The Lord of Pluto stood silent as the clock ticked away.

One last puff from his smoking pipe cut gently through the increasingly more tense atmosphere.

The Knight held out his hand for quite some time, he genuinely anticipated a sincere reply, but none came.

The Lord of Pluto simply put away his pipe with indifference, and he matched the man's disappointed glare with indifference and contempt.

The hand was lowered at last, and the Knight let loose a terribly exhausted sigh.

“You’ve let me down,” He said.

“At what point did I say I’d betray my own country? While I do thank you for indulging me, this and that are unrelated matters.” 

“Is that so?” The Knight asked him.

Then a cold smile formed upon his lips.

He stepped forward as a cloud of Ash began forming in the heavens high above.

“Then let me tell you something else.

The purpose of the Einherjar, like those forming that mist, is to gather the Ash of the recently dead to feed their Vanir master.

Every man, woman and child who ever perished to this curse is, of course, included in that number.”

The Lord of Pluto absorbed those words in silence.

Like most he already knew that the gods consumed Ash to grow stronger, so he had of course already expected somewhat that what the Knight just told him would be the case.

Those killed by this curse were consumed by Fimbultyr, he finally dared to believe it.

The reality then was that his ancestors, his wife and children and all the friends he grew up with stood among that number.

He was utterly silent as he removed a scalpel from his sleeve.

The first exchange was swift, the Lord of Pluto leapt forward to puncture the lung of the Knight of Cain.

The Knight leapt back, his feet never touched the ground after that.

“My armour is thicker than that blade is,” Said the Knight, and the Lord of Pluto scoffed in turn.

Mortuus threw his scalpel forward, and it slipped between the helmet and gorget to stab straight into the soft and unarmoured neck of the knight.

Though he started choking on his own blood a moment later, the knight was only incensed.

Such a wound was by no means fatal to a Platinum Class, after all, but it had managed to startle him.

The Lord of Pluto stood tall, as if his victory was already certain.

The Knight glared at him, but then stiffness consumed him.

Sounds popped in his ears, cracking and crumbling echoes.

Something cut off his airway and all the signals from his brain trying to find passage through his spine ceased their flow.

When at last he realised what Mortuus must have put on that scalpel, he couldn’t even curse as his body fell into the sea down below.

The Lord of Pluto was indifferent, he returned the pip to his lips and smoked it as he peered over the edge and looked down onto the raging waves rocking the shoreline.

“Tell me,” He said, huffing a breath from his pipe, “Were his words true?”

Silence, for the longest time there was naught but silence.

He heard a sigh upon the wind, as if it was uttered by the world itself.

The darkness all around him started to take shape, a woman in a black dress stepped forth from oblivion.

Sandals adorned her soles and clacked loud against the stone.

She was Dire, once an Immortal Matriarch, ancestor of Beatrix and Rapture, now Einherjar of the Vanir God named Rognir.

“How did you know I was here?” She asked him.

The man, once again, did not answer.

Her crimson lips raised into a knowing smile as he continued to smoke from his pipe.

She realised that he had not known, he had merely inferred.

‘Men like this are pretty annoying,’ She pondered, ‘But they’re also not boring.’

She shook her head and advanced until she stood shoulder to shoulder with the Lord of Pluto.

“There were no lies,” She said as she turned her gaze from the wall of fog to glance upon his side profile.

Mortuus didn’t show much of a reaction even then, it could not be said it surprised her either.

The man removed the pipe from his mouth again, then seemed to stare into it as though he was at a loss.

He thought of the God of Alfheim, Grimnir, whose blood was said to turn those who bathed in it into witless beasts while those who drank it turned into mindless dolls.

With such an example, he couldn’t help but dread the gods of this world.

What sickened him the most, what made his gut churn most of all, was the agonising revelation that his wife, his children, and their spouses too, had all perished in this same way.

Their Ash was devoured by Fimbultyr, he hurt them even after death.

“Are you an Einherjar?” He asked her.

The woman, Dire, blinked her long lashes.

She looked him in the eye with a very complicated expression before nodding her head in turn.

“What are you doing here?” He asked.

“My Lord has a vested interest in this land at the present time,” she said.

The Lord of Pluto then shot her a glance.

She became lost in her own little world as she peered off into the abyss before her, and then she pondered aloud the name of the God of Niflheim.

