The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 8: The Fire-Eaters

To the Quartermasters of the Asgardian Empire, a Scoria Scion wasn't a person. It was a localized thermal event with a heartbeat. A battery you plugged in until it burned out.

Brynja felt the Muspel-IV's tremors before the airlock cycled. Not the rattle of failing machinery. Something deeper. A fever-shiver running through forty thousand tons of orbital refinery. The docking tube tasted of sulfur. The air sat dry and scorched against her tongue.

"External hull temperature is spiking," Mist said. Fingers moving fast across the datapad, hard-linked to what was left of the station's network. "Core containment at forty percent. Thermal capacitors in the red."

"Breach," Brynja said.

Sigrun blew the hatch.

The blast doors groaned open. Emergency strobes turned the corridor into something from a nightmare—walls glowing cherry-red, floor plating soft enough to bow under their boots. And everywhere, Scions.

They were beings of living plasma, housed in obsidian exoskeletons that let them touch the physical world without melting it. The suits were coming apart.

Ten meters down the hall, one of them gripped the seals of his own chest plate with both hands.

He screamed in a burst of static and radiant heat.

He ripped himself open.

WHOOSH.

White-hot plasma washed the corridor. Bulkheads slagged. A blast door fused shut mid-swing. The Scion was gone—just a thermal scar and a feedback spike that spiked the core temperature another three degrees.

"They aren't trying to take the station," Brynja said, shielding her visor from the glare. "They're trying to become the bomb."

"Suicide pact," Sigrun grunted, running a check on her heat seals. "Mass matter-to-energy conversion."

They pushed deeper. The heat was a physical weight, pressing against Brynja's armor, pushing the environmental systems toward their ceiling. Bodies on the floor—Scions who'd cracked their shells and failed to fully go. They were bleeding light into the ventilation shafts. Dying in pulses.

"Help me." A flicker of orange.

Brynja stopped. Looked down.

The obsidian shell was shattered. The core beneath was unstable. Roiling. In agony.

"Kill it," she said quietly.

Sigrun's round put out the light.

"We need the reactor," Brynja said, stepping over the cooling slag. "If the main core goes critical, the sector shields go dark. The famine will kill us slow. The radiation will do it faster."

The comms crackled.

"Shield-Captain Vingfalk. Status report."

Astrid's voice was flawlessly calm. The voice of a woman watching a spreadsheet, not a hellscape.

"Lower decks," Brynja said, shouting over a venting steam pipe. "Scions have breached containment. Cascading thermal runaway. Moving to the core now."

"Negative." A pause, the kind that meant the decision was already made. "Sensors show structural integrity below thirty percent. The asset is critically compromised."

"We can save it. If I can get to the ringleaders—"

"There is no time for negotiation. I am initiating Protocol Extinguish."

Brynja stopped walking.

"Astrid. There are three thousand workers on this rig. If you vent the atmosphere—"

"The vacuum will flash-freeze the plasma and kill the rebellion instantly. The refinery infrastructure survives. It is the only logical solution."

"It's mass murder. They're your subjects. They're generating the power that keeps your ship flying."

"They are faulty batteries threatening the security of the Realm," Astrid said. "Disobedience spreads faster than fire. I will snuff it out."

"You can't just kill three thousand people because it's convenient."

"Watch me. Thirty minutes, Captain. Clear the rig or don't. After that, I open the airlocks."

The line went dead.

Mist's face was pale behind her visor. She didn't speak. Didn't have to.

"Thirty minutes," Brynja said. "We find the leaders. We stop the meltdown. And we give Astrid no reason to open those doors."

"And how do we keep them from blowing themselves up?" Sigrun asked.

"We find out who gave them the matches."

***

The reactor core was what standing inside a star probably felt like.

Shielding was failing. Radiation warnings screamed in Brynja's helmet on a three-second loop. Heat haze turned the air into a smear. Everything past twenty meters was a shimmer.

In the center of the room, clustered around the main power coupling, were the ringleaders.

A dozen Scions, obsidian armor painted with rebellion markings, stood in a circle. Cables ran from their suits directly into the reactor. They were feeding their own life force into the machine—pushing it toward critical mass from the inside.

The leader stood on the gantry above. Huge. Spiked armor. A core that burned blue-white, the kind of intensity that hurt to look at even through a polarized visor.

"Cinder-Heart," Brynja called, voice amplified.

He turned. His faceplate was a vortex.

"The Ash-Bringers." His voice was a grinding synthesis, metal on metal. "You come to burn with us?"

"I come to offer you a way out." She stepped onto the gantry. The heat was bad enough up here to blister skin through the undersuit. "Astrid is in orbit. She's venting the station in twenty minutes. You won't detonate. You'll just freeze."

"Then we die cold," he said. "But the station dies with us."

He held up a device. Wired directly into the main regulator.

"The Benefactor gave us the Key." The vortex in his faceplate flared bright. "One press. The inhibitors fail. We become the star."

Mist's scan came through on the secure channel. A beat of silence before she spoke.

"Captain. That's not a detonator."

"Talk to me."

"It's an injector. Loaded with a hyper-catalyst—Cultivator bio-signatures. If he triggers it, it won't blow the core. It'll chain-react through every Scion on the station. Burns them out in seconds." She paused. "It's an accelerant. That's all it is."

Brynja looked at the device in Cinder-Heart's hand.

Not liberation. Disposal.

"The Benefactor," she said, stepping closer. "He told you this would free you?"

"He said we would become pure energy. Unbound by stone or iron."

"He lied. That device doesn't destroy the station. It destroys you. Burns your essence faster than you can regenerate. Turns you into a disposable fuse."

