Chapter 2: The Stranger Arrives
[Midgard — Treeline Overlooking Kratos's Cabin — Same Day, Afternoon]
The cabin was smaller than the game had shown.
Ethan crouched behind a fallen pine on the ridge above the clearing, legs cramping from two hours in the same position, bark digging into his palms. From here, the house was a low-slung rectangle of dark timber, patched and weathered, with smoke drifting lazily from a chimney that leaned slightly to the left. The funeral pyre had burned down to embers, a dark circle of ash and charred wood in the yard. The smell was thicker up close—woodsmoke and something sweet and strange that clung to the inside of his throat.
Kratos was in the yard.
The games had gotten the size right. Kratos was massive—taller than anyone Ethan had ever seen in his old life, shoulders wide enough to blot out the doorway when he stood in it, arms like something carved from pale stone. The red tattoo ran down his left side in a stripe that the afternoon light turned the color of old blood. He moved with an economy that made everything else in the forest look wasteful—no wasted steps, no unnecessary gestures. He was splitting wood. The axe rose and fell with a rhythm that suggested this was what he did instead of grieving.
Atreus sat on the porch steps, a bow across his knees, fidgeting with a quiver strap. He was small. Not just young—small in the way of children who'd grown up under too much weight. His hair was dark, his posture uncertain, and every few seconds he glanced at his father with an expression that toggled between wanting to speak and knowing better.
There it was. The thing the games could never fully capture—the silence between them. Not comfortable silence, not shared quiet, but the kind of silence that happened when two people occupied the same space without knowing how to occupy it together. Kratos split wood. Atreus adjusted his quiver. Neither spoke.
Ethan's chest ached.
Focus. He wasn't here to get sentimental. The timeline was fixed—for now. Faye's ashes were in a bag somewhere inside the cabin. The Leviathan Axe hung at Kratos's belt, frost curling faintly off the blade's edge. Everything was exactly where it was supposed to be, which meant Baldur was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Close. Getting closer.
The first sign wasn't the man himself. It was the birds. Every crow, every starling, every small darting thing that had been singing in the canopy went silent at once, like someone had thrown a switch. The forest held its breath. Ethan's fingers dug into the bark so hard it crumbled.
Then the knock.
Baldur came up the path like a man walking into his own living room—barefoot on the frozen ground, arms swinging loose, shoulders rolled back. No urgency. No caution. Just that easy, predatory stroll that said he already knew he couldn't be hurt by anything behind that door. Tattoos covered his arms and climbed his neck, and his face wore the specific expression of a man who hadn't felt pleasure, pain, warmth, or cold in over a hundred years.
He was smiling.
Ethan's stomach clenched. On a screen, Baldur had been a memorable antagonist—tragic, frightening, well-voiced. In person, ten meters below and separated only by a thin ridge of frozen earth, he was wrong. Something about the way he moved communicated a fundamental disconnection from consequences. This was a man who had been hit by everything the Nine Realms could throw at him and walked away bored.
The cabin door opened.
Kratos filled the frame. For a beat, neither spoke. Then Baldur tilted his head, smiled wider, and said something too quiet for Ethan to catch from the ridge.
The response was a fist.
Every recreation, every playthrough, every YouTube breakdown of this fight—none of it prepared him. The first punch landed with a sound like a tree trunk splitting and Baldur flew backward ten feet, hit the ground, rolled, and popped up grinning. Kratos came through the doorway like an avalanche in human form. Baldur met him in the middle of the yard and the collision sent a shockwave through the ground that Ethan felt in his teeth.
Trees shattered. The cabin's roof caved on one side as a body—impossible to tell whose—slammed through a support beam. The earth cracked. Actual cracks, radiating outward from the impact points like frozen lightning, splitting the yard into uneven plates of frozen soil. Kratos grabbed Baldur by the throat and the god's neck snapped with a sound like a branch breaking.
Baldur stood back up.
Ethan's fingers went white on the bark. His breath came in short, shallow pulls that fogged instantly in the cold air. On screen, this fight was exciting. Impressive. Here, pressed against the frozen ground with dirt in his mouth, it was something else entirely. Two beings operating on a plane of violence that human bodies weren't built to witness. The ground shook. The air tasted like ozone and blood. Each impact sounded like the world flinching.
