Chapter 4: The Witch's Sanctuary
[Midgard — Freya's Woods — Day 2, Morning]
The boar came out of the underbrush like a battering ram wrapped in bristle and blood.
It crashed through a wall of ferns ten paces ahead, squealing—a high, ragged sound that split the grey morning apart. Arrows jutted from its flank, two of them buried deep, one snapped off at the shaft where the animal had tried to scrape it free against a tree. The creature staggered, slipped on a root, and kept running, trailing a bright red line through the frost.
Atreus lowered his bow. The guilt hit his face before the color did.
"I didn't— Father, I thought it was—"
"Quiet." Kratos tracked the blood trail with the flat efficiency of a man who'd been hunting since before written history. His eyes moved from the smeared ferns to the broken undergrowth to the thin red thread disappearing between the birches. "We follow."
They'd been walking since before dawn. Through the night, actually—Kratos had allowed exactly one hour of rest against a fallen trunk while Atreus dozed and Ethan sat rigid, arm throbbing, listening to the forest make sounds no forest should make. Growls that came from underground. Scratching from inside sealed cairns. Once, a voice that might have been singing, thin and broken, drifting from somewhere deep in the trees before cutting off mid-note.
The cut on his forearm had crusted over but hadn't closed. Every time he flexed the hand, the scab cracked and fresh warmth trickled down to his wrist. The draugr dagger rode on his hip, tucked through the leather belt cord. It pulled to the left when he walked.
Now they followed the blood. Kratos first, axe ready. Atreus behind, shame-faced, bow hanging at his side like it had betrayed him. Ethan brought up the rear and kept his mouth shut.
He knew where this trail led. The wounded boar was Hildisvíni—Freya's companion, enchanted, unkillable under normal circumstances. Atreus's arrows hadn't done permanent damage, but Freya didn't know that yet. She'd be furious. Then she'd be helpful. Then she'd send them to Alfheim.
The blood trail curved west through thickening forest. The trees here were different—older, their trunks wrapped in moss that glowed faintly green in the early light. The air changed. Warmer. Wetter. Charged with something that made the hair on Ethan's arms stand up and the dried blood on his forearm tingle.
Magic. Real, actual magic. Not the academic kind he'd spent years theorizing about in climate-controlled seminar rooms. This was the living current—Vanir seiðr woven into the soil itself, turning the forest into a garden that answered to one woman's will. Flowers bloomed in the frost. A stream ran clear over stones that shouldn't have been warm but were, steam curling from the water's surface like breath.
The boar collapsed in a clearing ringed by birches. It lay on its side, chest heaving, eyes rolling white. The arrows had worked themselves deeper during the run.
"Don't touch it." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. "Don't you dare touch it."
She materialized from the treeline like the forest had exhaled her. Tall. Blonde hair shot through with silver, pulled back from a face that was beautiful in the way glaciers were beautiful—ancient and sharp and fundamentally unconcerned with being admired. She wore leathers and furs and carried herself with the posture of a woman who had been worshipped by entire civilizations and found the experience underwhelming.
Freya. The Witch of the Woods. Daughter of Njörd, former Queen of the Vanir, Odin's ex-wife. Mother of Baldur—the barefoot god who'd destroyed Kratos's cabin yesterday and was currently tracking them across the Wildwoods with a jaw he'd popped back into place and a grudge that spanned a century.
She knelt beside the boar and her hands glowed. Golden light—warm, dense, saturated with a power that made Ethan's teeth itch—flowed from her palms into the animal's wounds. The arrows dissolved. The punctures sealed. The boar's breathing steadied.
"Who shot my boar?" Quiet. The kind of quiet that preceded storms.
Atreus stepped forward. "I— it was me. I thought it was a deer. In the dark, I couldn't—"
"You couldn't tell the difference between a boar and a deer?" Freya stood. Her eyes cut to Kratos. "Your boy needs better training."
Kratos said nothing. His jaw worked once, the only sign the comment had landed.
Then her gaze found Ethan.
The shift was immediate. Her expression went from anger to something else—curiosity mixed with a wariness that came from centuries of reading magical signatures the way most people read facial expressions. She stepped toward him and he fought the urge to step back.
"You." She circled him once, slow, the way a scholar might examine an unexpected artifact in a collection. "You carry Giant blood. Faint, but present."
The words dropped through Ethan's stomach like stones through water. He'd expected Freya to be perceptive—she was a goddess of fertility and seiðr, attuned to the biological essence of every living thing in her domain. But Giant blood. Confirmation of what the ancestral flash in the forest had suggested. This body—whoever it had belonged to—was connected to the Jötnar. The same race that had carved prophecy into mountains and spoken the future into existence.
"I— what?"
"The bloodline is thin." Freya's hand hovered near his shoulder, not quite touching. The warmth of her magic pulsed against his skin. "Diluted over many generations. But it's there. In the bones."
