#godofwarifc

Since Atreus had been gone, you’d accompanied Kratos and Freya to the Lake of Nine, clearing out the new groups of marauders creeping back into the region.

You were the first to notice them returning, catching a group of three mauling a smaller wolf just past the Wildwood’s border. You’d tried to intervene at first, but four more emerged from the trees, forcing you to retreat.

Kratos had been thoroughly displeased when you told him, grumbling low, jaw tight, before storming off with a curt, “Stay put,” in that hard Spartan tone. You knew better than to pry…but that didn’t stop you from crossing your arms and cocking a hip as he stomped out into the melting snow.

After that day, the marauders began grouping near the lake again, making camp along the thawing shores. Kratos quickly shifted from suggesting you stay inside the woods to commanding it, insisting he handle them alone.

That was until the day they crossed the sacred treeline of the Wildwood.

He’d only been gone a few hours, out on a simple patrol with the wolves and the sled, so when you heard the front gates open, you didn’t think twice. You were crushing a handful of wild red berries into your mortar, working to make a new paint color for the hobby you’d taken up. The pestle’s grinding muffled the sound of multiple footsteps outside the cabin door.

Wiping your stained hands down your deerskin apron, leaving dark red streaks behind, you headed toward the entrance to greet him.

“Kratos, you should see how vibrant this color is—it will look nic—”

You froze at the sound of unfamiliar voices. Several of them. Four…maybe five. Bootsteps crunched through the hard patches of snow scattered across the yard. Slowly, you backed away from the door, careful to silence your steps on the wooden floor, inching toward the blade lying on the table.

You knew how to defend yourself, but marauders were ruthless, deadlier in groups, and faster and more savage than most beasts across the Nine.

“Search the cabin.”

No.

Stealth abandoned, you lunged for your blade. You meant to grab your bow next, resting beside your bed, but before you could reach it, the door crashed open and heavy boots charged toward you.

“Here!” a man roared.

You snatched the bow just as arms wrapped tightly around your waist, hoisting you off the ground. The wooden curve slipped from your grasp as you kicked and thrashed, his grip iron-strong as he staggered backward with you toward the doorway.

Right before he carried you through the archway, you slammed your blade into his side. His grip faltered instantly. He dropped you.

You hit the floor, already running. Ripping the blade free, you left him writhing as you sprinted outside into the cold morning, aiming for the gates.

There were more of them than you thought—seven in total, scattered around the yard.

The gates were all you could focus on. You sprinted, lungs burning, ignoring the overlapping shouts behind you. You were almost there, so close the wood blurred, when a large man lunged into your path.

He rammed into you from the side, sending you tumbling into a snowbank. The soft cushion didn’t stop the spike of pain that shot up your back. Gasping, you scrambled backward, blade raised.

“Stay back!” you yelled.

Your side throbbed with each breath. You used your elbow to drag yourself farther away, but the man stalking toward you only grinned, wide and feral, head tilted as if possessed by hunger.

“Oh no, lads—she’s rowdy, this one!” he barked.

Laughter echoed across the yard as three of them approached you, the others rifling through your home. One inside your cabin, two near the wolves’ pens.

“Hey!” you yelled, your voice cracking, as one of them hurled your belongings out the cabin door. Your freshly stretched deerskin canvases flew as your paints spilled across the snow, blooming into a crimson stain.

You looked too long.

The large man lunged again, snatching the wrist that held your blade. He yanked you upright, twisting your arm until your knife clattered to the ground. Pain shot through your wrist, forcing a cry from your throat. Before you could recover, he shoved you hard against the wooden gate.

Your cheek smashed into the cold wood. A hand larger than your entire face pressed you there, pinning you. A sharp, burning pulse cracked across your brow.

“Please—” Your muffled plea cut off as he shoved harder.

“Where is Kratos?”

His breath was hot against your cheek, rancid enough to make your eyes water.

“Talk!” He ripped your head back only to slam it forward again. Warm blood trickled down your temple.

“I—I don’t know! He left hours ago!” You weren’t lying. He should’ve been back by now. The woods were silent—no sled, no wolves, nothing.

“You think I won’t ruin his little mortal?” he sneered, his grip sliding into your hair. The word "mortal" dripped like venom. A tear slipped down your cheek.

You were taught to be strong in the face of death—but this was different. This was real. Too real. Years under Kratos’s protection had softened the edges of danger and made you forget what it felt like to face a true threat alone.

Your struggles were weak but desperate as you twisted in his grip, trying to pry his hands away.

“Pathetic,” he spat. “Let’s go! He’s not here. Take her—he will come.”

