The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 17: The Execution

The sanctum didn't crumble. It screamed.

The backlash from the shattered control rune split the crystal floor beneath their boots. Fissures ran outward from the dais and vented scalding steam into the thin air of the Spire. Shield-Captain Brynja Vingfalk went backward on her heels. Her mag-locks chattered and failed to bite on the vibrating platform. Her helm had cracked in the blast and she'd torn it off two minutes ago, and now she tasted everything. Burnt circuitry. Crushed lilies. A sweetness thick enough to coat her tongue.

Freyr stood at the center of it.

He didn't look beaten. The gold that had been ripped out of him in the backlash was crawling back under his skin, but it came back wrong. It stuttered. It flared and dimmed in no pattern she could read, and every flare threw his shadow long across the ruined garden. Ten meters from him, a bed of white flowers blackened and curled in the heat coming off his body.

"You think you have broken the cycle," Freyr said. He didn't raise his voice. It arrived in her molars anyway. "You have only brought the drought sooner."

He lifted his hand. Above his palm the air bent and thickened until the shimmer hardened into a shape.

Sumarbrander. The Sword of Summer.

It wasn't metal. It was a length of sunlight given an edge, too bright to look at straight. It made a sound she knew from Midgard summers as a girl. Cicadas. Ten thousand of them in a dry field. The blade didn't sit in his grip. It circled his wrist in a slow orbit, and Brynja felt it looking at her.

"Freyr." She leveled Storm-Singer. "Stand down or I put you down."

The spear sagged in her hands. The capacitor read four percent after the strike on the rune. The energy blade at its tip guttered blue, flickered, caught again. Next to the god's weapon it looked like a pilot light.

Freyr didn't answer. He pointed one finger.

The sword crossed the distance in a gold smear. Brynja got the haft up with nothing to spare. The impact lifted her off her feet and threw her ten meters down the platform, and she landed on her back plate hard enough to see white. Her shield emitter whined up the scale and died. Suit telemetry flashed a fused-component warning across her left eye. She didn't need it. She could smell the emitter cooking.

The sword didn't wait for her to stand. It came at her from three angles at once. Every pass carved a furrow in her ceramite, and the edges of each furrow glowed orange. She parried on instinct. Storm-Singer rang with every hit, and every hit drove heat up the haft until her fingers went numb inside the gauntlets. It was faster than she was. It was faster than anything she'd fought in twenty years.

She keyed the comm. "Sigrun. Flank him. Now."

Static. Then the Shield-Sergeant came through, breathing hard. "Can't. Fucking roots, Captain."

The platform collapse had dropped Sigrun to the lower tier. Brynja caught a glimpse over the broken edge. Sigrun had her back to a pillar. Her storm-bolter hammered into a wall of animate wood, and each round blew a fist of bark loose. Each wound knitted shut before the next round landed.

Brynja was on her own.

She dragged the bio-rifle off her mag-clamp. She'd pried it from the dead Cultivator in the lift, and the grip was still slick with something green. She fired from the hip. The bolt struck Freyr square in the chest.

He didn't flinch. The green light sank into him and was gone. A burn on his collarbone closed while she watched. The flowers stitched through his robe opened wider, wet and bright.

"Life feeds on life, Captain." Freyr walked toward her. "Your weapon is a seed. I am the soil."

The sword went past her face and took a chunk out of her left pauldron. The undersuit beneath it smoked. She let the rifle drop to the deck and got both hands back on the spear, and gave ground. Her heel came down on nothing.

She looked back. The fissure behind her opened onto three kilometers of air and broken crystal, and far below that, cloud. She'd done HALO drops from higher. She'd done them with a chute.

Outmatched. Outgunned. Out of floor.

Freyr came on. His face was calm. He didn't move like a duelist. He moved like a farmer working down a bean row with a hoe. He was looking for the weed.

"You cling to iron," he said. "Iron rusts. Iron breaks. Why fight for a dead thing, Brynja?"

She feinted left and drove the spear in high. The Sword of Summer was already there. It slapped Storm-Singer aside, and the shock nearly tore the weapon out of her grip.

