Scene 1
"Is this what you call a warm house visit?"
Mrs. John didn't bother hiding the deadpan. No warmth. No softness. No grandmother glow.
Her eyes slid past me.
Straight to Crow.
And her face changed like it was muscle memory—like she'd been waiting for permission to feel again.
"Oh—look at you," she said, voice lifting, suddenly alive. "Come here, baby."
She stepped aside and brought him in first, leaving the door open behind us like she wanted the world to know I wasn't the priority.
"How've you been, my grandson?" she asked, guiding him like he wasn't a walking storm. "Have you found me a granddaughter yet?"
Crow's shoulders loosened like somebody cut a wire.
The edge he'd carried up to the porch—gone. Not because he wasn't dangerous. Because around her, he didn't need armor.
He let her pull him toward the kitchen, and the smell hit me a second later.
Warm butter. Sugar. Something familiar.
Cookies.
Not the "I had extra time" kind.
The I knew you were coming kind.
The oven light glowed. The timer was already set. Half a tray in. A normal guest welcome prepared for someone who wasn't normal anymore.
Crow leaned down and whispered something in her ear.
She nodded like it was routine—like he hadn't just said something only people in our world knew how to say.
Then she pointed to a specific corner of the house.
Not the living room. Not the hallway.
A corner.
Crow walked off without looking back, footsteps fading down the hall like he belonged here.
The second he was gone—
Mrs. John's face emptied again.
She lowered herself into the chair like she owned the room and the silence. Like she'd been running this house long before I was brave enough to show my face again.
"So," she said, voice flat. "What brings my former daughter-in-law home?"
Her hand clicked the timer, not because it mattered—because she needed something predictable to do with her fingers while she measured me.
I didn't sit.
I didn't smile.
"Which one came back?" I asked. "I know it wasn't Agni… and as a mother, I know you can tell which one came back."
She held my gaze for a long moment.
Then smirked, tapped the table once, and answered like she was testing a student who already knew the lesson.
"Hm."
Tap.
"Is it find acceptance in loss…"
Tap.
"…or reignite a dumb goal?"
My jaw tightened.
Mrs. John didn't care.
"I told you once before," she continued, calm like a surgeon. "Once you're married again, you forgo old relationships. We've managed our distance over the years and it's never affected your child Alexis when she's here with Crow."
She leaned back, eyes narrowing like she'd decided I was still the same woman who once begged her son to come home.
"If it helps you move on to believe it's Tyr," she said, voice flattening, "then please do it."
The oven hummed.
The room felt too warm.
"My time on this earth isn't going to last forever," she added. "So you'll have to figure out how to forgive yourself."
Her eyes didn't blink.
"He made his choice just like you did. He forced you out the sea. That was his choice to make."
My fist clenched without permission.
Mrs. John watched it like a weather report.
"Also quit sending those stupid fruit baskets," she said, like she'd been holding the insult in her mouth for weeks. "You do it at the same rate she does with the lilies—every week like it counts as showing up. If you want to check on me, then come by and talk."
I held her stare.
Knuckles white.
Then I let my hand unclench—not because she won.
Because she wasn't wrong.
Before I could answer, Crow's voice called from down the hall—light, casual, like he wasn't asking permission from someone old enough to smack gods.
"Hey grandma! Can you come and show me?"
Mrs. John brightened instantly.
Like a switch.
She stood, grin returning, and shuffled off before I could stop her—before I could follow instead.
I stayed in the kitchen one beat too long.
The timer ticked.
And her words finally registered the way they were meant to.
Lilies? Flowers? This bitc—
The thought caught in my throat as it clicked.
She's been keeping tabs in my territory.
…Yeah.
I need to hunt someone down.
⸻
Scene 2
"Y'all just couldn't stay down, could ya?"
My handgun stayed leveled at the rising bodies because my hands didn't know what else to do.
Inventory. Don't guess. Don't panic.
Rifle: dead. Bolt locked back, chamber empty—dry metal and failure.
Pouches: light. Too light.
Sidearm: still here, still warm in my grip, still not enough.
Radio: static and nothing else.
Team—
Team was already done in.
Command called them insurgents.
Insurgents didn't get back up after assault rifles took chunks out of them.
The first one stood with half its shoulder missing, meat torn down to bone like someone tried to rip the arm off and got bored halfway through.
Another dragged itself upright with a ribcage opened like a cabinet door—armor plates shattered, organs wrong, not where they should be.
Faces weren't faces anymore.
Not clean holes. Not movie wounds.
Real damage.
The kind that says the rifles did their job.
They still stood anyway.
"You see the glory our God has brought us!"
The voice came from the rear—behind the wall of ruined bodies—like a man hiding behind his own sermon.
