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The weakness burned in him as he climbed over the snow bluffs, a shudder in his left side. Frost crunched under his boot. His foot slipped and his knee gave out.
Kratos managed to catch a tree stump. He felt more drained than he had in centuries, wrung out like a rag, vision blurry. But he had no injuries, and he couldn’t have been posioned. No poison killed this slowly.
Winter sun blazed across the dark forest. Snow sparkled. Kratos’ breath swirled white.
When he tried to rise again—he fell.
Icy snow-melt splattered up both arms. His body was giving out. With a grunt of effort, he lifted his head from the hard earth and saw the slender, tan arm of a goddess. She leaned back in the pristine snow, her dark hair spilling in tides over her thin woollen tunic.
“No,” Kratos muttered to himself. “No.”
The goddess looked over her shoulder. Half of her hair fell in rich, dense, springy curls, but the other half was thin and limp, falling out of her left side’s bleached and burned scalp. Her left ear was mottled, as if it had been partially chewed off.
“Who are you here for?” Kratos demanded.
The goddess watched him with one dark eye. “Sit with me, grandfather.”
“No,” Kratos said, narrowing his eyes. His jaw shuddered. “It can’t be.”
She said nothing, still as a watching bird.
Kratos snatched her shoulders. “Not yet, not yet! Another season!”
The goddess inclined her head peacefully. She reached out a hand and touched the centre of Kratos’ chest.
All at once, strength began to flood back into Kratos’ system, divinity burning just under his skin. It was power he hadn’t felt since he was a young god and stupid with power, irritable in the extreme, itching just to lash out. All the tiny aches, the hanging fatigue, the tenseness, all of it was wiped away in scalding health.
Kratos released her. He slumped slightly. “I have so much to do. I can’t come with you yet.”
The goddess watched him. Her face was perfectly formed, smooth as the curve of the moon, apart from the wizened and burned side. Kratos still remembered her as a babe, squalling in his arms, face still whole and wrinkled with newness.
“Hela,” Kratos growled. “Hela, my Haima. I need you to let me live on. Vanaheim is in trouble; they need my help. Just a little more, I’m not finished.”
“Death is like that,” Hela said. “She is a bad house-guest, turning up in the middle of proceedings.”
Kratos looked at her, hopelessly.
“Sit with me,” Hela said. She squeezed snow-melt out of her thick black curls. “Please.”
Kratos swallowed. He wanted to shake her, to beg her, to threaten her. But she was too special, his only grandchild, his little black butterfly. Slowly, reluctantly, he sat next to her.
“If you won’t let me stay, I need you to pass on a message to Freya —”
Hela shook her head, sadly. Kratos’ voice died in his throat.
“No messages from the dead,” Hela said.
Kratos tightened his jaw. A dozen emotions roiled in his chest, like a storm in a glass bottle.
Hela’s good eye turned to the forest.
Black spears of dark fir broke up the paper-white snowfields. Rabbits darted across the frozen land, leaving streaks of dappled footprints. Frost glowed like diamond lace in the boughs of trees, and firs shed their needles into their shadows. There wasn’t a single cloud.
Is there really nothing he could do? Kratos really wanted to ask, but he knew the answer. He had a million things left unsaid, undone. They all crowded around his mind.
From the heavens, and hawk shot down. Like a lancer, she snatched a rodent from the undergrowth and swooped up to the branches of a nearby oak. A fox crept under the tree, tail half-raised, like a dog waiting for supper.
“I’ve survived so many winters,” Kratos said, finally.
“It wasn’t the cold,” Hela said. “Your last believer met the afterlife. The last true Spartan has died.”
“In battle?”
“In their sleep.”
Kratos thought about Sparta. About broad, paved roads, temple pillars, fresh bread cooling on market stalls. He thought about olives, and clear blue water. Running with his brother in the cool alleyways. The sound of the distant sea.
He thought about how big the world was. How old. Pain swept thought him, grief, longing, nostalgia, the ineffectual anger that he could do nothing to stop the turning of the world, the relentless fate, the change that slipped through every attempt to barricade it out.
“Don’t be afraid,” Hela murmured. “I am with you.”
She squeezed his hand. Her skin was warm and soft.
“I am not afraid,” Kratos said, gruffly.
Hela only smiled, slyly. “No, of course not.”
“Your father, Atreus,” Kratos said, words bursting out. “I need to speak to him, before I go.”
Hela raised her good eyebrow.
“You must make an exception,” Kratos insisted.
“I cannot,” Hela said. She raised her perfect palm, and pressed it into Kratos’ weathered cheek. “But don’t worry. He knows. He’s always known.”
Kratos breathed out shakily. His heart was thundering. He closed his eyes briefly.
“Come with me now,” Hela murmured. Her throat was decorated with pale tattoos that stood out against her deep skin.
Kratos opened his eyes. He had the sense that the goddess before him was both his precious granddaughter and, simultaneously, an ancient being, far older than himself. It was like cosmos was smiling warmly at him.
“I’m ready,” Kratos muttered.
Hela wrapped him in her arms.
Sunset lit the forest horizon up in brilliant orange. Blue snow fell in thin, drifting flakes. The hawk dropped the bones of the rodent and the fox snapped it up from the ice, swallowing it whole.