"I fight for the people you want to turn into mulch," she said, and spat blood.

"They are mulch already." He said it gently. "They breathe poison in your foundries and eat ash and call it bread. I am offering them something to live for besides a machine."

The sword spun above his shoulder until it was a wheel of light.

"Put down the metal," he said. "Put down the pain."

Brynja didn't answer. She set her feet. Broken weapon, burned hands, a god on his own ground. She was Einherjar. Quitting had been trained out of her in the Valhalla barracks, along with fear of the dark and most of her appetite.

The sword came down on Storm-Singer a hand's width above her grip. The haft was old ash bound in celestial bronze. It held for a heartbeat. Then it split.

The spear spun out of her hands and skittered across the crystal and over the lip of the fissure. She heard it strike something far below. Then she didn't hear it.

Empty hands.

Freyr stopped the blade a centimeter from her throat. The heat raised blisters along her jaw. The drone of it filled her skull and pushed out the wind.

"It is done," he said.

There was no triumph in his face. Only pity. A father looking at a child who'd broken something that couldn't be fixed.

"Stand up, Brynja Vingfalk."

She stood. Her armor ground at the knee joints. She kept her hands open and out where he could see them.

"Go on, then," she said. "Finish your harvest."

Freyr shook his head. The sword drifted back to hang at his shoulder. It waited there like a hooded hawk.

"Why would I kill the only one who understands?"

He opened his hand toward the sky. The projection above the dais stuttered back to life, and it wasn't the war map anymore.

"Look," he said.

The grey of the Aesir holdings was gone from the stars. Green had swallowed it. Hive cities lay under moss a kilometer deep. Vat-grown leviathans swam between the stars and sieved the void through open mouths. Trees taller than orbital elevators climbed out of the atmosphere and wrapped their crowns around the moons. Nothing in it was dead. Everything in it was eating something.

"It is wild," Freyr said. "It is dangerous. But it breathes. No foundries, no smog, no cages."

He held out his hand. The palm was ridged with callus, and there was black soil under the nails. A field hand's palm.

"The Aesir are dying, Shield-Captain. Their time is done. But you have a gardener's heart under all that steel."

Brynja looked at the vision. It was beautiful. She couldn't look away from it.

"And the billions in those cities?" she said. "The ones who can't breathe your spores? The ones in the hab-stacks who choke if the scrubbers go down for an hour?"

"They will adapt," Freyr said. "Or they will feed the ones who do."

"That isn't nature." Her voice shook and she let it. "That's a slaughterhouse somebody knocked the walls off. You're talking about half the thinking life in the galaxy, you smug bastard."

He stepped closer. "You are tired. Twenty years of orders and lies and masters who would spend you like a cartridge. Stand with me. Help me tend it."

The pull was real. Twenty years sat on her shoulders. Every drop, every burial detail, every after-action report she'd signed with numb fingers. To stop. To let the jungle take the metal. To lie down in the green and never smell blood again.

"A garden nobody tends is just jungle," she said.

Freyr smiled. "Then tend it. Help me decide what grows. Help me decide what gets cut."

She looked at his hand. Then she looked past it.

Behind him, above the wreck of the control rune, the primary amplification crystal still hung in the Spire's magnetic cradle. A crack ran through it from crown to base. It was still pulsing. Slow and steady, bright enough to throw shadows.

She looked back at Freyr. Black flecks moved under the gold in his throat. The hand he held out to her had a tremor in it. The backlash had cost him more than he was showing, and that was why the sword had stopped short of her throat. He didn't want a sister. He wanted a shield between himself and whatever Asgard sent next.

Hate wouldn't touch him. She'd come up the Spire on hate, and he'd drunk it like everything else she'd thrown at him. Give him a fight and he grew. So she'd give him what he was asking for.

She let her shoulders drop. She let the tension run out of her arms and out of her jaw. She let her face go slack, and it wasn't hard. She was tired.

"You're right," she said. "I'm tired."

