[THIRD PERSON POV]
As soon as the light died down, Ragnir, now in an ethereal form of Ratatoskr, revealed himself to the onlookers who had been watching the results of the forging. But their attention was not on him. It was on the hammer, or rather, where the hammer should have been. In its place sat a squirrel, wearing the same appearance as the Ratatoskr they had seen in Jotunheim, down to the bandage over one eye.
The squirrel let out a small squeak, something like a greeting, toward Kratos, Zelos, Atreus, and Mimir, and all four of them turned at once toward Brok and Sindri.
"I did not expect that. It feels the same as me, yet different altogether," Ragnir said, circling the squirrel slowly. The squirrel turned its head sideways to face him, the motion unmistakably confused.
"What a cute little fella," Brok said, waddling toward the new creature. The moment he reached for it, though, the squirrel's head split open into something that resembled the head of the hammer, and it lunged at him. Zelos was already moving, stepping between them and taking the brunt of the attack on himself before anyone else could react.
The instant Zelos placed himself in front of it, the squirrel's body shifted, folding itself back into the handle of a hammer, hovering calmly in front of him. The handle tilted toward his hand, as if asking, plainly, to be touched.
"It is already bound to you? Now that is something. The piece of flesh you gave us must carry no small amount of loyalty toward you, if it passed that on to something this small," Sindri said.
"Well, that core came from my own flesh. If even my own flesh turned against me, I suppose no one in this world would be worth trusting at all," Zelos answered. He meant it mostly as a joke, but none of them took it that way, not after everything they had already seen him capable of.
Zelos reached out and drew a thread of connection between the hammer and his own soul, giving it a piece of himself in turn, and the hammer vanished from sight. None of them asked where it had gone. They already knew Zelos kept his weapons tucked away in a space only he could reach, somewhere nothing could be stolen from him.
"FREE AT LAST!" Ragnir shouted, the moment of distraction finally passing. He shot upward and began looping through the forge, yelling and laughing, and it was plain to all of them just how much his freedom meant to him.
The celebration did not last. Ragnir went still mid loop, as though something had spoken inside his head, and his expression soured. He let out a low growl before he answered whatever it was.
"Fine. Could you not let me enjoy this for even a moment?" Ragnir muttered, and a portal opened in the air beside him. He turned toward Zelos, and for once, something seemed to catch in his throat.
"You are welcome, Ragnir. I know how grateful you are," Zelos said before Ragnir could force the words out himself. Ragnir's mouth twitched into something like a smile, and he rolled his eyes, then turned and stepped through the portal without another word, vanishing from sight.
"I am going to miss him," Atreus said, a little wistfully, looking at the spot where the portal had closed.
"You say that as if he is truly gone," Mimir said, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. "Something tells me a spirit that loud will find his way back to annoy us again before long."
"In any case, thank you both again. You have been an enormous help to us through this whole expedition," Zelos said, turning to Brok and Sindri. The two of them had always opened their doors to his family whenever they traveled, and a simple thank you felt like the least he could offer in return.
"That is not even worth a grain of salt next to what you have done for us. Our doors are always open to you and yours, free of charge, my friend," Sindri answered, glancing toward his brother as he said it.
"Ohh, now you are going to make me weepy," Brok said, clearly uncomfortable with the sentiment, though he gave Zelos a firm nod a moment later, the gesture saying what his words had not.
"Let us go," Kratos said simply, already turning toward the path that would lead them home. Mimir fell into step beside him, just as eager to finally lie down after so many years spent bound to a tree, without even the luxury of resting his own back.
Zelos clasped hands with Brok and Sindri before following after his father and Mimir, with Atreus close behind him. The two dwarves watched them go, looking well satisfied with the day's work, and turned back to the projects that had been waiting since Zelos first walked through their door, already bickering good naturedly over which of them would get to it first.
The four of them soon reached the path through Yggdrasil, taking it instead of the boat, since walking the road between the realms was far quicker than sailing it.
Zelos found his thoughts drifting back to what Ragnir had said earlier, about the source, the birthplace where all magic began, and the place it was said to return to in the end.
'Could that place actually exist? There was nothing like it in any of the games, and I played every one of them. Maybe it is something the world never explained, a piece of all this that sits outside what I ever knew,' Zelos thought. He had accepted his mother's death. He had told himself, more than once, that he had learned to let it go. But even the smallest chance was enough to make that old hope stir again.
'Could it be the same void Odin meant to use the mask to enter?' he thought next, distracted enough on the walk home that he barely noticed the path beneath his feet. Kratos said nothing about it. Mimir, for his part, had long since learned that once Zelos fell into thoughts like these, he was better left alone with them, and so the two of them let him be. Atreus, walking a little ahead, was lost in thoughts of his own, though his were a far simpler kind.
For now, their only plan was to go home and rest. There was still much to prepare, and Zelos still had a promise left unfinished, one he had made to Mimir, to see every last Valkyrie set free. Whatever answers waited for him about the source, about the mask, about his mother, they would have to wait their turn behind that promise, and behind whatever else the realms still had planned for them.