the ‘smartest’ decision maker." Eirik uncrossed his arms and leaned forward. "And Kai could be that someone. As long as he stops looking to her whenever things get complicated."

  "Then you'll teach him." This was now clearly an order. "Don't make it obvious. He'll probably resist instruction he disagrees with. But- " She considered. "Let him lead the group into its mistakes for a while. Small ones, ideally. Let him feel the difference between what Athena would decide and what he would decide. Teach him to try making his own decisions, but accept advice from others."

  "He knows that already. He just doesn't know how to apply it yet."

  "Then help him."

  Eirik stood without being told. He had what he needed, and he was not a man who stayed in rooms with busy Gods longer than necessary. At the tent entrance, he paused.

  "The girl," he said. "Athena. She's already figured out she's the most tactically useful person in the group. But she hasn't figured out yet that that's not the only thing she could be. Perhaps a mentor might make a difference."

  Freya sat with that for a moment, turning his words over in her mind, before thinking to herself with some amusement and a shake of her head, ‘he always has to have the last word’, then turned back to her endless piles of reports.

  As she was about to pick up a field report on the Midgardian Giants, Freya paused as a thought occurred to her. She called for Geira, who was waiting outside.

  "Tell Sveit Seventeen to prepare for deployment and bring Kai here," she said. "I'll give the orders myself."