Unaware that her villa had been wrecked, Daisy was locked in a desperate fight. The bitter cold Skadi had conjured slowed her down yet again, and a half-beat's hesitation was all it took. The giant wolf's jaws clamped onto her arm, teeth sinking deep enough to expose bone. Pain shot through her like white lightning, and she punted the recovering wolf a hundred meters (328 ft) with a furious kick.
She stood in the howling wind, chest heaving, each breath a ragged gasp of freezing air. Normally a wound like this would need fire to cauterize, but the extreme cold had done half the job for her. Her arm was numb from the elbow down.
The temperature had killed everything else. Every grunt soldier lay frozen where they fell. The handful of Frost Giants had been beheaded in an earlier exchange. On this blank white expanse of ice, only two living things remained. Daisy staggered, her vision swimming. Her legs buckled and she dropped face-first into the snow, unable to rise.
At first, when Skadi's own consciousness had been suppressed, the two of them were evenly matched. But even then Daisy had been burning chi, fighting at two or three times her baseline. A draw was the best she could manage.
As Skadi's mind was gradually unleashed and her body stopped moving like a machine, her natural combat instincts emerged. From that point on, Daisy was outclassed.
She'd held on through some stubborn resilience she couldn't explain even to herself.
Now her psychic power felt frozen solid, frost crusting her hair and eyebrows. She had nothing left.
"You... are not... my... match!" Skadi's face was a charred ruin, and her right arm—the one that had hurled all those ice spears—was gone at the shoulder, the stump still trailing wisps of smoke. That had been Daisy's improvisation: coating her hand in flame and chopping clean through like a blade.
The woman Skadi had just declared defeated lay on the ground, staring blankly at the sky.
Her Adamantium sword and shield were shattered. Four or five puncture wounds riddled her body, and a massive volume of dark cold energy churned inside her, locked in a war against the Phoenix Force. Her left leg was fractured clean through; she'd bound it with her lasso to stay mobile. That was over now.
"You've... lost!" Skadi stood over her, a fresh ice spear materializing in her remaining hand. The point hovered an inch from Daisy's forehead. Movement of any kind was agony, and Daisy could only glare up at her with eyes that refused to yield.
Then Daisy smiled. Facing Skadi's battered, swaying frame and the spear tip inches from her skull, she laughed with genuine delight. "Got any more cards to play? No? Didn't think so." The grin sharpened. "I've still got one."
Silver light flickered across her right hand. The Atomic Cutter, held in reserve all this time, was her final gambit. The fight against Shou-Lao had taught her roughly how the ring worked. A semi-magical creature like Shou-Lao could shrug off atomic-level cutting, and Skadi might resist it too.
But Eternals were not Asgardian gods. Eternals drew on bodily energy, cellular energy. Their resistance to atomic cutting was actually quite low. Without an energy shield, Daisy was confident one clean hit would be lethal.
She'd saved the ring for exactly this moment, when both of them were running on fumes. A surprise kill shot.
The silver wire streaked out, fast and vicious as always, slicing toward Skadi's throat. Lose your head, and very few beings survive.
The distance was nothing. Skadi had no time to react. She watched the lethal thread arrive at her face, eyes wide.
The instant she braced for death, a ripple of spatial distortion washed through the air. The battered, broken wolf, long since out of the fight, swapped positions with her.
The silver wire met no resistance. It carved through the wolf's neck and, following its programmed trajectory, sliced twice more: top to bottom, left to right.
"Pfft—!" "Pfft—!" Blood sprayed from both of them simultaneously. Daisy spat a mouthful; so did Skadi.
Daisy's mind went blank. She'd schemed and calculated, saved her trump card for the perfect moment, and this was the result? The damn wolf had spatial displacement? Why hadn't it used that a single time during their entire fight? Were they cheating?
Skadi's agony was of a different kind. Kaldr had sensed the killing blow coming and severed their life-sharing bond on his own, one-sided, so the backlash wouldn't reach her. He'd traded his life to neutralize Daisy's last card.
The wolf was dead. His body lay in eight pieces on the ice, the severed surfaces barely bleeding. The earlier battle had already drained him dry.
"KALDR!" Skadi screamed, raw and breaking. She closed the distance in three lurching strides, dropped to her knees beside the remains, and ran trembling hands over the still fur, grief tearing through her like a physical wound.
Daisy's expression darkened. Every instinct told her to run. A voice in the back of her mind whispered that this wasn't the time for retreat, but the part of her that valued her own skin said she couldn't keep fighting. This wasn't a training bout like the Shou-Lao challenge. This was a fight to the death.
She was gathering what little psychic energy remained for a vibration-teleport when an outside signal slammed into her mind. Sorrow. Bottomless regret. An eternity of longing accumulated across countless days and nights. It nearly shattered her will on impact.
What the hell?
She bit down hard and forced herself to concentrate.
Through the haze she saw figures. Dozens of men and women, tall and strikingly beautiful, every one of them wounded. They cast a final look at the land below, then split into two groups. The majority soared skyward, accelerating through the atmosphere and vanishing from sight.
A smaller number stayed behind, hiding from their enemies, refusing to abandon their home.
A girl grew up in that world. She walked into the ice and snow, away from civilization, with only animals for company.
"Skadi's memories?" Daisy's psychic power sifted through the flood of images. That first vision had to be the Eternals departing Earth.
Before she could process further, the memories surged again and pulled her under.
Young Skadi wandered through mountain forests. Her kin scattered across the globe, each choosing a direction. She walked north, alone.
She was taken in by a new family. Its patriarch wore an antelope-horned helm and carried a great axe and shield. He was the God-King of the Norse pantheon, father of Odin, grandfather of Thor: Bor Burison.
Bor was loving and imposing in equal measure. He treated Skadi like his own daughter, and Skadi found something in Asgard she'd never known. A word for it existed, though she'd had no use for it before: home.
Over the long, long span of her life, Skadi met many people and lived through many things. Some drifted past like clouds. Others carved themselves into her bones.
She fell in love with a mortal.
There was no melodrama, no scheming. Just a chance meeting that became something more. The gods gave their tacit blessing, even offered well-wishes, the way Sif in the original timeline had accepted Jane Foster. Everyone understood: time itself was the only real obstacle.
Skadi watched her lover age in her arms and die there. Her beautiful face showed nothing. Her heart had already followed him.
Soon afterward the God-King arranged her marriage to the Summer God. The union was brief. On a whim, Skadi wandered into the forest one day and encountered a giant wolf: Kaldr.
The wolf's eyes stirred something in her. They reminded her of her lover, of every moment of joy they'd shared.