An elderly man stepped forward.
Twin green light shined in his eyes—too steady, too bright, like somebody else was using him.
Bare feet ignored the rivers of blood pooling across the concrete as if the mess didn't belong to him.
In his hands was a staff carved wrong.
Faces were embedded into it—open mouths stretched into silent screams, teeth bared, expressions frozen mid-panic like the wood had swallowed people and never digested them.
"To keep rejecting when the Emperor is offering you a spot to aid his plan…" he said, calm, almost disappointed, "…is foolish and naive."
I tightened my grip on the pistol.
"Your false sense of morals won't hold when my lord speaks to you," he continued, stepping forward like he owned the air. "Yes. I just need to give him the chance."
This entire room had turned into a horror show we should've handed to the Society.
Let their perimeter teams chew on it.
Or pass it to Baldur and let him erase it from the map.
Instead, command gave us the order to go in with assault teams.
Action over waiting.
Ego over patience.
We followed the clues—missing people, vans, patterns in a region that didn't want to be found—and the second we crossed the threshold, the room stopped feeling like a warehouse and started feeling like a mouth.
I chose action too.
I fired.
The bullet landed square in his forehead.
His head snapped back like any human would.
For one heartbeat, it almost looked real.
Then he uprighted himself.
Not healing.
Not flesh knitting.
More like the world corrected a mistake I wasn't allowed to make.
The hole sealed shut.
The bullet came out with a dull ping—like it struck metal instead of bone.
My stomach dropped straight through my boots.
I went to make the next best decision—
Only to learn it was the worst time to find out.
"Command—"
Static.
The lights blinked once.
And the world went black.
⸻
Scene 3
The command room was noise pretending to be control.
Screens flickered. Radios chirped. People moved fast so they wouldn't have to think about what the silence meant.
Maps were pinned up like they could pin down truth.
Then the intercom crackled.
Everything stopped.
Huginn's live report hit the speakers, and panic surged before he finished his first sentence—because if Huginn sounded like this, the situation had already climbed past "mistake."
"Yeah," Huginn said. "They cleaned house."
No softness. No apology. No room for denial.
"Whatever footage you had… wasn't this warehouse. You sent your agents to their end the second they followed whatever figure inside."
Faces went pale.
One officer opened his mouth like he could argue with a verdict.
Huginn didn't give him the oxygen.
"But yes, Baldur—I'm sensing the residual energy of a barrier."
A pause—like he tasted it.
"A higher-tier one at that."
The room went colder just hearing the word barrier out loud.
"Besides Crystal and me, the only other person who can use barriers that breach into illusion spaces is maybe Merlin," Huginn added—casual insult somehow making it worse. "But you know he's worse than Wukong."
Nobody laughed.
"But this kind of 'worse' the soldiers' cameras were displaying is clearly a cult."
Not insurgents.
Cult.
He didn't even respect the government label enough to repeat it.
"I don't have to explain how unlikely it is for him to work with them," Huginn continued. "But you never know. I'll pin my best bet on an Astral Pantheon getting involved."
That line landed like weight.
Like the problem wasn't local anymore.
"If the word Emperor is being used," Huginn said, voice flattening, "then it's likely one of the known paths to divinity."
A chair creaked.
Someone swallowed too loud.
"I'll focus on checking for any leftover notes and destroy this place when I leave."
The comms cut off.
Silence snapped back into the room like a collar.
Baldur's finger stopped tapping.
He stared at the commanding officer.
The officer tried to speak first—smart enough to read the room, dumb enough to think words could fix it.
"Don't," Baldur said.
One word.
No room for excuses.
"I don't want to hear it," Baldur continued, voice controlled in the way that meant violence was being restrained by choice, not inability. "In fact, I'll make sure I route all my own reports of you to the current leader of the defense section."
His gaze sharpened.
"I thought that with the new administration that your ilk would calm down and stop playing these foolish games."
The officer's anger flared like it had nowhere else to go.
"You're one to speak!" he snapped. "I'm trying to prove these people have just as much potential to be America as you!"
Baldur nodded once.
Like he could agree with the principle and still condemn the method.
"A soldier who took up an oath is clearly not in that grouping of issues we describe," Baldur said. "To use them as a shield to defend your horrible command is the sickness here."
He didn't raise his voice.
That made every word cut cleaner.
"They had families too."
The officer's jaw tightened.
Shame thickened in the air.
"You crushed that for what?" Baldur pressed. "To prove your own family deserve some fake chance when they're citizens—yes, we know."
His eyes narrowed.
"But to weaponize these people for your own reasons instead of getting on the frontline like men like Bo or even Tasey? Then you're the issue."
Baldur exhaled once—tired of saying obvious things to cowards who hid behind desks.
