Frigga raised both hands and placed them gently on either side of Arthur's head. Her magic pressed against his mind. It was vast, an ocean of golden light that dwarfed anything he had ever encountered.
"I will share my memories directly," she said. "Not merely the knowledge, but the experience of finding it. Context matters."
Arthur braced himself. Frigga closed her eyes.
The world dissolved.
First came memories he had not expected. He did not see the theoretical framework or the grueling research. Frigga showed him the girl.
A nursery draped in gold. A baby girl with dark hair and dark eyes and something around her that made the flowers on the windowsill curl and brown at the edges. A young Odin standing over the cradle, his face caught between wonder and something colder. He picked up his daughter and the flowers died completely.
The scene shifted to a brutal war camp. Hela was older now, striding through returning warriors who gave her a wide berth the way animals instinctively move away from a forest fire. Her eyes were wrong. They were not the eyes of someone who enjoyed killing. They were the eyes of someone for whom killing had become as thoughtless and necessary as breathing.
It was not what Arthur had asked for, but he understood exactly why Frigga had included it. If he was going to keep his promise, he needed to know who she was. He needed to see the child who was never given a chance, rather than the legend or the weapon.
He filed the memories away carefully. He would need them later.
Then the real knowledge came.
It arrived not as a tidy sequence of lessons, but as the raw experience of centuries of research compressed into fleeting moments. He saw libraries that no longer existed. He read fragments in dead Vanir dialects carved into crystals misfiled among agricultural records. He touched carvings on a deep root beneath the World Tree, pressed into reality by something that existed before language was even invented. These were raw concepts rather than words.
Woven through everything was the framework Frigga had built from the ruins. It was incomplete but structurally sound. Death's power operated in clear tiers.
—
At its foundation lay perception. This was the ability to see the mortal truth of all things, to read the thread of life in any being, and to know its proximity to ending. It was the sensitivity to sense disturbances in the boundary between the living and the dead.
Above that rested authority over the threshold. The wielder gained the ability to strengthen or thin the barrier between life and death. They could banish what had overstayed its time and sever connections that violated the natural order, such as soul contracts, necromantic bindings, and forced immortality.
Above that was the power to channel the fundamental force of ending itself. To decay, to unmake, to dissolve. Conversely, it granted the power to refuse the ending. To stand in the path of death and say 'not yet.' This was exactly what had frightened Mephisto. For the briefest instant, Arthur had touched the cosmic authority that says all things end.
At the absolute apex was a concept Frigga had found only the faintest references to in the darkest corners of history. A state in which the champion did not merely channel death's power but embodied the threshold entirely. A living boundary. A door that walks. This last piece was mostly speculation, and Frigga's notes were honest about the gaps. But the shape was undoubtedly there, like seeing the faint outline of a massive cathedral through thick fog.
—
The garden reassembled itself around him. Frigga withdrew her hands. She looked incredibly tired.
Arthur sat perfectly still. His eyes remained closed and his breathing slowed. Inside his mind, the torrential flood of knowledge was settling into place like pieces of a grand mosaic finding their rightful positions.
He locked most of it away behind thick mental barriers for later study. Even the fraction he currently understood was substantial. But there was one piece that pulsed with an immediacy he could not ignore. The foundation. The first tier.
Perception. The absolute beginning of everything.
It was now or never.
The mark on his chest pulsed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Something shifted deep inside his soul. A door he had not known was there cracked open, and through the narrow crack, he saw everything.
Everything was dying.
It was not happening in a catastrophic or violent way. It was simply the natural order. The vibrant flowers in Frigga's garden were dying slowly and beautifully. The stone beneath his feet was dying grain by grain. The ancient trees were dying ring by ring, even as fresh green growth pushed outward from their sturdy cores. The small bird that had sung its three-note melody was dying, its tiny heart beating steadily toward a final number it would never exceed.
Nothing was exempt. Nothing was permanent. And it was not horrifying in the slightest. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The quiet machinery of a universe in constant motion, where every ending was the raw material for a new beginning.
Arthur opened his eyes.
He could feel that they had changed.
His irises were no longer their usual bright blue. They had shifted to twilight grey. It was not the dull grey of overcast skies or cold stone, but the liminal shade that exists right between day and night, belonging fully to neither.
He looked at Frigga and saw radiance. Her life force blazed golden, impossibly dense. The thread of her existence stretched back millennia, thick and luminous.
But she was not infinite.
He could see it clearly. It was not a weakness, but a fundamental truth. There was the faintest dimming at the very edges of that golden blaze. He could see the barely perceptible weight of entropy pressing against even her immortal flame. The end was not imminent. It would not happen for centuries. But it was present. It was the quiet truth that even the revered Queen of Asgard would one day cross the threshold.
"Death Sight," Frigga whispered. Her voice held no fear. Only recognition, and something very close to awe. "The oldest Vanir texts described this. The first expression of the threshold's power. The ability to see the mortal truth of all things."
"Thank you for sharing this knowledge," Arthur said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears. Richer. Steadier. As if some part of him had settled into a foundation he hadn't known he was missing.
Frigga's expression was calm but firm. "As long as you complete my wish, there is no need for thanks."
Arthur blinked, and his eyes returned to their normal blue as he actively pulled back from the new perception. It was simply too much to hold passively. It felt like staring directly at the sun. He could look, but not for long. At least, not yet.
"I will need time to process all of this," he admitted. "What you have given me is monumental. I only fully grasped a fraction of it, and even that has already activated something I did not know was dormant."
They sat in comfortable silence for a while. The little bird had been joined by two others, and their cheerful songs wove together into something that resembled harmony.
Arthur finally stood up. "Frigga. Thank you. I will keep your confidence. And I will absolutely keep my promise."
"I know you will." She straightened in her chair, and the weariness from the transfer seemed to ease. Not gone, but set aside. Frigga's way. "Now go and rest. You have a great deal of locked knowledge to unpack, and I suspect you'll want to start before lunch."
Arthur stood and inclined his head. "You suspect correctly."
He was halfway to the garden's glowing edge when her voice reached him one last time.
"Arthur."
He turned around.
"The mark on your chest," she said, her golden eyes fixed on him. "Whatever placed it there did not come from those artifacts. They were simply the key that opened a door." She held his gaze with total absolute certainty. "Whatever is on the other side of that door has been waiting a very long time."
Arthur nodded once, then stepped through the shimmering wards and left the tranquil garden behind.
He returned to the quiet safety of the Hayes Manor in New York and sat alone in his study.
The mark pulsed gently against his chest. It beat with a steady rhythm that perfectly matched his own heartbeat.
Somewhere, on the other side of a threshold older than the universe itself, something was watching. It did not watch with malice or demanding expectation. It watched with the patient, infinite attention of a cosmic force that had waited since the first star died and would continue waiting until the very last one flickered out.
It had finally found its keeper.
Now it would patiently see what he did with the key.