The Asgard trip had been a Wednesday. By Thursday morning, Eileen was back at A.I.M. headquarters, buried under a mountain of final preparations for the Extremis launch.
The launch was slated for the first week of September.
Everything was ready. The public clinical trials had been a massive, undeniable success, and even the regulatory permissions had been secured across fourteen countries. Now it was time to build up the manufacturing stock and aggressively lobby key congressmen to ensure any future political trouble could be handled before it started.
Arthur had absolutely no role to play in any of it. Aldrich and Eileen were handling the entire corporate machine on their own, and surprisingly, without any real trouble.
The lack of trouble was almost suspicious. Maybe Fury was playing interference behind the scenes. Or maybe the pharmaceutical giants who stood to lose billions genuinely had no idea what was about to hit them.
Whichever it was, Arthur was happy not to deal with it.
He was back in Asgard by Friday morning, and he wasted no time in contacting Frigga. The earlier he got the information he needed, the better.
He sent a request through one of the palace attendants, worded with the appropriate Asgardian formality.
The response came within the hour. Not through a servant or a written note, but through a gentle pulse of magic that carried with it a location and a time.
Tomorrow. The Queen's Garden. Dawn.
—
Arthur arrived precisely on time. The heavy, invisible enchantments parted for him like a beaded curtain, and he stepped through into a space that immediately made him forget he was standing on an alien world built by gods.
It was simply a garden.
No gold, no towering columns. Just trees, some species he recognised from Earth, others that existed nowhere else in the Nine Realms, arranged around a central clearing with a stone table and two chairs. Flowers grew in deliberate wildness along winding paths. A stream ran through the eastern edge, its water catching the dawn light.
Frigga was already seated at the stone table.
"Arthur Hayes," she said, and the warmth in her voice was genuine. "Please, take a seat. I've had breakfast prepared."
He sat. The breakfast was a vibrant array of Asgardian fruits and a warm bowl of something that smelled remarkably like spiced porridge.
"Thank you, Your Grace."
"Frigga," she corrected. "Here, in this garden, I am simply Frigga."
He inclined his head and reached for one of the fruits. They ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes. Arthur didn't push. Powerful people operated on their own timelines. Rushing them was both pointless and deeply unwise.
Frigga broke the silence first.
"You are a very special mortal, Hayes," she said casually, picking up a silver spoon. "Especially the mark over your heart."
"You recognized the mark."
"I recognized the magic. The sheer density of the power it holds." She set down her cup and looked at him. "Tell me how you came to bear it."
Arthur considered how much to share. He kept his secrets close most of the time, revealing them only when he truly respected and trusted someone. Like the Ancient One. He did not know Frigga well, but at this point, it was better to be honest. Well, for the most part.
"In my world," he began, "there's a story. A fairy tale, really. The Tale of the Three Brothers."
He told it simply. Three brothers who cheated Death at a river crossing. Death, appearing as a cloaked, cunning figure, offered each a gift as a reward for their cleverness. The Elder Wand, unbeatable in combat. The Resurrection Stone, which could call back the shades of the dead. The Cloak of Invisibility, which could hide the wearer from Death itself. Two brothers died violently for their gifts. The third lived a full, long life and greeted Death as an old friend.
"A children's story," he said. "Told to young witches and wizards at bedtime. Most people in that world thought the Hallows, the three artifacts, were myth. The few who believed spent their lives searching and went mad in the process."
"But they were real," Frigga said.
"They were real. I found them. All three."
"And when you united them?"
"They merged. Into me." Arthur tapped the center of his chest. "The physical objects ceased to exist as separate things. And this brand appeared."
Frigga studied him for a long moment. "And they called you 'Master of Death' for this?"
"That's the legend, yes."
Frigga's lips twitched. Then, quite suddenly, she laughed.
It wasn't mocking. It was a genuine, deep sound of pure amusement.
"Forgive me," she said, still smiling, holding up a hand. "I mean no disrespect. But Master of Death. Three artifacts, however powerful, making a mortal the master of something so vast, so universally fundamental..." She shook her head. "That would be like saying a man who holds a torch has mastered the sun."
"I'm aware," Arthur said dryly, taking no offense. "I never believed the title myself. But the artifacts were real, and whatever they did to my soul was real. The title is just what the wizards called it because they had no concept of the true vastness of our universe."
"A fair point." The amusement faded from her expression, replaced by something sharper. "Tell me what they gave you. The actual abilities. Not the legend. What can you do?"
Arthur nodded.