She took his hand.

His grip was warm. His pulse was slow and even. He drew her in and put his arms around her, and he smelled of rain on turned earth.

"Welcome home, sister," he said against her ear.

Brynja dropped.

She went dead weight and twisted at the same time, and four hundred kilos of armored Einherjar tore out of his arms before he could close them. Freyr stumbled forward after her. His hand closed on air.

She rolled. Her glove found the bio-rifle where she'd let it fall. It was slick with condensation and heavier than she remembered. She came up on one knee and set the stock against her shoulder.

Freyr turned. The sword came round in a gold arc. "No," he said, and for the first time it was loud.

She didn't aim at him. He'd only drink it.

She put the reticle on the crystal.

"Eat this, you fuck," she said.

She squeezed the trigger. The rifle coughed once. The round in the chamber was a seed-charge, built to raise a full-grown tree in seconds on a dead world. It struck the amplification crystal dead center.

The crystal didn't shatter. It bloomed.

The seed took root in the raw power stored in the lattice and grew faster than she'd known anything could grow. Roots punched out through the crystal faces from inside. Vines poured from the cracks and thickened as they came, splitting the structure apart as they gorged on it. White blossoms opened and blackened and dropped in the space of a breath.

The Spire screamed again. This time it wasn't stone. A shockwave went through the sanctum that she felt in her teeth and her fillings and the plates of her skull. It drove the air out of her lungs.

Freyr convulsed. His back bowed. His mouth opened on a scream that made no sound. The gold in his veins went dark from the fingertips inward, and he dropped to his knees and retched black ichor across the crystal.

The Sword of Summer stopped singing. Its light went out. It fell to the deck with a flat clang, a length of dull grey metal.

Brynja got to her feet.

Weapon. She needed a weapon. Storm-Singer was three kilometers down. The rifle was empty. Her armor hung off her in pieces.

The sword lay a meter from Freyr's knee.

She took the hilt. It was hot enough to scorch through her gauntlet, and something in it pushed back against her grip. She didn't let go. It was heavy and dead in her hands. Iron now. Only iron.

Freyr raised his head. The gold was gone from his eyes. What looked out at her was a man. He looked frightened. He looked younger than she'd ever seen him.

"Brynja," he said.

She didn't give a speech. She didn't let him finish.

She put the blade through his chest.

He gasped. It was a small sound, and the wind tore it away.

He sagged against her. His weight came onto the sword and onto her arms. His hand came up and touched her cheek, and the fingers were already cold.

"You have killed the summer," he said. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. "Now the long winter comes."

The hand slid down her face and fell. His eyes stayed open. The color went out of them until they were the grey of river stone.

The sword under her palm crumbled. It went to ash from the point up, and the ash blew out through the broken dome.

Her comm-bead clicked. A voice she didn't know came through, distorted, shouting over alarms. Valaskjalf. Someone on the station's bridge. The vines on the hull were dying. They were going grey and falling away from the plating in sheets, and main power was back. Then more voices on the fleet channel, stepping on each other. Tree line receding on Ydalir. Sleepers waking on Glitnir. Someone laughing. Someone saying "oh gods, oh gods" over and over until an officer cut the channel.

Brynja stood holding the dead god while the wind howled through the cracks in the crystal.

Sigrun hauled herself over the lip of the platform. Blood from a scalp wound had sheeted down one side of her face. Her storm-bolter hung by its sling, and the ammo counter read zero. She saw them and stopped. She lowered the weapon.

"Is it done?" she said.

Brynja looked at the body. At the garden, burned black. At the grey sky above the dome.

"The machine's awake," she said. "War's back on."

She let Freyr slide off her arms onto the crystal. His head rolled against her boot. She looked at her hands. They were shaking. The gauntlets had scorched through at the palms, and the skin underneath was blistered and wet with his blood.

Sigrun came closer. She didn't touch the body. She looked at it for a long moment, then at Brynja. She pulled a field dressing from her thigh pouch and held it out.