They fought across the yard, through the cabin wall, up the side of the ridge—close enough at one point that Ethan flattened himself into the snow and felt the wind of Baldur's body passing overhead as Kratos threw him. When they crashed back to earth, the impact cratered a section of yard big enough to swallow a car.
Atreus was nowhere visible. Smart kid. Hiding inside, probably under something heavy. Good.
The fight ended the way it always ended—Kratos winning through sheer brutality, snapping Baldur's neck a final time, the god's body going limp and falling into a crevasse the battle had carved into the hillside. Dead. Except not dead, because Baldur couldn't die. Not yet. Not until mistletoe.
Kratos stood in the ruin of his home, breathing hard, blood running from a cut above his eye. He stared at the crevasse for a long moment. Then he turned.
"Boy."
Atreus emerged from the remains of the cabin, bow clutched in both hands, face white. "Father—"
"We leave. Now."
No discussion. No processing. No grieving the destroyed home or wondering who the stranger was. Kratos grabbed a pack from inside the wreckage, slung it over one shoulder, and walked into the trees without looking back. Atreus scrambled to follow, tripping once over a chunk of collapsed wall, righting himself, and disappearing into the treeline after his father.
Ethan stayed pressed against the ground for a full minute after they vanished.
His hands trembled. Not from cold—though the cold was still trying to kill him—but from something deeper. A physiological response to witnessing violence on a scale his nervous system had no category for. In twenty-eight years of life—the old life, the one that ended with headlights and a truck running a red light—the worst violence he'd witnessed was a bar fight outside a grad school pub. Two drunk men shoving each other until a bouncer intervened.
Baldur had been thrown through a stone wall and gotten up laughing.
Ethan stood on legs that didn't want to hold him. The wrecked cabin smoked below, beams cracked and leaning, one wall completely gone. The funeral pyre ashes had been scattered by the shockwaves, grey and white streaking the churned ground. Faye's remains—what was left of them—were in a bag on Kratos's back now, moving north through the trees.
Two options.
Approach now. Walk down there, wave his hands, explain himself. Hi, I'm a stranger who appeared in the woods with no backstory, wearing someone else's skin, and I happen to know everything about your dead wife and your son's secret heritage. Please don't kill me.
Or follow. Keep distance. Wait for a moment where the cost of approaching was lower than the cost of being alone.
Kratos had just fought a god to a standstill. He was wound tight, suspicious by nature, armed with an axe forged by the same dwarves who'd made Thor's hammer. Any stranger who appeared right now would be treated as a threat, and Kratos's method of threat assessment involved the Leviathan Axe and very few questions.
Following, then. Watch. Learn how the real versions of these people differed from their digital reflections. Find the right moment.
Ethan climbed down from the ridge, skirting the ruined cabin, and picked up the trail. Kratos left tracks like a plow cutting a field—heavy, deliberate, impossible to lose. Atreus's smaller prints stuttered alongside, sometimes falling behind, sometimes rushing to catch up.
Two sets of tracks heading north through the Wildwoods. Ethan followed at fifty meters, matching their pace, keeping the flicker of Atreus's quiver visible through the trees. His body—the borrowed body, the one that moved through this forest like it had done it before—settled into a rhythm of pursuit that required less thought than it should have.
The afternoon light faded as the canopy thickened. Shadows pooled between the trunks. Somewhere ahead, the Wildwoods burial grounds waited, full of things that had been dead for a long time but hadn't stayed that way.
And somewhere behind them both—behind Ethan, behind Kratos, behind all of it—Baldur was climbing out of that crevasse with a dislocated jaw and a new item on his hunting list.
The burial mounds broke the treeline ahead. Stone markers jutting from the frozen ground like rotten teeth. The earth between them had been disturbed—pushed outward from below, soil and snow heaped in mounds that steamed faintly in the cold air.
Something moved beneath the nearest cairn.
Ethan stopped. Kratos, fifty meters ahead, drew the Leviathan Axe.
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