Ottar delivered the report plainly, he didn't know any other way to speak.
Kneeling in the upper room of Folkvangr with his head bowed, he described the subterranean chamber the same way he would describe a road.
He recounted everything that happened.
And then Yōtōsai, and the red light that poured from his blade until it bathed the ceiling.
"It didn't cut the guardian," Ottar explained. "It took it apart. Everything Daedalus bound into the construct simply came undone, and it couldn't piece itself back together. Then he turned the blade on the seal and unraveled a three-year-old working in less than a minute."
Freya listened from her couch, resting her chin on her hand.
She hadn't moved once during the entire account.
"And you," she asked quietly. "What did you feel?"
Ottar considered the question with his usual grim seriousness.
"I stepped back," he said.
That was all.
Freya's smile bloomed slowly, warm and brilliant, across her face. In twenty years, she had never heard her Warlord utter those three words.
"Thank you, Ottar. You may go."
He rose and departed, leaving her alone with the last of her wine to think about a boy who had already occupied her thoughts for months.
She had seen his soul at Hephaestus's table.
Or, at least, she had tried to.
Most souls opened for her like a book left face-up in the sun.
His was surrounded by blades, overlapping so tightly she couldn't even find the edges of the boy hidden beneath them.
A petal.
A fang.
A mirror.
A shadow.
And lingering behind it all, something faint that didn't belong in this world at all.
She hadn't been able to name it then.
She still couldn't.
Yet now, that same boy had effortlessly unmade the work of an ancient craftsman and a sleeping horror, and her strongest child had stepped back in response.
'Oh,' Freya thought, gently turning her wine glass by the stem. 'You lovely, troublesome thing.'
She set the cup down and went to the mirror.
The woman in the glass was the most beautiful thing in the Lower World.... and Freya looked at her without much interest, because she'd seen her before.
Then she reached up and took her own face off the way you'd take off a hat.
The reflection changed.
Silver became grey.
The beauty folded down into something small and plain and pleasant, a girl in an apron who worked at a tavern and made bad jokes and carried a basket, and who a hundred adventurers walked past every night without once looking twice.
Freya looked at Syr in the mirror and smiled with Syr's mouth.
"You never came to see me," she said. "That was rude of you, Yōtōsai."
...
Apollo heard the news from a scribe, which he considered a personal insult.
"It happened under the city," the man said, bowing low. "It's classified Guild business, Lord Apollo. The records are completely sealed. They haven't admitted anything publicly, but the Loki Familia sent their captain and their high elf, Ganesha sent Shakti's squad, and Freya sent the Warlord himself."
"Freya sent Ottar." Apollo sat perfectly still on his couch. "For what?"
"That is the sealed part, my Lord."
Apollo waved the man away, his normally flawless face twisting into an ugly sneer.
He had walked into that smith's shop with his entire Familia behind him.
He had been gracious.
He had been generous.
He had offered to make the boy's little sword trial into a memorable spectacle, and the boy had looked at him like a man tracking mud onto a clean rug! Telling a god to admire his work from behind the line.
Then his precious Hyakinthos had been rejected by a sword, right in front of him, and was told the refusal was his own fault.
And now, apparently, while Apollo was left nursing his bruised pride, that same arrogant smith had gone down a hole with the strongest adventurers in the city and done something the Guild refused to put in writing.
"He gave a blade to Cassandra," Apollo muttered to the empty room. "My child. My beautiful, frightened little prophet. He gave her a sword and convinced her she had chosen it herself."
The girl still lived under his roof, but the sword was in her hands—not his—bound by a contract bearing Hephaestus's name ensuring it stayed that way.
Apollo smiled, though the expression didn't reach his eyes.
"How long," he asked the ceiling, "does a man get to be interesting before someone insists on owning him?"
...
Word reached Ishtar simply because she heard everything whispered in the beds, bars, and back rooms of Orario, along with half of what happened everywhere else.
She received the news in the center of her own hall, lounging on her throne surrounded by her Amazons.
But what caught her attention wasn't the smith, the underground hole, or the Guild's secrecy.
"Freya," Ishtar repeated. "Freya sent her damn boar."
"Yes, Lady Ishtar."
"For a blacksmith."
The girl kneeling in front of her nodded and kept her head low, which was a wise decision.
Ishtar leaned back.
She had been in a foul mood for over a decade, and every ounce of that bitterness had one silver-haired face attached to it.
Freya took whatever she wanted.
Freya was handed whatever she desired.
Freya sat high up in her tower while men lined up to be ruined by her, and Ishtar had spent years building an empire bigger, louder, and hungrier just to force the woman to look down.
And now Freya was moving quietly.
That meant she wanted something.
She had sent Ottar, which meant she wanted it badly.
"Tell me about him," Ishtar demanded.
"Yōtōsai of the Hephaestus Familia. He forges swords that pick their own masters. They cost hundreds of millions of valis, and the great Familias buy them anyway. Ottar carries one. The Sword Princess carries one. The Astraea girls carry them." The Amazon hesitated for a fraction of a second.
"He's Level 4."
"Four?"
"Yes, Lady Ishtar."
"A Level 4 smith, and Freya sends her Level 7 to watch him work." Ishtar let out a low, delighted laugh, and the suffocating tension in the room finally broke as her girls relaxed.