"I won't beat the dead horse," he said. "But I'll be taking command as of this moment to find this lost agent. He wasn't your soldier to use."
He gestured.
"So we'll return him to his organization while you head back to your own HQ."
Baldur's men moved in.
The commanding officer got escorted out before he could turn his anger into another excuse.
Baldur pinched the bridge of his nose.
Calculating. Distances. Time. Response windows.
Then, without meaning to, his hand tightened.
Metal groaned.
The table cracked.
Everyone stared like they'd just remembered Baldur wasn't a symbol on a ranking sheet.
Baldur stared back, briefly embarrassed.
See why Crystal says I give the teams something to laugh at when I deep think.
I stepped forward, mask set, voice cutting through the stunned quiet.
"So who'd like to explain to him how bad these idiots screwed up?"
⸻
Scene 4
"So how long before you give him the key? It could help Crow stabilize himself with a better identity than one we've never created."
Baldur stood in the doorway of my office like he hadn't stopped moving since Huginn's voice died on the intercom.
Golden eyes still carrying that rush of crossing half a country just to deliver a problem personally.
My energy rose without permission—heat climbing my spine, pushing outward like anger was the same thing as control.
Baldur's presence answered immediately.
Not aggressive.
Containing.
Like he'd learned how to keep a room from breaking just by existing in it.
"We were choking them out," Baldur said.
Quiet. Calm.
And heavier than shouting.
"Quiet. Slow. Controlled. That was the whole point. Huginn and I had them squeezed—routes, donors, sites. No headlines. No panic."
His eyes narrowed like he could still hear the static from that last transmission.
"And then you pushed it into the open."
I didn't answer.
"You pushed your Dogs to make a spectacle," Baldur continued, voice flat.
Not assets.
Not teams.
Dogs.
Daggers.
"Cani-B," he said. "The Wolfpack."
He let the names sit like evidence.
"Deleting a mountain wasn't a strike," Baldur added. "It was a declaration."
The air tightened.
"And now?" His voice lowered. "Now cults don't just hide. They adapt. They build pockets and traps instead of hideouts. Now it's open cleanups. Raids."
He looked me dead in the face.
"And it's Travelers who die doing it."
My jaw locked.
Like that could argue with math.
"The way you feel doesn't matter," Baldur said, and I could hear the restraint—hear the part of him choosing not to turn this into a war inside my office. "I'm only doing this because Crystal asked me not to overstep you."
A beat.
"But if you keep being destructive while calling it protection—then I'll be forced to have the Giver step up."
His gaze sharpened.
"You're his second in command. You know better."
Then he reached into his coat and pulled out pages that felt wrong the moment I saw them.
Too quiet.
Too heavy.
Like paper shouldn't carry weight like that.
"Odin didn't leave the same thing for everybody," Baldur said. "Explorers got chapters. Pieces. Clean pages meant to be read and filed away."
He slid the stack closer.
"Crow didn't get chapters."
The words tasted strange in the room.
"He got a diary," Baldur said. "Catered. Tailored. Hidden with triple the effort."
He tapped the top page once.
"Brand new language. Not one of Odin's old tongues. Not even close."
A pause.
"The kind of thing you don't write unless you expect the reader to survive long enough to need it."
He slid the pages onto my desk.
Not offered.
Placed.
Like a gavel.
"Crow would've come for these anyway," Baldur said. "So this is me giving you one chance to control how it lands."
My hands hovered over the ink.
The words didn't just sit on the page.
They greeted me like they knew exactly who I was.
I shouldn't have read it out loud.
I did anyway.
"Hello, sister in law."
The next line almost made my mouth twitch—playful. Almost him.
"I present the bed time story."
Then my eyes dropped to the title and my throat tightened so fast it turned mean.
"The savior journey."
A bedtime story.
About my dead husband.
Like he could wrap himself in something gentle and pretend it wouldn't cut me open.
I tried to read deeper.
Tried to chase him past the title—past the cute mask he'd left on the front page.
And the language turned into a wall.
Not on the paper—
Inside my head.
The letters stayed steady, ink perfect, but meaning wouldn't attach.
Every attempt to push past the cover slid away like it wasn't meant for my eyes to hold.
I blinked hard. Once. Twice.
Still nothing.
A laugh escaped me—sharp, wet, half-disbelief, half-grief.
"Odin is a true bastard," I muttered, wiping at my face like that fixed anything. "Banning even me from his own story."
Baldur's voice stayed calm—like he'd already filed this outcome away.
"It happened exactly how I expected."
The pages sat on my desk like a loaded choice:
Keep the cover and never know…
Or let Crow read it—
And let the story finish on the only reader it was written for.