The swirling light in his faceplate slowed.

"The Architect promised—"

"The Architect is spending you. Every last one of you. He doesn't care about your freedom. He cares about killing the Aesir's energy grid."

She gestured back toward the corridor.

"Look at what's behind us. The ones fused to the walls. Are they free? Or are they spent fuel?"

A long silence. The reactor hummed. Something in the walls groaned.

"We cannot go back to the cages," Cinder-Heart said, quieter now. "The extraction hurts. It eats us."

Brynja checked the clock.

Twelve minutes.

She made a choice. It was treason, probably. Bribery, definitely. Necessary.

"I can't give you freedom," she said. "The Empire needs the power. I let you go, the shields fall, and millions die. I won't pretend otherwise."

Cinder-Heart's core flared red.

"Then we burn."

"But I can give you survival." She kept her voice level. "The pain comes from the extraction manifolds. They're old. Inefficient. They strip your casing along with the energy."

She deactivated her mag-locks and took a step closer to the living bomb.

"I have authorization to upgrade containment protocols. High-grade Asgardian shock-troop suits. Inertial dampeners. Essence stabilizers. Same tech our elite run."

She held out her hand.

"It stops the pain. It lets you live. You supply the power, but you keep your selves."

The blue-white core pulsed, slow and steady.

"You would give us iron skin?"

"I would give you a tomorrow."

She didn't look away from the vortex in his faceplate.

"Eight minutes, Cinder-Heart. Decide."

He looked at the device in his hand. The Architect's promise. The lie, now obvious.

He looked at Brynja. The enemy's promise. The compromise.

He crushed the device.

"We accept."

He turned to the console and ripped the cables free. The reactor's scream dropped to a hum. Red lights shifted to amber, then green, ticking down the thermal spike one degree at a time.

"Mist, signal the fleet," Brynja ordered, bracing herself against a bulkhead as the relief hit her legs. "Tell Astrid the asset is stabilized. Cancel Protocol Extinguish."

***

The Gungnir's Vengeance briefing room was cold. The deliberate kind.

Astrid stood at the viewport with her back to the room, looking down at the refinery. Still there. Lights still on.

"You disobeyed a direct order," she said.

"I saved the facility. And the workforce."

"You negotiated with terrorists." She turned. Her eyes were steady and burning. "You promised them Class-A military hardware. Do you have any idea what it costs to refit three thousand workers in shock-troop armor?"

"Less than building a new refinery," Brynja said. "And less than explaining to Tyr why the sector shields went dark."

Astrid closed the distance between them. Stopped close enough that Brynja could see the flatness in her expression—not anger, exactly. Something colder.

"You think you won," she said, barely above a whisper. "But you showed them we flinch. You showed them that if they hold a knife to their own throats, we'll deal."

"I showed them we aren't monsters."

"We are warriors, Brynja. We don't bargain with fuel. We burn it."

She turned back to the viewport.

"Get out of my sight. Go back to your scavenger hunt. But know this: next time you hesitate, I won't wait for the clock."

Brynja walked out.

The weight followed her into the corridor. The Scions were alive. The station was intact. The meltdown was stopped.

She'd done it by locking them into better cages.

She caught her reflection in a blast door. Stared at it for a moment.

"Another piece," she said quietly. "Just another piece of the soul."

***

Glossary

Cascading Thermal Runaway
A catastrophic chain-reaction failure within a reactor core (or a living Scoria Scion) where increasing heat causes further uncontrollable temperature spikes, inevitably resulting in a critical meltdown or explosion.

Class-A Shock-Troop Armor
High-grade, elite military exosuits utilized by Asgardian vanguard forces. These suits are heavily shielded and equipped with internal inertial dampeners and essence stabilizers to protect the wearer from extreme physical and environmental trauma.

Extraction Manifold
Industrial processing hardware used on orbital refineries to siphon raw plasma energy from Scoria Scions. Older models are notoriously inefficient and painful to the host, stripping away their physical casing along with their energy.

Mag-locks (Magnetic Locks)
Electromagnetic locking mechanisms built into the soles of Asgardian combat boots. Used to anchor a soldier to metal deck plating during zero-gravity combat, structural breaches, or extreme kinetic events.

Protocol Extinguish
An extreme, zero-tolerance tactical contingency ordered by Asgardian naval command. It involves venting a space station’s atmosphere into the vacuum of space to flash-freeze and instantly terminate all biological/plasma threats, prioritizing the survival of the station's infrastructure over its personnel.

Quartermaster Corps (Asgardian Empire)
The logistics and resource management branch of the Empire. Known for their brutal pragmatism, Quartermasters categorize all things—including sentient alien races like the Scions—strictly as assets, batteries, or liabilities.

Scoria Scion
Referred to in military shorthand as "Scions" or "living batteries." Sentient, localized thermal events (plasma beings) encased in obsidian exosuits, used by the Empire as forced laborers and living fuel sources to power large-scale infrastructure.

Sector Shields
A massive, macro-scale defensive energy grid protecting Asgardian territories. Because of the immense power required to maintain them, they are entirely reliant on the continuous output of orbital refineries like the Muspel-IV.

Shield-Captain
A mid-to-high-ranking combat officer in the Asgardian military, responsible for leading elite strike teams (like Brynja's) into high-risk, hostile environments.

Thermal Capacitors
Heavy-duty industrial energy storage units designed to absorb, hold, and regulate extreme heat spikes within a refinery's reactor to prevent structural melting. When they are "in the red," a facility is moments away from structural failure.

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