Chapter 718

"Where am I?!"

After being consumed by the inferno, Frigga discovered that she was still alive.

More astonishingly, she was completely unharmed.

Her pale blue gown remained immaculate, its elegant fabric untouched by fire or ash. Not a single thread had been damaged, and even her carefully arranged hair remained perfectly in place.

It was as though the catastrophe she’d witnessed had never happened.

Except for one thing.

There was nothing before her but darkness.

Frigga stood alone in an endless black void. No light, no sound, no landmarks. Nothing existed here except herself.

She looked around in bewilderment, then slowly closed her eyes.

So this is what comes after death.

She had been certain that the flames consuming Asgard had killed her. This place must be the realm where all the dead eventually arrived.

And if she hadn’t been granted the peace of eternal unconsciousness, perhaps that was her punishment.

Frigga lowered herself to the ground and drew her knees to her chest. She buried her face against them and began to sob quietly.

She wasn’t mourning her own death. Nor was she crying because she would never again see her family.

She was crying for her people.

"I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, everyone. I wasn’t strong enough."

As queen, she had failed in her most fundamental duty.

Her subjects had entrusted the royal family with their loyalty, their futures, and their very lives. They had looked to their rulers for protection and guidance, believing that Asgard’s strength would keep them safe.

Yet the royal family had failed to bring them happiness.

Worse, when disaster came, they hadn’t even been able to protect them.

Frigga had spent countless years accepting the respect and reverence of her people. But when the final moment arrived, she had stood among them and watched helplessly as they died.

She hadn’t even been able to save a single life.

What kind of queen was she?

Frigga remained curled up in the darkness, drowning in guilt. Every memory of the people she’d failed became another weight pressing down on her.

She punished herself with grief, convinced that she deserved every moment of suffering.

But her anguish was doing more than tormenting her.

It was awakening something else.

A sound broke the silence.

Then another.

Soon, the quiet void was filled with a dense, relentless rustling.

Frigga lifted her head, her eyes red and swollen from crying. She looked around, confused by the sudden disturbance.

Then terror seized her.

"THIS IS YOUR FAULT!"

"YOU FAILED US!"

"YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO SAVE US!"

Bodies began crawling toward her from every direction.

Thousands upon thousands of charred corpses emerged from the darkness. Some still had scraps of carbonized flesh clinging to their bones. Others were nothing more than skeletal remains.

Every one of them was blackened from head to toe, trailing wisps of dark smoke as though an ember still smoldered deep within each ruined body.

They were the dead of Asgard.

Frigga stumbled backward.

Their faces had been burned beyond recognition, yet she knew them. Somehow, she could recognize every one of her subjects.

They reached for her with skeletal hands, their voices rising in a chorus of accusation and rage.

They blamed her for their deaths. They condemned her weakness. They demanded to know why the royal family had abandoned them when they needed protection most.

Frigga was swallowed by their accusations.

She ran, sobbing apologies as she fled through the darkness.

But no matter how fast she moved, the corpses pursued her even faster.

No matter how desperately she begged for forgiveness, their hatred did not diminish.

Empty eye sockets burned with fury. Their voices followed her wherever she went, each accusation cutting deeper than the last.

They wanted her to suffer.

They wanted her to pay.

At last, Frigga broke.

She clutched her head and screamed with all the strength she possessed.

"No! THIS WASN’T HOW OUR STORY WAS SUPPOSED TO END!"

Her cry rang through the void.

Instantly, everything stopped.

Silence returned.

Frigga slowly opened her eyes and looked around.

The corpses had vanished.

The darkness receded, revealing the street where the nightmare had begun.

She was back at the beginning of the apocalypse.

"I see..."

Frigga narrowed her eyes.

At last, she understood what was happening.

As Queen of Asgard, she was a formidable warrior in her own right. Even Malekith had been caught off guard by her skill and suffered for underestimating her.

Yet it wasn’t her martial prowess that had earned her the greatest respect.

It was her magic.

Everyone knew that Loki, the God of Mischief, possessed extraordinary magical talent. He could outmaneuver Thor time and again, leaving the God of Thunder frustrated and helpless.

But Loki had learned his magic from Frigga.

His mastery was built upon the knowledge she had taught him. In terms of magical skill and understanding, Frigga surpassed even her gifted adopted son.

With her extensive knowledge and experience, she could recognize the nature of what she had just experienced.

The destruction of Asgard had not been real.

Not yet.

It was a glimpse of something that had not happened.

"A prophetic dream."

According to ancient Asgardian lore, those of sufficiently pure Asgardian blood could sometimes witness fragments of the future under extraordinary circumstances.

