My scream continued, pushing back the animal until I felt the next step of my plan come and bury itself bone-deep inside of me. I stood and dropped my head until the crown faced the ground, and I thought of that wall inside my body and the thin ice of the gauntlet, and like an actual stag, something inside me crashed through the wall and continued to run through my body. My veins, my muscles, my skin, every part of me was filled with a fiery sensation—not painful—as the power danced around my body, and as stag me and human me merged together in a beautiful storm of ice and fire.

I took a step up into the air, and it formed like a step from the ice under my feet. Turning, I reached a hand to Soren, who while thoroughly terrified—I knew his every thought and emotion now, no need to reach, no need to dig—accepted my hand as I pulled him up with me.

The inferno of ice that surrounded my body quickly climbed across our linked hands and circled his body too, his remaining eye turning the color of frost, and the scar where his eye should’ve been shone in the same bright color.

When I spoke, the wind spoke with me, and my voice boomed over the flat icy plain that was Niflheim.

“I am ash and I am elm,” my voice boomed over the wind. “I am Frigga and Freya, Skadi and Gefion, Idun and Sif. I am Sigyn, Eir, Fulla, Gna, and Hlin. I am Ilmr and I am Hel. Every goddess throughout time, named and unnamed, flows through me. Everything that is or ever has been is in me. I know without knowing. I see without seeing. I am the beginning and the end and the time in between.” My words lashed out at Fjalar like the swing of a sword, and the rooster shrieked in pain as it bled.

Soren clutched my hand and said, “I am the hunter. I am death. I am the brutality of nature at its fiercest and its protector at its weakest. Through me flows the blood of the Ancient One, the first Erlking, and through blood and sweat, I claimed the throne and I will rule. I am Odin’s Other Eye and to slay you is my destiny.”

Another shot of icy fire hit the bird, and it stumbled, bleeding from two very deep cuts in its chest.

The thing inside of me that told me to speak, gave me and Soren the words to say, pressed on.

“I am life, I am the cycle, and I forbid you from my realms,” I shouted. The swirling of dust, ice, snow, and mist made it almost impossible to see what was happening to our enemy, but I could feel it in my very bones as Soren continued the chant.