Darkness swallowed the world.
Freya blinked, but there was nothing to see. No horizon. No ceiling. Only a thick blackness pressing against her skin, sticky and cold like oil. Her breath rasped in her throat, each inhale a shallow gasp that rattled her ribs. Pain bloomed behind her eyes, in her gut, in the places where memory wouldn't quite reach.
Where... where am I?
Her hands trembled as she pushed herself upright. Metal, slick and pulsing faintly with warmth, pressed against her palms. She was lying on a table — no, a slab — inside a cavernous space that hummed with strange vibrations.
Something was wrong with gravity. Her body floated slightly, weightless, before sagging back down.
The last thing she remembered —
the battlefield,
blood and fire and the shriek of rupturing earth.
She had fallen.
She had died.
Hadn't she?
Freya's heart hammered. Slowly, she peeled her arm up to examine the underside of her wrist.
A jagged seam, silver and luminous, traced the veins under her skin.
Not a wound — a stitch.
A seal.
"What..." Her voice cracked, unfamiliar even to herself.
Light bloomed overhead — pale, sickly green, casting the chamber in a sterile glow.
Freya shielded her eyes, her gut clenching. Shapes moved beyond the light: tall, lean figures cloaked in armored robes, faces hidden beneath helmets that shimmered and shifted like liquid.
They spoke, but not in any language she recognized.
A series of low-frequency vibrations, like whale-song through iron pipes.
She scrambled backward on the table, adrenaline flooding her system. Her leg gave out. Something in her thigh — bone, tendon — hadn't healed right.
The nearest figure approached and reached for her.
Freya lashed out instinctively. Her fist connected with a chestplate harder than stone, sending a jolt of agony up her arm. She cried out, more in frustration than pain.
"Stay away!" she snarled.
A second figure raised a hand. A pulse of sound hit her squarely in the chest, dropping her back onto the slab with a force that emptied her lungs.
Gasping, Freya fought to stay conscious.
Voices murmured. Decisions were being made.
About her.
I'm not dead, she realized, struggling against the panic rising in her gut. I'm not dead... but I'm not home, either.
The tall figure — the leader — stepped closer, he studied her for a moment that stretched into eternity, then spoke a single word that seared itself into her mind:
"Impure."
Freya's stomach turned.
She understood, somehow, what he meant.
Not prisoner.
Not human.
Impure.
Before she could protest, two armored figures seized her arms, dragging her forward.
"Wait!" she barked. "Wait — listen — I'm human! I'm—"
Freya felt it then: something alien slithering across the surface of her mind, probing, testing. A foreign presence pressed against her thoughts like a key searching for a lock.
"No," she whispered, thrashing. "No, get out—!"
She screamed — but the sound was only in her mind.
The world blurred, trembled — and then shattered.