Such visions might be triggered by a special ritual. They might emerge at the threshold between life and death.

Or they might arrive in sleep, slipping into a person’s dreams without warning.

Frigga glanced down at her right arm.

It was unmarked, but she remembered what had happened before she lost consciousness.

Malekith’s poisoned dagger.

He had stabbed her there.

I must be close to death.

That would explain why the vision had come to her.

Yet something about it troubled her.

Prophecies were rarely so straightforward. Even divine revelations tended to arrive in fragments, obscured by symbolism and half-understood warnings. Their meanings could be debated endlessly, with a hundred interpreters offering a hundred different explanations.

Sometimes, those disagreements became more vicious than the disasters the prophecies foretold.

But this vision had been unmistakable.

Asgard would be destroyed by an inferno that consumed everything.

No one would survive.

There was no ambiguity. No hidden message waiting to be deciphered.

It was simply the end.

Have the Norns taken such an interest in me?

Frigga looked toward the crimson sky.

Then she reconsidered.

The Norns were not her superiors. She hardly needed their special favor.

So what was the purpose of showing her this?

Before she could find an answer, the nightmare began again.

The panicked crowds returned. The sky turned red. The flames surged through Asgard and swallowed everything in their path.

Frigga was consumed once more.

She found herself back in the black void, surrounded by the charred remains of her people.

But this time, she wasn’t afraid.

Understanding had dawned on her.

The vision was too vivid, too detailed, and too persistent to be an ordinary prophecy. She was being forced to experience the same catastrophe again and again.

There could only be one explanation.

She was being given the opportunity to find a way to prevent it.

The destruction of Asgard was a future that could still be changed.

Frigga turned toward the approaching corpses and straightened.

"I am your queen," she declared. "And I will find a way to save you."

The void shifted.

She was back on the street.

Frigga immediately noticed that her time in the darkness had been much shorter than before.

The change strengthened her conviction.

There was a purpose to this trial, and she was beginning to understand its rules.

From that moment on, she tried everything.

She was willing to sacrifice anything, to use any method, if it meant saving her people.

But the ending refused to change.

The interval between her return to the street and the arrival of the inferno was barely a minute.

A single minute.

She tried to organize the citizens into evacuation groups, urging them to flee before the flames arrived. But the disaster engulfed all of Asgard. There was nowhere to escape, no distant sanctuary beyond the reach of the fire.

She tried gathering every ounce of magical power she possessed, raising barriers against the oncoming inferno.

The flames overwhelmed them.

No matter how much strength she poured into her spells, the destructive force bearing down on her was simply too great.

Her power felt insignificant.

Again and again, she returned to the beginning.

Again and again, she tried something new.

And again and again, she failed.

Frigga lost track of the number of attempts. She tried countless strategies, exhausting every idea she could conceive.

Nothing worked.

Her initial determination slowly gave way to frustration. Frustration became desperation, then anger, then a hollow exhaustion that left her struggling to summon even the will to try again.

Each failure stripped away another layer of her resolve.

Eventually, she stopped fighting.

Back in the black void, she stood surrounded by the charred corpses of her people. She spread her hands in weary resignation.

"That’s enough. I’ve tried everything."

Her voice rose in agitation.

"Do you understand? A prophecy is a prophecy precisely because it can’t be changed!"

The corpses did not retreat.

But neither did they advance.

They simply watched her in silence, their hollow eye sockets fixed upon her.

Their expressions seemed to ask a single question.

Have you really tried everything?

Frigga understood their unspoken challenge.

"I have!" she insisted.

"If you’ve experienced these visions alongside me, then you know what I’ve done. I’ve tried every method I could think of. I don’t want to admit it, and I certainly don’t want to accept this future, but..."

She faltered.

"This is fate. Perhaps this is simply Asgard’s destiny."

She looked at the countless dead surrounding her.

"What else can I do? You expect me to change fate itself? To rewrite the course of history?"

Her voice grew bitter.

"I’m not powerful enough. And as time passes, as I grow older, I’ll only become weaker. As for everything else..."

She lowered her head.

"I’m only the queen."

The words had barely left her mouth when the corpses dissolved into black smoke and vanished.

Frigga rolled her eyes.

"Here we go again. Another round? Is there really any point in continuing?"

She waited.

Nothing happened.

The darkness remained still. The street did not reappear. No flames descended from the sky.

After a while, Frigga let out a weary breath.

"So you’ve given up, too."

Her understanding of the vision had begun to change.

