The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 16: Brother and Sister

The lift shaft at the base of the Central Spire ran three kilometers straight up, all polished crystal, and it breathed. Shield-Captain Brynja Vingfalk felt it through her soles before she heard it. A slow intake drew the air up past her helmet seals. A long exhale pushed it back down. The exhale was warm and smelled of crushed pine and wet bark, and it left beads of water on her visor that her wipers couldn't keep up with.

Green light pulsed in veins along the walls. No cables ran up the shaft. No cars waited at the bottom. There was only the column of air and a faint pressure at the backs of her knees that said up was already pulling.

Mist crouched at the edge of the deck over her wrist-comp. Her thumb left grease smears across the cracked screen. She had taped the corner where the casing split on Niflheim, and the tape was peeling again. "Lift vector's garbage," she said over the squad net. "The pull spikes every time the planet's pulse does. Freyr's heart rate climbs and we get smeared across the ceiling."

"Then we go up fast," Brynja said.

The Weavers had already built the platform a meter off the deck. It was a disk of hexagonal hard-light panels. Each panel flickered at the seams. Brynja stepped on. The panels gave a centimeter under her weight and held. Sigrun followed and locked her tower shield into the mag-clamp at the leading edge. The armory stencil from Vigrid still ran across its face. SHIELD-SERGEANT S. HALLDORSDOTTIR. Acid had eaten half the letters.

Frode and Jorn took the rear with storm-bolters up. They were the last two Einherjar out of the nine who had dropped. The three Weavers stood at the center of the disk. Their hands moved without pause, threading something nobody else could see.

"Up," Brynja said.

The nearest Weaver closed her fist. The platform went.

The atrium floor fell away. The crystal walls turned to a green smear. Brynja's stomach stayed somewhere near the bottom of the shaft while the rest of her climbed. Frode spat a curse she couldn't make out over the wind noise.

Something moved inside the walls. "Contact," Sigrun said. Her shield came up.

Ports opened along the shaft. They weren't doors. They were rings of bark-skinned muscle that dilated and spat out bodies. Freyr's personal guard came through them and dove straight into the updraft.

The Verdantblades stood seven feet tall. Fungal flesh had grown over and through their ironwood plate until Brynja could not tell where the armor stopped. None of them carried a gun. Their weapons grew out of their arms. Scythe blades of black thorn. Hammerheads of root gone hard as stone. Their faces were overlapping fungal plates and nothing else. No eyes. The nearest one turned its head toward the heat bleeding off her pauldron vents and tracked it.

"Weapons free," Brynja said.

Storm-bolters hammered in the shaft. The crystal threw the noise back doubled. Explosive rounds blew fist-sized chunks of bark off the lead berserkers and showed wet red meat underneath. They kept coming. The first two hit the platform hard enough to tip it fifteen degrees, and Brynja went down on one knee.

A Verdantblade landed in front of her. Its scythe came down. She got Storm-Singer's haft up in time, and the shock ran from her wrist to her collarbone. The second strike came faster. She turned it off the spearhead and felt it in her back teeth.

"Heavy fuckers," she said. "Sigrun. Hold the edge."

Sigrun put her shoulder behind the tower shield and drove it into the next berserker. The impact rang through the platform. She kept her legs churning and shoved the thing off the lip. It fell, clawed at the crystal, and found nothing. The updraft caught it and threw it back up past them. It hit a support strut a hundred meters above.

"Shift," one of the Weavers said. The platform banked left. A slab of loose crystal the size of a dropship hatch went by close enough to stir the air against her chestplate.

More ports opened above. A dozen bodies dropped out of them at once.

"They're stacking on us," Frode said. He held the trigger down until his barrel glowed orange and the heat warning blinked on his visor. "Captain, I'm black on ammo in twenty seconds."

"Shit," Jorn said. "Eighteen."

Brynja ducked a swing that would have taken her head off at the gorget. "Weavers. Flip it."