Kratos's attention sharpened. The axe didn't move, but his grip on it changed—subtle, the difference between holding and ready. His eyes went from Freya to Ethan and stayed there.
"I didn't know." True enough. Not the whole truth, but the part that mattered.
Freya studied him for three more seconds. Then she turned and knelt beside the boar again, stroking its bristled neck. "You're hurt," she said, without looking up. "The arm. Come inside. I'll tend to it."
Inside was a cottage that grew from the forest floor like it had been planted rather than built. Roots formed the walls. Living branches wove into the ceiling. Light came from clusters of luminescent flowers that opened as Freya entered and tracked her movement across the room. The floor was packed earth, swept clean, warm underfoot.
She sat Ethan on a bench carved from a single root and unwrapped the makeshift bandage he'd tied around the draugr cut. The wound looked worse in good light—a jagged line running from wrist to mid-forearm, the edges crusted but inflamed. Infection, probably. This wasn't a world with antiseptic.
Freya pressed two fingers to the wound. Heat bloomed—not painful, but deep, like sunlight reaching through skin to the muscle beneath. The inflammation faded. The edges drew together. Not fully healed—she wasn't spending that kind of power on a stranger's scratch—but cleaned, closed, bandaged with a poultice of herbs that smelled like pine and something sweeter.
"Thank you," Ethan said. His voice came out rougher than intended. She was being kind, and kindness was harder to navigate than hostility because he knew what was coming for this woman. He knew her son would try to strangle her. He knew she would beg Kratos to spare him. He knew Kratos wouldn't.
"Eat." She pushed a wooden bowl across the table. Root stew, thick with herbs, still steaming. Atreus was already on his second helping, color returning to his cheeks. Kratos sat in the corner with a bowl he hadn't touched, watching.
The first spoonful burned Ethan's tongue. The second made his eyes water. The third—
God. Real food. Hot food. Not the handful of frozen berries he'd choked down during the night's march or the strip of dried meat Atreus had silently shared from his pack an hour before dawn. This was nutrition with flavor, warmth that spread from his throat to his stomach to his extremities, and the effect was so immediate and so overwhelming that his hand shook when he lifted the spoon for a fourth bite.
Two days. He'd been in this world for two days and this was the first proper meal. In his old life, he'd ordered delivery when he didn't feel like walking to the kitchen. The contrast was so absurd he almost laughed.
Almost. Not quite. Because Freya was watching him eat with an expression he couldn't decode, and Kratos was watching Freya watch him, and somewhere in the Nine Realms a god who couldn't feel pain was hunting for Giants, and this warm cottage with its growing walls and its luminescent flowers was a rest stop on a road that led through war and death and the end of the world.
Atreus broke the silence. "Your blood. The Giant connection. Does that mean you can do magic?"
"Boy." Kratos's voice. A warning.
"What? She said he has Giant blood. The Giants could do all sorts of things—Mímir's stories say they could see the future, build whole cities with rune-craft—"
"The boy asks fair questions." Freya sat across from Ethan, hands folded on the table. "Can you? Do anything with it?"
The headache from the forest flash pulsed behind Ethan's eyes. The woman's hands on the tree. The runes flowing like ink. The knowledge that had poured in and mostly poured back out, leaving fragments lodged in his mind like shrapnel.
"Sometimes I see things," he said. Careful. Measured. "Flashes. Memories that aren't mine. A woman carving runes. It hurts."
"Ancestral memory." Freya's expression changed. Not surprise—recognition. "The Giants encoded knowledge in their bloodline. Passed down through generations, accessible to descendants under certain conditions." She paused. "It's dangerous. Uncontrolled access can fragment the mind."
Good to know. He filed that alongside the nosebleeds and the splitting headache and the woman's voice still echoing in the back of his skull.
"Rest here tonight," Freya said. "The forest is safe within my wards. Tomorrow, continue your journey." She looked at Kratos. "The mountain path is your destination?"
"Yes."
"You'll find it blocked. The Black Breath spreads."
Kratos's jaw tightened. "Then we will find another way."
Freya looked like she wanted to say more. Instead, she stood and went to tend the boar. Atreus followed her, asking questions about Giant magic that she answered with the patient precision of a teacher who hadn't had a student in a long time.
Ethan sat with the empty bowl in his hands and the weight of everything he couldn't say pressing down on his shoulders. Across the room, Kratos sharpened the Leviathan Axe with a whetstone, the rhythmic scraping filling the cottage like a heartbeat.
The God of War's grey eyes lifted once. Held Ethan's for a three-count. Then dropped back to the blade.
He doesn't trust me. He shouldn't.
Outside, through the cottage's living walls, the forest settled into evening. Safe. Warm. Temporary.
Because the mountain path ahead was choked with corruption that only the Light of Alfheim could burn away, and getting that light meant crossing into a realm at war—a realm where the first real test of everything Ethan knew was waiting like a loaded gun.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them. No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more. Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1