Brynja didn't take it. The wind off Alfheim came through the shattered dome and found every gap in her armor. It was colder than it had been an hour ago. She could see her breath.

***

Glossary

Organization & Ranks

• Einherjar
  The elite, heavily cybernetized shock infantry of the Aesir. Trained in the brutal subterranean barracks of Valhalla, Einherjar soldiers undergo physical augmentation and psychological conditioning designed to systematically excise instinctual fear, fatigue, and shock response.

• Shield-Captain
  A senior front-line tactical officer within the Einherjar vanguard. Shield-Captains command breach operations, drop-assaults, and high-threat boarding actions, leading from the absolute front with specialized energy spears and heavy-assault loadouts.

• Shield-Sergeant
  A non-commissioned officer responsible for direct squad-level fire support, squad cohesion, and heavy suppressive fire during platform-clearing operations.

Tactical Operations & Protocol

• AAR (After-Action Report)
  A standardized post-engagement debriefing detailing casualties, rounds expended, structural compromises, and operational outcomes before reassignment.

• HALO Drop (High-Altitude Low-Opening)
  An orbital or sub-orbital combat insertion method where an operative free-falls from the stratosphere, deploying stabilizers or thrusters at minimum altitude to evade planetary defense grids.

• Flank
  A tactical movement aimed at bypassing the enemy’s frontal defenses to attack their sides or rear, intended to split fire and force the target to commit resources across multiple vectors.

• Feint
  A deceptive offensive maneuver designed to draw the opponent’s primary parry, guard, or automated point-defense away from the true point of attack.

Armor, Systems & Medical

• Ceramite
  A dense, heat-resistant composite ceramic-metallic plating used in heavy combat chassis. Built to disperse directed-energy burns and deflect heavy ballistic impacts, though vulnerable to repeated thermal strikes.

• Pauldron
  Heavy shoulder-guard armor plates. In Einherjar battle suits, pauldrons house localized servo-dampeners, sensor arrays, and magnetic anchor hardpoints.

• Mag-Locks / Mag-Clamps
  Electromagnetic soles and utility clamps integrated into boots and armor rigs. They allow operators to lock onto metallic hulls, decks, and landing zones in zero-g or unstable environments (useless against non-conductive crystal or organic terrain).

• Shield Emitter
  A suit-mounted energy projector that creates a localized deflector envelope against incoming kinetic and thermal strikes. Prone to catastrophic burnout ("cooking") when overwhelmed by extreme kinetic or plasma overload.

• Suit Telemetry
  A real-time HUD and diagnostic neural link tracking suit integrity, core temperature, ammunition counts, atmospheric toxins, and user vitals.

• Comm-Bead / Fleet Channel
  A subcutaneous or inner-ear communications transceiver tied into local squad networks or planetary command relays (e.g., the orbital station Valaskjalf).

• Field Dressing
  A sterile, fast-bonding compression trauma bandage impregnated with coagulants and local analgesics, standard issue in all infantry survival pouches.

Weaponry & Ordnance

• Capacitor (Weapon)
  The internal battery assembly feeding energy blades and plasma emitters. Discharging a weapon’s capacitor against hardened structural nodes (like planetary runes) drops power reserves dangerously low.

• Storm-Bolter
  A heavy, two-handed automatic slug-thrower chambered in high-caliber, explosive-tipped armor-piercing rounds. Engineered to tear apart dense chitin, reinforced plating, and heavily armored targets.

• Bio-Rifle
  An exotic directed-matter weapon captured from Cultivator factions. Rather than firing kinetic slugs or plasma, it launches bio-chemical payloads and engineered matter designed to interface directly with organic neural and cellular networks.

• Seed-Charge
  Specialized terraforming munitions designed to rapidly germinate and bloom aggressive, engineered plant life across hostile or dead planetary biomes. When detonated against an energetic amplification lattice, the reaction causes explosive, runaway cellular growth.

• Storm-Singer
  A signature Einherjar polearm combining classical celestial-bronze and ash hafting with high-output blue plasma edges, built specifically for Shield-Captains breaching fortified lines.

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