The three Weavers moved together. Their hands closed on nothing and turned.

Up stopped being up. The diving Verdantblades stalled in the air above the platform. Their limbs kept working against momentum that was gone. They hung and rotated slowly. Sap trailed from their wounds in red ribbons that didn't fall.

Brynja reversed Storm-Singer and drove the butt-spike into the deck. "Channeling. Hands off your barrels."

She dumped the spear's capacitor. The readout inside her visor dropped from ninety-one percent to four. Current crawled over the hard-light panels in blue threads. The Weavers caught it and pushed it outward.

Lightning filled the shaft. It forked between the hanging bodies and found the sap leaking from their bolt wounds. The sap boiled in their joints. They jerked once, twice, and went still. Then the Weavers let the pull come back, and the bodies fell past the platform in a smoking rain. One clipped the edge as it dropped and left a smear of black char across Sigrun's stencil.

"Resume," Brynja said. She pulled the spear free. The metal hissed where the damp air touched it.

They climbed. The green in the walls brightened until her visor dimmed itself to compensate. Jorn reloaded. Frode had nothing left to load. He slung the bolter and drew his seax. Then the walls ended.

They came up through the cloud layer into thin air under a dome of force-fields. The stars were very sharp. Far below, the planet's surface glowed a dull red through the breaks in the cloud. The platform slid to the lip of a circular garden and stopped.

No gun emplacements. No guards. The gravel under Brynja's boots was crushed gemstone, and it crunched. Blue ferns from Niflheim grew beside a cluster of Jotunheim crystals that chimed whenever the air moved. Midgard iron-oaks stood along the rim. Someone had tied a Fleet requisition tag to the lowest branch of one of them, and the faded print read HORTICULTURE / SPECIMEN 0447 / PROPERTY OF ASGARD. The air smelled of rain and turned soil.

In the center sat a plain wooden chair. Freyr sat in it.

He wore a robe of woven grass over linen. No armor. On the broadcasts he had burned gold. Here the light under his skin came and went, and when it went he was grey. His hands were black with soil to the wrist. He held a pair of shears and was cutting dead growth off a sapling in a clay pot. He didn't look up as five armored soldiers and three Weavers walked across his gravel.

"The roots are thirsty," Freyr said. His voice reached them without amplification. "They drink and drink. They stay dry."

"Step away from the interface," Brynja said. She held Storm-Singer's point level with his chest.

Freyr looked up. Brynja had seen that look in the field hospitals at Vigrid. It belonged to men on the morning after their second amputation. "There's no away, Captain," he said. "You prune, it grows back. You prune again."

The air beside Brynja thickened. Lady Freyja stood there. She wasn't a hologram. Her projection cast a shadow on the gems, and the ferns bent away from her feet. She wore mourning grey.

"Brother," Freyja said.

Freyr set the shears down and wiped his hands on his robe. It didn't help. "Sister. You came for the harvest."

"I came to stop you." She took a step toward him. "The casualty feeds from Alfheim alone run eleven hours. I sat through all of them."

"They were running before I started." Freyr lifted a hand, and a map unfolded in the air between them. The galaxy turned slowly. Asgardian holdings showed grey. They reached out from the core in long fingers. Strip-mined worlds. Orbital foundries. Garrison moons. "Ninety-one worlds paved since the Treaty of Vigrid," Freyr said. "Go and count the forests on any one of them."

"You're killing billions," Freyja said.

"I'm weeding." Freyr traced one grey finger of the map. "You'd stand over a bed of roses and cry for the bindweed."

"They're people. They lie and cheat at dice and drink too much." Freyja's voice did not rise. "Then they get up the next morning and feed their children. You used to carry the first sheaf into the hall yourself."

Freyr looked at her for a long moment. Something moved behind his face. For that moment Brynja could see the god the farm boys in the Einherjar still sang about on long hauls.

"I remember the sheaf," he said. "Winter's coming anyway. Somebody has to turn the soil."

