Frigga closed her eyes briefly. When she opened them, Arthur recognized the expression. He'd seen it in the mirror once, a long time ago. It was the look of someone carrying a weight they had never been allowed to set down.
"My husband would not appreciate me speaking of this to you," she said softly. "He buried her name along with the histories. He erased the murals. Burned the texts. He believes, perhaps rightly, that some wounds heal better when they are forgotten."
"But you don't forget."
"No." The word was simple and final. "I was there, Arthur. I was already his Queen when it happened. She was not my blood, Odin's firstborn from before our marriage, but I was there. I watched the whole of it."
The shift to his first name was subtle, but Arthur noticed it. The conversation had moved past formality.
"She was not easy to love," Frigga continued. "She had her father's iron and none of his patience, and she looked at me the way children often look at the woman who takes a place that was never hers to fill. I did not try to be her mother. I tried to be something else. An ally, perhaps. A steady hand nearby, if she ever wanted one." A faint, rueful smile crossed her lips. "She never did."
She paused, and when she continued, her voice carried a weight that told Arthur he was hearing something Frigga had never spoken aloud before.
"What I am about to tell you is not what the histories record, Arthur. It is not even what Odin believes. The official truth is simple: his daughter was too ambitious, too bloodthirsty, too hungry for conquest. She tried to seize the throne when he changed his ways, and he imprisoned her. That is the story. That is what happened."
She looked at him.
"But it is not all that happened."
Arthur waited in silence.
"Thor was born with lightning in his blood," Frigga said. "It is his nature, his birthright. As innate to him as breathing. He did not learn it or acquire it; it was simply what he was. Odin understood this, because he had seen it before in his own bloodline. So, he gave Thor a focus. Mjolnir. A tool to channel the storm, to teach him control, to bind the raw power to a framework of worthiness and restraint. Thor had centuries of guidance, intensive training, and a weapon built specifically to shape his chaotic gift into something he could master."
She paused, letting the garden's silence stretch.
"Hela was born with death."
The garden seemed to go very still.
"Not a metaphor," Frigga continued quietly. "Not a talent for killing or a predisposition toward violence. She was born with an innate connection to the cosmic force of death itself, the way Thor was born connected to the storm. It was in her from her first breath. I believe Odin sensed it even then, though he would not have had the words for what he was sensing. A coldness in the child. A gravity. Things wilted when she was upset. Small creatures in the nursery simply stopped living if she had a tantrum. The servants whispered about it, and Odin silenced them."
"He didn't understand what she was," Arthur said.
"He understood she was powerful. That was enough for him." Frigga's voice carried no anger, only the flat sadness of someone who has had millennia to move past bitterness and arrived instead at total exhaustion. "He was fighting brutal wars across the Nine Realms. He had a daughter born with the power to end anything she touched. Where another father might have sought teachers, scholars, or spiritual frameworks to help her understand and control what she was... Odin saw a weapon. The greatest weapon Asgard had ever produced."
She looked down at her hands.
"So he aimed her at his enemies. And she was everything he hoped for. She carved through armies, toppled ancient kingdoms, broke the resistance of entire realms. She was magnificent. And every battle, every kill, every bloody campaign fed the thing inside her that she had never been taught to understand."
"Her powers grew," Arthur noted.
"Yes. And she couldn't control it because no one had ever taught her how. No one had ever tried. Thor has Mjolnir and lessons in restraint. Hela had a sword and a list of targets." Frigga's jaw tightened. "I saw it. Early on, before anyone else. I watched her come back from the campaigns, and she was different each time. Stronger, yes. More devastating. But also more hollow. As if the power was filling up the space where the rest of her humanity should have been. She was not choosing to be cruel, Arthur. She was losing the ability to choose at all."
"The power was consuming her."
"Slowly. Over centuries. Like a fire that grows so gradually you don't notice the room is burning until the walls are gone." She paused. "I tried to reach her. Once. Near the end, before the coup. I went to her chambers and spoke to her as I had never dared before, not as a cautious stepmother but as someone who could see her drowning. She looked at me with eyes that were more void than anything else and she said, 'You should kneel, Frigga. Everyone will, soon enough.'"
She was quiet for a long moment.
"Then her ambitions grew beyond the Nine Realms. She wanted to conquer further, wider, endlessly. By this time, my husband had changed. He had seen enough blood and decided peace was the better path. He ordered her to stop." A bitter, tragic smile touched her lips. "You cannot tell a bonfire to stop burning, Arthur. The fire does not understand the request. He was asking her to suppress the one thing that defined her existence, a power she had never been taught to manage, that had been actively encouraged, fed, and weaponized for her entire life. Of course she refused. Of course it ended in war."
"And he sealed her away."
"He sealed her in Hel. Bound his own life force to the prison so it would hold as long as he lived. And then he erased her. Every text, every mural, every passing mention. Not just because of the threat she posed." Frigga's voice dropped to a whisper. "Because he could not bear to look at what he had made. She was his masterpiece and his greatest failure, and he could not face either."
Arthur absorbed all of this in silence. He had known going in that his knowledge of Asgard was incomplete. The memories of his previous life painted a broad picture, vivid in places and frustratingly vague in others, and he had long since learned not to treat them as a reliable map. Details shifted. Contexts changed.
Hela was a perfect example. He had carried a version of her story in his head for years, and Frigga had just quietly dismantled it and built something truer in its place. He filed the corrections away and reminded himself, not for the first time, to hold everything he thought he knew about the Nine Realms loosely.