He shoved you forward, right into the path of a smaller marauder raising a club and swinging it toward your head.

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You woke to freezing air and a burning throb in your skull, your arms bound tightly behind your back. The camp sat in the center of a large thawed patch of snow somewhere out on the lake, judging by the openness and the echo of the wind. Your head pounded worse than anything else; dried blood crusted through your hair and down your cheek, stiffening your skin where it mingled with old tears.

Most of the men huddled together around the central fire. Only one patrolled the edges of the camp, his boots crunching through the slush in a steady circle. You sat about ten, maybe fifteen feet from the flames, propped against a stack of crates, no doubt what they had dropped you against, judging from the ache at the back of your skull.

Gently resting your head against the wood, you tried to steady your breath. Cold air in, hot air out, little clouds of fog forming faint ghosts in front of your lips.

“She’s up,” the patrolling man announced, spotting your movement as he passed. His voice alerted the others, giving you your first full count: five.

One was missing.

The big one.

These men were dressed down compared to their commander… far more ragged, starved-looking, and filthy. The brute with the silver beads in his hair and beard had carried himself with authority; these ones looked feral. Gaunt. Unwashed. The sight of them turned your stomach.

Only the patrolling man approached you. The others turned back to roasting thin, pathetic squirrels over the fire. The spear he carried was taller than he was, the point sharpened to a wicked glint. A torn scrap of cloth fluttered from the shaft, snapping in the cold breeze. Your nose and ears grew numb, the sensation fading into painful tingling.

He crouched in front of you, leaning on his spear. “Feel like talking yet?”

You stared into the black tar painted across his eyes, then spat directly into his face.

“Fuck you,” you snarled.

He jerked back, swiping the spit from his cheek. His expression flared with anger, hand lifting as though to strike you—until the startled gasps of the other men snapped his attention toward the fire.

You followed their gaze, heart hammering.

A human head rolled over the edge of the camp wall, bumping to a stop at one man’s boots. Blood streaked the snow with every turn. The silver beads tangled in the hair made your breath hitch.

Their commander. Dead.

The camp erupted in curses and shouts. Weapons came out. The man crouched before you seized your arms and hauled you upright, dragging you toward the entrance. The snow walls formed a narrow funnel leading down to the opening. He kept you in front of him as a shield, his hands tight around your bound wrists, breath hot against the back of your neck.

The heavy crunch of boots echoed through the air. Everyone froze.

Kratos stepped around the corner.

The white snow illuminated the red markings curling over his chest and arm. His bear-fur cloak billowed behind him in the wind. He gripped his axe in one hand, its blade soaked in deep, fresh crimson. His face was a blood-splattered scowl carved from stone.

He stopped dead at the sight of you. Your apron stained red, your cheek streaked with dried blood.

A sick twist of guilt curled through your stomach. You were smeared with another man’s gore—blood shed because you hadn’t been fast enough. No, you reminded yourself. Kratos would have spilled that blood regardless. Your surviving was all that mattered.

The man behind you leveled his spear toward the Spartan, and Kratos’s gaze sharpened, all his fury burning into the monster at your back, softening only for a fraction of a second when he met your eyes.

“Give back that which you stole,” Kratos demanded, lifting his blood-dripping axe. The crimson patterned into the snow like falling embers.

A hawk circled overhead, gliding in slow, deliberate loops.

Kratos stood like the embodiment of bloodshed, rage radiating from him so powerfully that even the wind seemed to hush.

“I will not repeat myself,” he growled.

The man behind you yanked you closer, burying his nose into your hair, inhaling. Disgust washed over you as he tossed his spear aside and drew a blade from his belt, pressing it to your throat. Kratos froze mid-step, chest pausing mid-breath, though the fury in his eyes still burned molten.

“You know the only way she leaves this camp alive, God of War,” the man hissed over your shoulder.

Kratos’s expression faltered—just for a moment—as the blade pricked your carotid, drawing a bead of blood. He forced the rage back down with visible effort.

“Don’t—” you tried to speak, but the blade dug deeper, silencing you with a sharp sting.

Kratos reacted instantly, stepping forward, only to halt when all the remaining men raised their weapons at once. He snarled, baring his teeth, and flicked his gaze toward them before lifting it briefly to the hawk overhead. The bird screeched and dove out of sight.

His jaw flexed. A low growl rumbled from the depths of his chest. Then he cracked his neck left, then right, slow and deliberate.

Kratos straightened. And dropped his axe.

It fell into the snow with a heavy thud, the bloodied blade sinking halfway into the ice.

You felt the smile spread across the man behind you… felt the sick joy radiating off him.