He turned to the rune-stone beside the chair. It was a column of dark rock cut from deep in the planet. Runes ran down its face in green light. He laid his palm flat against it.

"You think the World-Strangler is for taking planets," Freyr said. "That's a quartermaster's idea of it."

The map pulled back. Star clusters shrank to points. Sectors shrank to smudges. Then the hyperspace lanes came up through everything. One pale trunk split into ten thousand limbs.

"Yggdrasil," Mist said. "The lanes. The whole fucking network."

"The veins." Freyr touched the base of the trunk. A green stain started there and began to climb. "That's where the Eitr runs. That's what keeps your Aesir young and strong and hungry."

"What did you do to it?" Brynja said.

"I grafted the Strangler into the root. It doesn't kill the tree. It filters it, and anyone drawing Eitr through the grid gets cut off."

"Anyone with Aesir blood," Freyja said.

"Unplugged." Freyr looked at Brynja. "No Eitr, no gods. Some of them will be dust by morning. The rest will be human."

Sigrun's grip creaked on her shield. "That's genocide, you mad bastard."

"It's mortality," Freyr said. "Everyone else in the galaxy manages it."

Sigrun opened her mouth and nothing came out. Her bolter muzzle dipped a few centimeters, then came back up shaking.

Freyr turned back to the map. The green had reached the first fork. He lifted his hand toward the last rune at the top of the stone.

"I won't let you," Freyja said. Light gathered around her raised hand.

Freyr didn't turn around. "Where do you think that comes from?" He flicked two fingers.

Vines broke up through the gravel under Freyja's projection. They went straight through her. Her form tore into static wherever they passed. She flickered and thinned, and her mouth kept moving after the sound cut out. One word came through in pieces.

"Brynja."

Her eyes found the Shield-Captain before she was gone. Nobody needed to say the rest.

Brynja dropped her shoulder and charged.

Freyr didn't raise a shield. He raised the floor. The crystal under the gravel split, and vines as thick as a man's thigh came out of it and whipped across her path. One hit her chestplate and cracked the ceramite. Another tore a pauldron half off its mount. She kept running.

She thumbed the switch on the shield generator at her hip. She had rebuilt it herself after Alfheim and stripped out every limiter the Fleet armorers had put in. The field came up white. Every vine it touched burned. The smoke was thick and sweet, and ash caked her visor. She put her head down and went through the wall of green.

Freyr's eyes went wide. He hadn't expected the steel to burn that hot. He turned back to the stone and reached for the last rune.

Brynja hit him at a full run. They went down together on the gravel. He was lighter than she expected, all bone under the grass robe, and the air left him in a grunt. His hand came up anyway and closed on her throat. The grip was hard. She felt roots threading out of his fingertips and feeling for the seals at the edge of her gorget.

"You're saving the tumor," he said into her faceplate. His breath fogged the ceramite. "You're dooming everything."

Brynja headbutted him. The brow of her helmet met the bridge of his nose. Something cracked, and it wasn't the helmet.

Freyr rolled away. Blood ran from both nostrils into his beard. Brynja got her knees under her and found Storm-Singer in the gravel.

He raised both hands. The whole garden came up off the ground. Iron-oaks tore out of the rim and dragged their roots behind them. The ferns, the crystal clusters, the requisition tag, the turned soil all lifted and leaned toward her in one mass of wood and thorn.

"Captain," Sigrun said over the net. "End it." Her bolter chewed into the oncoming mass in short bursts to buy seconds.

Brynja didn't look at the wave. She looked at the rune-stone. The last rune was still dark.

She turned the spear in her hands, point down.

"For the weeds," she said.

She drove Storm-Singer into the stone.

The point went in a hand's width. The stone split along its runes. Whatever Freyr had been holding in it came out all at once. The blast threw Brynja backward across the gravel, and the gemstone chips opened her undersuit in three places. The wall of trees came apart in the air and fell as dust. The crystal floor crazed outward from the stone in white lines.