At first, she had believed she was being shown the future so that she could discover a way to save her people. Now, she wondered whether the repeated failures had served an entirely different purpose.

Perhaps this place was meant to wear away her attachments, one by one, until she had nothing left to fight for.

Once every desire had been extinguished, she could finally surrender to the eternal sleep awaiting the dead.

Perhaps she really had died.

Perhaps there was no escape from this place.

Then something touched her shoulder.

A hand.

Frigga jolted and spun around.

Throughout her countless repetitions of the nightmare, the corpses had chased her, surrounded her, and screamed accusations in her face.

But none had ever touched her.

This was different.

Someone was standing behind her.

Frigga stared.

It wasn’t a charred skeleton.

It was a living woman.

A woman who looked almost exactly like her.

The resemblance was astonishing. The same features, the same face, the same general bearing.

Yet the differences were impossible to ignore.

The stranger’s eyes were green. Her face bore fewer wrinkles, her lips were tinged with black, and something faintly sinister lingered in her expression.

She wore black armor traced with intricate green markings.

Frigga had never appeared in such attire. Asgardians might pride themselves on their martial traditions, but she was a queen, not a frontline warrior. Magic had always been her greatest strength, and she had never needed to parade about in armor.

The woman before her looked like a version of herself who had taken an entirely different path.

"Who are you?" Frigga demanded.

She was certain the strange woman had been created by this realm, but she had no idea what purpose this new manifestation served.

The woman lowered her head and smiled.

It was a seductive, sinister smile, utterly unlike anything Frigga had ever seen on her own face.

"Who am I?" she repeated softly. "Isn’t it obvious?"

Frigga studied her.

The woman’s mannerisms were different, but her voice was identical to Frigga’s own.

The realization came quickly.

"You... you’re me."

She narrowed her eyes and began circling the stranger, examining her from every angle.

"Yes. You’re me, but you’re also my reflection. Another side of myself."

The woman tilted her head.

"Close. Very close."

She turned, the plates of her black armor shifting with a faint metallic clatter.

"But I’m not simply another side of you."

Her green eyes gleamed.

"I’m the embodiment of your obsession."

Frigga said nothing.

The woman continued.

"Your obsession with saving your people. Your desperate need to find redemption. All the things you’ve refused to abandon, no matter how much you’ve suffered."

She took a step closer.

"Those obsessions created me. And when you finally let them go, I was born."

"Is that so?"

Frigga regarded her with guarded skepticism.

"Then why have you appeared before me?"

The armored woman tilted her head and smiled again.

"To ask you the same question as before."

Her voice softened.

"Have you truly exhausted every possible way to save your people?"

Frigga shrugged.

"I’ll give you the same answer I gave the others."

She didn’t hesitate.

"I don’t have the power to stop this. I can’t change the course of history. I’m only the queen. Is that good enough for you?"

"Good enough," the woman murmured.

She lowered her head slightly, a sinister smile spreading across her lips.

"Power. The queen."

Her eyes gleamed with sudden understanding.

"Those are the keys to everything."

The woman began to change.

Her armored form dissolved into a mass of vivid green substance. It surged and twisted like a blazing fire, yet its surface flowed with the liquid smoothness of something alive.

Frigga stared.

For the first time since the nightmare had begun, she felt something stir within her that wasn’t fear, guilt, or despair.

Hope.

The green substance pulsed before her, beautiful and terrible.

Its voice was Frigga’s own.

"I am every obsession you’ve ever possessed. I am the ambition you’ve desperately suppressed. I am every impossible dream you’ve ever dismissed."

The mass expanded, its luminous surface rippling.

"I have always been here, hidden deep within you."

Its voice rose, filling the void.

"And now... I’ve tasted your essence!"

Frigga slowly extended both hands toward it.

Her eyes shone with wonder.

"It’s beautiful..."

She took another step forward.

"It’s truly beautiful..."

Her fingertips came within inches of the glowing substance.

Then it recoiled.

The mass drew away from her hands, refusing to let her touch it.

Frigga froze.

Before she could ask why, the substance spoke again.

"What am I?"

The question hung in the darkness.

Frigga’s lips parted.

"I am the queen..."

She faltered.

"No..."

She raised her head.

Her eyes widened, and her voice rang out with sudden, absolute conviction.

"I AM THE QUEEN!"

No.

Not merely the queen.

The Queen.

The declaration echoed through the void.

The green substance surged forward and embraced her.

It enveloped her back, then spread outward in a magnificent burst of emerald light.

Two enormous wings unfurled behind Frigga.

The darkness trembled.

And Frigga stood transformed.