He must die, Odin says. He challenged me and our marriage. He looks sad, but he looks resolved.
Please, Freya says. Our people need his strength. They need his loyalty, and they need to know there’s room here for everyone. We’re not going to allow the hatred that has always persisted between our people, not here, not in any form, not anymore.
Odin’s nostrils flare, and his body shakes, but eventually, he steps back. Thunar, flame blessed æsir, I spare your life this day, but you will never take my position. You will never lead our people. The æsir will never answer to you, not under any circumstance. It’s as though you died today, and now you only live by the grace of our vanir queen. He looks around at the gathered æsir. Witness and acknowledge.
Every single æsir present bows their head and murmurs their agreement.
Thunar’s stuck in the old ways. They don’t work. Freya and I are changing our ways and our people’s future. Together, we will unite the vanir and the æsir, and we will make a place for us to coexist peacefully with the earth children who were here before us. I will eliminate anyone who interferes with our vision. Am I clear?
No one argues.
Not even Thunar.
Freya and Odin call the æsir who hadn’t joined them over, and they complete their mating flight right there, over the half-dead body of his challenger. It’s both beautiful, dangerous, and disturbing, like the ferocity of the æsir and the vanir naturally is anyway.
I must be deranged to be bonded to one.
But I do admire their desire to change the world around us.
I’m proud to be a part of it. The other æsir have wandered off, flown away, or gathered up their bonded and winged away, leaving me alone beside Thunar’s wrecked form.
I wonder what happened, exactly. The hardest fights are always between æsir with the same affinity. The flame blessed æsir are the worst of all. They’re impervious to heat or flame, so the only way they can injure one another is by claw and tooth.
Only, when I look at Thunar, he’s not splayed open like he should have been with Odin’s teeth or some kind of massive mauling force. He is crumpled, bruised, and seemingly broken, but most of that looks like it happened from his fall. No, the only severe wound I see is a dark, spreading, black mark on his chest that appears to be radiating outward.
Like he was pierced with a spear of ice.
Something that would destroy any flame blessed æsir in existence.
The æsir and the vanir were always opposites—balanced perfectly to offset the other. The strike blessed are the lightning to the storm’s wind. The moon vanir conceal in the air above while the water blessed hide underneath the ocean. And the ice vanir are perfectly set to destroy or be quenched by flame.
But challenges must always be carried out between one æsir and another, just those two. It’s forbidden for another to interfere. Surely Freya wouldn’t. . . What? Prevent her new husband’s miserable son from killing his own father? Break the rules the vanir might not even share?
Is it even breaking the rule if a vanir interferes? She’s not an æsir, not really.
This union will doom our people, witch, Thunar rasps.
I jump sideways, shocked he’s even conscious with as crumpled, torn, and bruised as he is.
You witnessed it yourself. My father forsook me and my mother’s memory for that she-devil. He welcomed our ruin through the door himself. He finally collapses.
I’m busy trying to revive him when the vanir begin to pop out of nowhere. Stupid moon vanir snuck another attack force into Valhalla today of all days.
Poor Freya can’t catch a break.
She’s stuck attacking her husband’s son and her own people on her wedding day. After hours and hours and heavy casualties, Odin and Freya finally win their second fight of the day, but I’m not sure anyone could call their wedding a success, not under any definition of that word.
And I can’t help fearing what this beginning means for our future.
Chapter 12
Azar
The earth children call themselves humans.
That was information we were able to gather in our advance missions. They have leaders at a local level, and also leaders at the larger divisions, but it was unclear exactly how many leaders they had or how to reach out to them specifically.
So when we land, we do it just outside of a large city, one that has had the most small machines launch into the sky. To attract the attention of their leaders, we locate a large building with no humans inside, and I incinerate it. Once they arrive, we try to talk to them about our search, what we’re looking for and how very badly we need the heart to be returned to us.