"Three things. First, the Wand's gift. Wizards in my world generally need a focus to cast powerful magic. A wand, a staff, something to channel their energy. You can train yourself out of the dependency, but it takes years and most never fully manage it. The Wand's gift made that irrelevant. I can cast any magic I know effortlessly, without a focus."
Frigga was not visibly impressed. Wandless magic was the baseline in Asgard. She waited patiently for Arthur to continue.
"Second, the Cloak's gift. Invisibility. Not a simple illusion, not a bending of light around my form. True concealment."
"Show me," Frigga said.
Arthur smiled. Then he vanished.
There was no shimmer, no distortion, no fading. One moment he was sitting across from the Queen of Asgard. The next, the chair was empty.
Frigga's reaction was immediate and impressive. Her hands moved in patterns Arthur recognised: scanning spells, detection weaves, magical sonar. The garden's ambient magic shifted as she drew on it, layering enchantment upon enchantment. Her eyes blazed gold.
She found nothing.
"I'm still here," Arthur said, and his voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
She cast three more spells in rapid succession. The first was a Vanir technique that seemed to read the displacement of air itself. The second was a brute-force pulse that should have disrupted any concealment enchantment in the Nine Realms. The third was subtle and clever: she conjured a fine mist of luminescent particles throughout the garden, looking for his silhouette.
Nothing. The mist settled on the empty chair, on the table, on the ground where his feet should have been. As far as every sense and spell at Frigga's disposal were concerned, Arthur Hayes had simply ceased to exist.
He let it go on for another ten seconds, partly to make his point, and partly because watching the greatest sorceress in Asgard throw everything she had at finding a man sitting three feet away was genuinely entertaining.
"That is not invisibility," Frigga said quietly.
"No," Arthur agreed. "It isn't."
"Invisibility I can see through. Illusions I can shatter. Even the deepest concealment magic leaves traces, displaced energy, a gap in the weave. You left nothing. You were simply absent." She paused. "As if you had stepped behind reality itself."
"An apt description."
She was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had changed. The warmth was still there, but how she looked at Arthur changed.
"And the third gift?"
"The Stone's gift. I can summon the souls of the dead who have not yet passed on to their next existence. It's time-limited, but real. I can speak with them, see them. They retain their memories, their personalities."
Frigga absorbed this in silence.
"Three gifts," she said finally, almost to herself. "The authority of effortless magic. The ability to hide from all cosmic perception. And dominion over the boundary between the living and the dead." She looked at him steadily. "These gifts are far greater than what any simple artifact or inheritance can provide. But you are not satisfied. You believe there is more, and you kept on searching the Archives. Why?"
Arthur weighed his next words carefully.
"A few weeks ago, I fought Mephisto. In his realm."
Frigga went very still. Not shock. She was too composed for shock. But her entire bearing changed. She sat straighter. The ambient magic in the garden tightened around them as if the wards were responding to her alertness.
"You entered a Hell Lord's domain," she said carefully. "And fought him there."
"Yes. We have a history, and recently something happened that left me no choice but to confront him head-on. During the battle, I found that his soul attacks were completely useless against me. Every attempt to touch my soul, to corrupt it, backfired on him violently. His exact words were, 'You are marked by Her.'"
Arthur continued. "And then, at the end, when I pressed him hardest using a powerful soul spell... I accessed something. A power I didn't fully understand. For a moment, just a moment, Mephisto was afraid. Not angry, not frustrated. Afraid. As if, for the first time in his eternal existence, he was looking at something that could actually end him. Permanently."
Frigga said nothing for a long time. But the shift in her demeanor was absolute. Before, she had been looking at a powerful mortal who could defeat Laufey. Now, she was looking at someone who was her cosmic equal. A peer.
"That's what led me down this path," Arthur continued, leaning forward. "The mark did something in that fight that went far beyond the three gifts. It touched something deeper. Something that made a Hell Lord, in his own realm, at the height of his power, believe he could truly die." He looked at her. "I came to Asgard's Archives hoping to find answers. Instead, I found gaps. Everything related to death magic, to the cosmic concept of death, to any interaction between Asgard and the abstract forces... Gone. Purged."
"That is my husband's doing," Frigga said softly.
"I know. And I believe I know the reason."
Silence stretched between them. The stream murmured. Somewhere in the garden, a bird that had no earthly equivalent sang a three-note melody.
"You know about her," Frigga said, her voice heavy with an old, old grief.
"Odin's firstborn," Arthur confirmed quietly. "His executioner in the wars of conquest. The Goddess of Death."