“No!” you cried, struggling against him, as he laughed against your ear.

“Now kneel,” he ordered Kratos, venom dripping from every word.

Kratos’s gaze flicked from the captor to the men, then back to you. He didn’t look away, not even as he lowered himself, sinking to his knees in the snow. The metal rings and pouches on his belt clattered softly as they hit.

“Kratos, no—” Your voice cracked, your plea barely a breath, tears threatening to spill.

“This is your god?” the man taunted, gesturing with the blade. “Kneeling before a human pet?”

Kratos held his head high, expression blank, emotionless, the polar opposite of the molten fury that had consumed him moments ago.

“Kill him.”

“No!”

The men lunged—and everything happened at once.

“Now!” Kratos roared.

The hawk screamed above, and vines burst from the ground, thick with thorns glowing pink and purple, Freya’s magic weaving upward in a violent spiral. They wrapped around the marauders’ legs, cutting deep and binding them in place.

Of course she had come.

Time slowed as Kratos rose from one knee, planting his foot firmly in the snow as he summoned Draupnir into his hand.

Your captor raised his blade and drove it into the right side of your chest.

Kratos hurled the spear in the same breath.

It pierced the man’s skull before you could even cry out

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Even though the surrender had been a ruse, Kratos’s anger was real. The blood that thundered hot through his veins when he returned to the cabin—when he saw the destruction, when he realized she was gone—was real. It burned through him, molten and corrosive, eating a hole straight through his center. Every second it took to track her down decayed him further.

Felling a tree in his rage had been the least of what he wanted to destroy. He summoned his axe and stormed through the realm gate to Freya’s hut. She agreed to help within a heartbeat. Even so, she tried to steady him, to settle the storm radiating off his skin. His eyes only darkened the more they found…the crimson flecks in the snow, her knife abandoned in the wet grass, the entrance gate…

And when Kratos saw the dried blood splattered across its wooden frame, something inside him broke. He braced a hand against the post as the hollow in his chest finally swallowed itself.

Freya watched the red of his Blades begin to glow, recognizing the frenzy simmering beneath his skin.

“Kratos—”

“Get the wolves,” he rumbled. “This ends now.”

It took everything in him to pull his hand from the gate, turning without a word as the heat of his rage melted a trail through the snow behind him.

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Standing at the entrance of the marauder camp, the cool air steamed as it touched his burning skin. The sight of her, hands bound, a brute’s blade pressed to her throat, was enough to ignite the fire already roaring in his veins.

The plan was surrender. He knew that. But reigning in the instinct to rip each and every one of them apart clawed inside his ribs, begging to be released.

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“This is your god?” the brute taunted, blade pointed at Kratos.

Kratos didn’t look at the knife. If he did, he feared he might sever the man’s arm without a second thought. Instead, his gaze stayed fixed on her and the tears brimming in her eyes.

“Kneeling before a human pet?” The brute spat the words like a curse.

Kratos did not flinch. He was not her god. He was no one’s god.

He was simply hers… and she was his.

And he would kneel before her again…in this life and the next.

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“No—”

Too late. The blade had already plunged into her chest the instant he began his charge.

Kratos caught her as the brute toppled behind them, her knees giving way. One arm swept beneath her legs, the other around her back. She screamed as he lifted her, the pain ripping through her body.

“Freya!” His voice was cracked, uneven, and twisted with panic.

He looked down just as the adrenaline faded from her face. The realization hit her like a second blow. She buried her face into his shoulder, jaw clenched hard as she fought back cries that spilled over anyway.

“Stay awake,” he commanded, pulling her closer, as if proximity alone could keep her tethered to him.

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Freya finished the last two marauders with ruthless precision—slicing one down, wings flaring for momentum as she vaulted into the next. His head rolled into the snow beside her feet.

“Freya!”

“Can you give me a moment? I am—” She froze mid-sentence.

The sight of the human in Kratos’s arms, blood staining her chest, fingers trembling as they clutched the fur of his cloak, drained the color from Freya’s face.

“My gods…”

“Freya—” His voice faltered as he dropped to his knees in the snow.

Freya sheathed her blades and rushed to him, kneeling close, eyes scanning the wound. The girl was slipping, consciousness flickering like a failing flame. The wound was too deep to assess here, and Kratos looked ready to kill anything that tried to pull her from his arms.

“We have to get her back to the grove,” Freya said softly. “I can treat her there. Here…” She swallowed the rest, watching the dread flood through Kratos’s expression. She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Kratos.”

He didn’t look away from the girl for a long moment. Freya had only seen him like this once. When Atreus had fallen ill.

“We have to go,” she repeated.