“Fimbultyr...was it? In truth I know very little of this Vanir but...would you like to hear it?” The Lord of Pluto shook his head in silence.

“What good would come from knowing?” He said to deny her, yet she saw it in his eyes, the desire.

Curiosity is a dangerous thing, made only worse when it involves matters so personal to the man who wants to know.

“My Lord once was human too,” She said, “Even the Aesir follows that rule, whatever else is true we were all humans at some point in the past.”

Mortuus pondered her words, he committed them to memory.

He wasn’t a scholar like Rudolph so he didn’t really care about learning where the gods came from, he only wanted to avoid their wrath.

Even still this truth intrigued him, it might be worth at least sending it to the scholars and their union for the sake of the archives.

“This man, Nakha Igora, was the Prime Minister in the country where my lord stood as a Duke. They were...not friends,” Said Dire.

Mortuus could sense her words were something of an understatement.

She carried on, though confessed that she had heard only one tale about this man, and in that tale the man finished off her master Rognir’s, only daughter.

This struck a cord with him especially when she told him that Asagrim’s enforcer was meant to do so first, but that person in the end could not stomach to commit such a sin.

Minister Igora, therefore, certainly did not stand out as a man of moral convictions when stood next to that failure of an enforcer's example.

Mortuus raised his pipe to his lips anew and then turned on his heels.

He started walking back into his place of dwelling and did it so naturally that it was as if nothing had happened at all.

He treated even Dire herself as though she was a normal person and it was as though the dead Knight of Cain had never even been there to begin with.

“Would you like to come inside?” He said, turning to glance over her shoulder.

“If you insist,” She replied, and then the man paused in his steps.

He only meant to be polite, he really wanted this nothing more than for this terrifying woman to leave his company as swiftly as possible.

She knew that, of course, but she accepted his gesture anyway.

He'd done something to spark her curiosity, oh such a woeful tragedy. 

_______________________________________________

Rudolph’s heavy steps trekked the mountain path.

He kept himself hot on the trail of that ghostly white figure and descended into a large cratered region that was surrounded by mountains on every side.

There he spied it, the temple laying in the very centre of this space.

The scholar stared downward into the inverted dome with awe in his eyes.

He beheld a woodland, oddly lush and tropical for Muspelheim’s typically arid landscape.

He took in the sight, then continued walking downward.

He stepped into the woods, walked upon the rich soil and before long he passed them by.

He came upon the heart of the cratered region, where he could only see charred ashes and the stumps of trees long laid to rest.

Something had happened here, something had killed all the trees that had been thriving off the heat from the dormant volcano below.

He lifted his gaze from the soil and stared into the heart of the woodland.

There lay the mighty temple, a pyramid shape crafted from faintly azure coloured stones.

He advanced, his winged Fay companions slowly emerged and lifted his shroud in the breeze.

They let out gleeful sounds as they dug themselves into the Ash covered soil.

They coiled up in those boroughs like infants in the womb.

Their wings cocooned their bodies and hardened, roots entrenched them into the soil as Rudolph’s advance carried on past them.

Pitch black boles began erupting from the earth around him but the man did not halt his steps.

Many of his fay evolved into trees here in this wealthy soil, and from their branches unravelled the wings of yet more of their kind.

They took flight and then, before very long at all, the entire temple was surrounded by a pitch black storm formed from the Ash of millions of tiny winged women.

Rudolph raised his head.

That white figure was here, he sensed it lurking within the temple walls.

He closed his eyes and then took the first step, he climbed the stairway up the temple and then delved into its maze-like chambers.

______________________________________________ 

Only an hour had passed after Rudolph had entered the temple grounds.

The wind dulled to stillness, and then a white storm roared its way in from afar.

Thunderous clouds covered the mountainous land.

The region began to tremble, indeed, the mountains themselves began to shake down to their very foundations as the eye of the storm unfurled.

The female Einherjar from that time before appeared once again.

She looked upon the crater with her eyes glowing white.

The winged women could not see her, nothing could sense her standing there, yet she did not make a move.

She did not enter the temple, for she knew “him” better than anyone else.

He would only choose to flee from her if she made her move too soon, but he would not flee from that mortal.

She chose to wait, she chose to let that mortal weaken “him” until finally he could not summon the strength to escape from her again.