Arthur spent a full week with the knowledge locked firmly behind mental barriers before he trusted himself to begin unpacking it.
He worked methodically. One piece at a time, fitting fragments together like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle, testing each ancient concept against what he already understood before daring to move to the next. Frigga's memories were dense, layered, and occasionally contradictory. Exactly the way any compilation of research assembled across centuries from dying civilizations would be.
But the underlying framework held. The tiers of Death Magic were clear. Perception. Authority. Channeling. Embodiment.
He had already activated the first. Death Sight. In the quiet days since the garden, he had been experimenting with it in short, carefully controlled bursts, just a few seconds at a time.
With the Sight active, every living thing carried a visible thread. Bright and dense for the young, thinner and dimmer for the old. Plants, animals, people, all of them burning through their allotted time at their own pace, all moving steadily toward the exact same destination.
He could hold the Sight for about thirty seconds before the mental and physical strain became deeply uncomfortable. His eyes would shift to that twilight grey and the world would open up, achingly beautiful in its impermanence. Then he'd pull back, blink, and let normal vision return.
Practice would extend the duration. But extending the Sight wasn't what occupied Arthur's thoughts during that long week.
It was the progression path.
Frigga's framework was very clear on what the tiers were, but frustratingly vague on how one actually moved between them. The scattered historical references described practitioners who "deepened their connection through service" and "earned the threshold's trust through balance."
Poetic. And entirely unhelpful.
Arthur wasn't a poet. He was an engineer. He needed to understand the mechanism.
He sat with the problem for three days. Turned it over from every conceivable angle in his mind.
On the fourth day, at two in the morning, nursing a cup of tea while the rest of the house slept, it finally clicked.
Death's energy wasn't his. It never would be. It belonged to something vast, fundamental, and cosmic. Arthur didn't generate it; he accessed it. And access was granted based entirely on his relationship with that force.
The relationship had to be built through action. Through doing Death's work.
Not killing. That was Hela's mistake, treating Death as violence and conquest. Death's work was balance. Things that should naturally end, ending. Things unnaturally preserved past their time, released.
The universe had a specific rhythm. Life and death in constant exchange. When something disrupted that rhythm, when someone cheated death through unnatural means and anchored themselves past the point where the threshold had called them, it created a distortion. A weight on one side of the scale.
Correcting those distortions would be Death's work. And doing Death's work would deepen his relationship with the entity. It would earn trust. It would open access to the next tier of power.
Arthur was certain of this. Not because Frigga had told him. She hadn't known this part. But the mark on his chest had pulsed in steady, warm agreement the exact moment the thought crystallized in his mind, like a heavy door recognizing the right key.
He knew exactly what he needed to do.
"EVE."
"Yes, Sir?"
"I need your help. Cross-reference global records for individuals displaying anomalous longevity. People who should be dead based on documented birth dates but are still active. Focus on patterns suggesting supernatural life extension. Identity changes across decades, massive financial holdings spanning centuries, medical records that don't age consistently."
"That is an exceptionally broad search."
"Start with any geographic location where Mephisto was historically sighted. I am sure most of his unfortunate victims were given some form of cursed immortality."
"Understood. Estimated time for initial results: forty-eight hours."
"Good. Let me know the moment you find the first one."
—
Devon, England — Ten Days Later
The house sat at the end of a long, winding gravel drive, surrounded by massive oak trees that had been old when the house was built, and were older still now. It was one of those sprawling English country estates that regularly appeared in period dramas. From the outside, it looked like the peaceful home of someone who had inherited well and managed their wealth wisely.
Eve's research told a different story.
The property's ownership records went back to 1743, purchased by a merchant named Edmund Blackwood. The title had passed through a succession of Blackwood heirs, each inheriting at suspiciously convenient intervals, each bearing a striking resemblance to the last. The current occupant was listed as Thomas Blackwood, age forty-seven.
Eve suspected they were all the exact same person. If she was right, Thomas Blackwood was two hundred and sixty-eight years old.
Arthur Apparated to the edge of the property at dusk and walked slowly up the drive. The gravel crunched under his boots. The ancient oaks whispered in the wind. The evening air smelled of cut grass and something faintly, distinctly wrong.
The front door was unlocked. The interior perfectly matched the exterior: tasteful, well-maintained, expensive. And completely devoid of life.
Arthur found him in the study.
Thomas Blackwood sat in a deep leather armchair by a cold, dead fireplace. He did not notice anyone entering the room. He looked to be lost in incredibly deep, hollow thought.
Arthur activated Death Sight. His eyes shifted to twilight grey.
Blackwood's life thread was immediately, glaringly wrong. It should have ended centuries ago. It was a bright flame that had burned through its natural fuel and should have guttered out into smoke. Instead, it was anchored. Pinned violently in place by something dark and external, a chain of energy looping through his soul and disappearing into a dimension Arthur recognised.
Mephisto's mark. A soul contract. The thread of life was being held open by brute force, the way you might prop a dying man's eyes open and cruelly call it 'living.'
And the thread was screaming. Not audibly. But through Death Sight, Arthur could feel it. The soul's desperate, exhausted yearning to simply complete its journey. To cross the threshold. To rest.