Frigga broke the silence. "After Odin destroyed the texts, I conducted my own research. Privately. He does not know, and I would ask that you keep this confidence."
"You have my word."
"Everyone accepted the official story. The ambitious daughter, the necessary imprisonment. I could not. Not because I disagreed with the imprisonment, it was the only option left. But because I refused to believe there was no other way. That a child born with this power was simply doomed from birth. That there was no path between what she became and what she might have been." She paused. "So I started looking for one."
She turned back to face him.
"It took me centuries. I searched through Vanir oral traditions, Norn prophecies, records from dead civilisations in realms that no longer exist. I traveled to the World Tree's deepest roots and read carvings in languages that predate Asgard by millions of years. I was looking for any record of someone, anyone, who had carried a connection to the cosmic force of death and not been consumed by it. Most of what I found was fragmentary. Contradictory. Incomplete."
"But you found something."
"I found a pattern. Across every source, every tradition, every scattered reference to mortals or gods who had brushed against this force, there was a distinction. Always the same distinction, expressed in different words but pointing to the exact same truth."
She leaned forward, resting her hands on the table.
"Those who wielded the power of death for dominion, to conquer, to rule, to destroy, were consumed by it. Without exception. The power answered their call. It made them terrifying. But it ate them alive. As if the force itself rejected being used as a weapon."
"And the other side?"
"Rarer. Far rarer. References so scattered I spent decades convincing myself I wasn't imagining them." She paused. "But in every tradition, there were whispers of a different figure. Not a wielder of death. Not a master. A guardian of the threshold. One who understood that death is not an enemy to be conquered or a weapon to be wielded, but a boundary to be maintained. A balance to be kept."
"A guardian?" Arthur said.
"The word I found most often, in the oldest texts, translated roughly to 'one who walks between.' Between life and death. Between ending and beginning. Not serving death, not commanding it. Standing at the border and ensuring that what should pass does pass, and what should remain does remain."
She reached across the table and, very gently, placed her fingertip against his chest. Right over his heart. Against the invisible mark.
"In every fragment I found, the figure who walked between bore a sign. Not a brand of servitude. A sigil of acknowledgment. The cosmic force of death had noticed them. Accepted them. Not as a servant. Not as a weapon. As something closer to..." She searched for the right word. "A counterpart."
Arthur's breath caught.
"I never found a concrete example," Frigga continued, withdrawing her hand and folding it in her lap. "No name, no complete story of someone who fully achieved it. I began to believe it was purely theoretical. A possibility that had never been realized." She looked at him, her eyes shining. "And then your family visited my home, and I saw that mark burning over your heart like a star. I realized I had been looking at a theoretical possibility made flesh."
The garden was very quiet.
"Arthur. I cannot tell you what you are becoming. I can only tell you what you are not. You are not what she was." Frigga's voice was steady and certain. "She was born with the power and given a sword. You were born into a world of death and given, eventually, a choice. She killed because it was all she was taught. You learned every other kind of magic first, built framework after framework, and the mark came to you only after you had spent a lifetime understanding what death meant without ever needing to wield it."
Arthur sat with that for a long time. The stream murmured. The bird sang its three notes again.
"You said Odin destroyed the texts. But you conducted your own research. The fragments you found..."
"I memorized everything. Odin destroyed parchment and stone. He cannot destroy what lives in my mind."
"Would you share it with me?"
"That is exactly why I invited you here." She folded her hands tightly. "But first, I must ask something of you."
"Name it."
"She is still sealed. Sleeping, in a prison bound to my husband's life force. When he dies, and he will, Arthur, even the All-Father is not truly eternal, the seal will break. She will return. And she will be exactly what she was when she was imprisoned. The same power. The same hunger. The same absence of any framework to control what she is."
Her voice was steady, but Arthur could hear the fractures beneath it.
"I have spent centuries searching for a way to reach her. Not to strip her power away, that would be like ripping the lightning from Thor. It is part of her. It has always been part of her. But to give her what she was never given. The understanding. The framework. The chance to learn what she is and become something other than a weapon."
Frigga's eyes glistened.
"I never managed to be a mother to her, Arthur. She would not allow it. But I have spent longer trying to save her than she ever spent alive, and I do not intend to stop now."
"You want me to help her," Arthur realized. "When the time comes."
"You carry the same cosmic force that defines her." Frigga's voice was quiet but unwavering. "When she returns, she will not listen to Odin. She will not listen to Thor. She certainly will not listen to me. But someone who carries the exact same power, who has mastered what she never could, who can show her that there is another way to be what she is..."
"You want me to teach her."
"I want you to try."
"Just that?" Arthur said softly. "You'll give me centuries of exhaustive research, knowledge your husband would wage a realm-shattering war to keep buried... for a promise?"
Frigga smiled. It was the saddest, most desperate smile Arthur had ever seen.
"It is not a small promise, Arthur. It is the only thing I have wanted for two thousand years. To fix my broken family. Hela... and Loki."
He held her gaze for a long moment, weighing the gravity of what she was asking. Facing the Goddess of Death was one thing. Trying to redeem her was something else entirely.
Then, he nodded.
"I promise. When the time comes, I will try. I will try my absolute best to correct both her and Loki."
Something in Frigga's flawless expression cracked, just for a fraction of a second, and Arthur saw the full, crushing weight of what this woman had carried alone while her husband built towering walls of forgetting.
Then the crack sealed, and she was the Queen of Asgard again.
"Then let us begin," she said.