"Oh, she's found a toy! She's found a toy, and she hasn't gotten her hands on it yet."
She stood up and stretched, making sure the entire hall watched her do it.
"Then we'll get our hands on it first," Ishtar declared. "Find out what he wants. Every man wants something: money, women, fame, a favor, a night he'll never forget."
Her smile was all teeth.
"And if he's the type who claims to want nothing, then he wants someone. Find out who! That's usually cheaper than money anyway."
Her Amazons laughed with her.
None of them noticed the two girls at the back of the hall who stayed perfectly silent.
...
"Three," Hephaestus said.
She dropped into the chair across from Rayleigh's workbench, took his tea without asking, and drained half the cup before continuing.
"Freya is asking about you. Not openly—she's being polite, which is exactly how I know it's bad. Apollo is telling anyone who will listen that you humiliated his Familia and stole his prophet. And Ishtar spent all of last night asking every loose mouth in the Pleasure Quarter what a certain swordsmith likes."
Rayleigh didn't stop working. "Sounds like a normal week."
"Rayleigh."
"I'm listening."
"You're filing." She reached across the bench and placed her hand flat against the blade he was shaping.
He stopped.
She was his goddess, and she almost never interfered with his work like that.
"Listen to me properly," Hephaestus said. "You went down into that hole and unmade a construct built by a god's craftsman. Ottar watched you do it. That means Freya knows, and if Freya knows, eventually everyone will."
"Let them know."
"That's the part that worries me!" She released the blade and rubbed her temples.
"You don't understand what you look like to the deities up there! You dismantle the creations of gods and their favorites. You're doing it at Level 4, which shouldn't be physically possible, and the rest of the city knows how to count." She fixed him with her one steady eye.
"You've stopped being a merchant they can buy from. You've become a piece on the board. And gods love to collect pieces."
Rayleigh set his file down.
And there it is.
He had known this conversation was coming the moment the red light flared in that underground chamber.
He had made his choice anyway, because the alternative was letting Valletta open a lid that would swallow the whole city.
It had been an easy trade. This part was just the bill coming due.
"Freya wants my soul," Rayleigh summarized. "Apollo wants an apology and a sword. Ishtar wants whatever Freya wants, just because she's Ishtar."
He picked the file back up. "None of them are getting any of it."
"That isn't how gods work."
"It's how this one does." He met her gaze. "I'm not a piece on a board, Hephaestus. I'm a person with swords and a bad attitude, and I've already told a god to his face exactly what I do to gods who get in my way."
Hephaestus fell quiet for a moment.
"You told Artemis," she corrected softly. "And Artemis liked it. That kind of reaction is rarer than you think."
"Then the rest of them can learn the hard way."
"Rayleigh." Her voice dropped, losing its sharp edge, revealing the raw concern she rarely let him see.
"Freya isn't Artemis. Artemis will fight you, Freya will keep you. She won't take your sword away; she'll just make you want to hand it to her. She'll be kind and perfect.
One morning you'll wake up and realize everything you love is still there, but it all belongs to her." She stared at him hard.
"You are my child. I don't hand my children over to that!"
The forge was warm and loud around them, and for a rare moment, Rayleigh didn't have a clever deflection ready.
"Then we'll be rude to her together," he finally said.
Hephaestus let out a tired, genuine laugh and finished his tea.
"Yes," she sighed. "I suppose we will."
...
That evening, a girl in a grey apron was waiting outside his gate with a basket draped over her arm.
Rayleigh spotted her from thirty paces away.
A sudden coldness dropped through his stomach—the exact same chill he'd felt a year ago in a burning street, right after he'd pulled a frightened girl from the rubble and she had smiled, offered her name, and asked him to come find her.
He hadn't gone.
Not once in all the time since.
"You never came," Syr said.
She said it lightly, the way someone might tease a friend for missing a birthday.
Her smile was warm, small, and perfectly ordinary.
Her hair caught the fading light like spun grey silk, and there was absolutely nothing out of place about her.
'A whole year,' Rayleigh thought. 'A whole year of quiet, and she waits until now.'
"I've been busy," he said.
"Everyone says that." Syr tilted her head. "But you're the only one who has been busy for an entire year. Anya thinks you hate our stew. Mama Mia thinks you're a coward."
The corners of her eyes crinkled. "I told them you were just shy."
"Your Mama is closer to the truth."
"Is she?" Syr laughed, a bright and musical sound, which was the worst part of all. "Come and eat sometime, Yōtōsai-san. That's all. You saved my life and I still haven't paid you back. It bothers me."
She lifted the basket slightly. "I'd hate to owe someone forever."
'You don't owe me anything. You've never owed anyone anything in your entire existence.'
"Another time," Rayleigh said flatly.
"Of course." She stepped aside to let him pass through his own gate, the picture of graciousness.
"We'll be there. We're always there."
He went inside and shut the door.
He stood in his own entryway for a moment longer than necessary, listening to her footsteps fade down the street—light, unhurried, and in no particular rush at all.
Three gods, then.
And one of them had already shown up at his front door a year ago, wearing an apron and asking for nothing.
Out of sheer habit, he counted the blades at his hip, and went to find Alfia.