Two hundred and sixty-eight years of desperately wanting to die and being unable to.
Blackwood finally noticed Arthur standing in the doorway. His eyes focused slowly, as though perceiving another person required effort he'd forgotten how to make.
"Who are you? How did you get in here?"
Arthur said nothing. He was reading the thread, tracing the contract's architecture. Mephisto's work was elegant in its cruelty. The contract sustained the body indefinitely while stripping away everything that made the body worth inhabiting in the first place.
Blackwood reached weakly for the antique shotgun mounted on the wall. A single, silent pulse of Arthur's magic later, the man was immobilized in his chair.
Arthur stepped forward and used Legilimency. Gently. Not to intrude or violate, but simply to understand.
The memories flooded in, confirming exactly what Eve had investigated. Edmund Blackwood, born 1742. A merchant. A genuinely good man. Generous with his sudden wealth. Loved by his community. Diagnosed with a terminal, agonizing illness at thirty-one.
Then the stranger came. Well-dressed. Charming. Offering a deal.
Blackwood took it. Of course he took it. He was thirty-one and terrified and had a young wife and two children who needed him. Anyone would have taken it.
The true price became clear slowly. Not all at once. That wasn't Mephisto's way; the Devil preferred a slow burn. The children died first. A sudden, virulent fever. The wife went next. A tragic fall down the stairs. Then the friends, the business partners, the neighbors who had been kind. One by one, over agonizing decades, everyone Blackwood loved was taken from him. And he couldn't follow them.
He'd tried. Arthur saw the attempts. Poison his body rejected. A pistol that miraculously misfired. A sheer cliff he had thrown himself from, only to wake in agony at the bottom with every bone shattered, already rapidly healing. The contract simply wouldn't let him die.
That was the whole point. The extended life wasn't a gift. It was a cage.
Two hundred and thirty-seven years alone in a cage.
Arthur withdrew gently from the memories and looked at the broken man in the chair.
"You want to go," Arthur said softly.
Blackwood stared at him. Something moved behind the total emptiness in his eyes. A tiny, desperate flicker of hope.
"More than anything," Blackwood whispered, his voice cracking. "More than anything I have ever wanted."
Arthur crossed the room and stood directly in front of the chair.
"I am here to set you free."
He placed his hand flat against Blackwood's chest. Right over the heart. Exactly where the dark contract anchored to the soul.
He didn't cast a spell. He didn't use magic or sorcery. He reached deeply through the Death Sight and touched the chain itself.
Mephisto's contract was strong. Woven through the soul like barbed wire through flesh. Tearing it out by force would cause unimaginable agony. Arthur didn't tear.
He called on Death's ambient energy, and the chain simply unraveled. Link by heavy link. Mephisto's dark mark burned away like morning frost under a blazing sun. It didn't happen violently. It happened the way morning gently dissolves a nightmare.
Blackwood gasped. His eyes went wide. Not with pain. With sensation. After two hundred and sixty-eight years of numbness, he could feel again. And the first thing he felt was the door.
It was there. Right there. The doorway he'd been denied for over two centuries. Open. Waiting. Warm.
"Oh," Blackwood breathed. His eyes filled with tears. "Oh, I can feel it. I can feel them. They're there. Margaret. Thomas. Elizabeth. They're waiting for me."
The last link of the chain dissolved into nothingness.
His body relaxed instantly, and everything that had been held impossibly taut by the contract for centuries simply let go.
His eyes fluttered closed. A smile spread across his weathered face. Genuine. Deeply peaceful. The beautiful smile of a tired man finally coming home.
Edmund Blackwood, born 1742, finally died.
—
Arthur sat on the floor of the study for a long time.
The body in the chair looked peaceful. Younger, somehow. As though death had returned the years that the contract had stolen. He looked like a man who had fallen asleep after a very long day.
Something had changed in Arthur.
He could feel it. A deepening, like a well being dug further into the earth. The Death Sight, which had required effort and concentration, now sat at the edge of his awareness like a sense he'd always had but hadn't noticed. He could activate it without strain. Hold it longer. See further.
The mark pulsed with a steady rhythm. Satisfied.
He'd done death's work. Restored balance. Released a soul held past its time. And the energy had responded by opening itself a fraction wider.
Arthur arranged things quietly. Blackwood's body would be found by the local estate agent. The cause of death would appear natural. Nothing suspicious. Just a man who had finally been allowed to rest.
He portaled home.
In his study, he sat in the dark and let the new depth settle. He could feel the threads of his family sleeping upstairs. Eileen's warm and steady. Elena's bright and fierce. Tristan's vast and still forming. All of them burning beautifully toward destinations they couldn't see.
"Eve."
"Sir?"
"How many more are on the list?"
"Based on current search parameters, I have identified one hundred and forty-seven high-probability matches globally. Seventy of those show behavioral patterns completely consistent with Mephisto contracts."
A hundred and forty-seven.
"Continue the search. Expand the parameters. There will be more out there."
"Yes, Sir."
Arthur stood up, looking out the window at the sleeping city. He had work to do.