Then nothing. Her ears rang. On the map, the green stain flickered at the first fork and went out.

Brynja pushed herself up on her arms. They shook. She let them shake.

Freyr lay in the wreck of his stone. His chest rose and fell too fast. The gold was gone from his skin. What was left was an old man in a grass robe who had been out in the cold too long.

She walked over and stood above him. Storm-Singer hung at her side. Something that wasn't blood dripped off the point.

He looked up at her. "You saved them," he said. He had to stop for breath. "Next time they won't need a Strangler. They'll do it to each other."

His hand moved across the gravel toward the sapling. The pot had cracked in half. The roots lay bare in a fist of dark soil.

"Who tends it now?" he said.

"We will," Brynja said.

Freyr closed his eyes. His shoulders began to shake, and he turned his face into the gravel so she wouldn't see.

Above them the dome flickered. A long crack ran across the force-field, and the thin air began to whistle through it. Somewhere under the floor a support strut gave with a sound like a bulkhead going in a hull breach. The whole summit tilted two degrees.

"Captain," Mist said. "Platform's up. The Weavers say ninety seconds, and they're lying."

Brynja bent and picked up both halves of the clay pot. She held them shut around the root ball with one gauntlet. Dirt sifted out between the plates of her fingers. She tucked the sapling against her chest, under the cracked ceramite, and turned for the platform.

***

Glossary

Tactical Jargon & Brevity Codes

• Black on Ammo: A standard military supply status indicating that a unit or soldier has completely depleted their ammunition reserves (past "red," meaning critically low).

• Contact: Immediate tactical callout alerting the squad to the visual identification or physical engagement of an enemy force.

• Squad Net: An encrypted, short-range tactical communication frequency shared exclusively by members of an immediate squad or fireteam.

• Stacking (Stacking on us): Jargon describing an enemy force concentrating their numbers, massing heavily in vertical lanes, or rapidly consolidating their entry points to overwhelm a defensive position.

• Weapons Free: Rules of Engagement (ROE) status permitting personnel to fire at any target not positively identified as friendly, without waiting for individualized firing orders.

Ranks & Unit Designations

• Shield-Captain: A senior combat officer responsible for a drop unit or tactical detachment, traditionally leading from the front line of an assault.

• Shield-Sergeant: A senior non-commissioned officer (NCO) who anchors the defensive line, directs squad fire, and enforces formation integrity.

• Einherjar: Heavy assault drop-infantry serving the Aesir/Asgardian military; veterans often deployed via high-risk orbital drops.

• Weavers: Specialized combat support personnel trained to manipulate hard-light arrays, energy vectors, and structural matrices directly in the field.

Weaponry & Combat Systems

• Storm-Bolter: A heavy automatic assault weapon firing high-caliber, mass-reactive explosive shells ("bolts") designed to shred armored plate and biological targets.

• Storm-Singer: A custom captain-grade power lance/spear integrated with internal high-output energy capacitors capable of channeling lethal electrical arc-discharges.

• Seax: A heavy, single-edged combat trench knife used as a standard-issue backup blade when primary ammunition is exhausted.

• Mag-Clamp: High-yield electromagnetic locking brackets used to anchor heavy shields or equipment directly onto platforms, decks, or drop pods.

Armor & Field Engineering

• Ceramite: A high-density composite ceramic armor plating designed to absorb heat, energy discharges, and projectile impacts.

• Gorget: The armored collar assembly that seals and protects the throat, trachea, and the vulnerable junction between the helmet and the chestplate.

• Pauldron Vents: Exhaust and heat-sink ports situated on the shoulder armor to bleed off excess heat generated by powered suits or internal life-support systems.

• Hard-Light Panel: A solid-state force-field array capable of generating temporary, weight-bearing structural platforms or barricades mid-air.

• Limiter (Stripped): Factory-installed safety governors designed to prevent power generators or shield units from overheating and burning out; stripping them allows for illegal, highly dangerous spikes in defensive output.

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