Frey!? (1/2)

"FREEEYAAAA!" shouts an old man in the shiny black halls of the Death King's palace.

All the resident servants and guards are cowering in the halls and trying to remain calm. None of them have EVER seen Das this upset before. Even the floor is rumbling, for crying out loud.

Meanwhile, Das is running through the halls with a livid poison in his eyes.

He rounds a corner and sees the cursed woman sitting on a comfy, cushioned chair in some lobby, and she's drinking tea. She lifts her cup at him in cordial greeting and says, "How do you do? Shall I order you some tea as well?"

"Bah!" Das waves her away while trying to calm himself down, "Stop gloating." 'Besides,' he thinks, 'I can make better tea than whatever you can order.'

"Bwahahahaha!" Freyya finally bursts out laughing as she drops her teacup disgracefully to the floor – letting the remaining tea spill carelessly on the ground.

Das looks at the spilled mess with twitching eyes. Is this woman TRYING to make him more angry? Doesn't she know how hard he works keeping the palace clean?

"Tell me," Das finally says without shouting, "Was it under your suggestion that Haalfrin completely bastardize my blessing?"

"Geh hehe," she chuckles, "as much as I wished it was my idea, it really wasn't." She shrugs, "I actually told him to wait there a bit longer, since I was sending little Frey to go meet him. He looked a bit lonely, after all."

She then shrugs again, "I didn't know you'd been so desperate as to jam your Blessing into his Yiir Rune. Were you so afraid we'd try to pull it out that you had to meld it into his soul – the place you thought it was the safest?"

…There's no answer.

"Huh," she sighs, "What's the problem anyway? He took out most of the blessing. Whoop de doo! That thing wasn't supposed to be there in the first place, so he was just evening the playing field a little."

Seriously, that boy was never supposed to have that plot shield in the first place!

Das shakes his head. "He had the bright idea to put it in his Dra Rune."

"…What?" Freyya's mouth is hanging so stupidly wide right now that drool starts to dribble out. "He… he did that?" Slowly, a smile curls up on her cheeks. "Eh heh. He's so smart."

Das frowns with barely concealed rage. "You know what that means!"

Freyya lifts her head up and laughs, "Yes. Your blessing was supposed to preserve his life against anything but the most inevitable of ends – old age. With the preserving nature of this power put directly into his body instead of his Fate, it's his body itself that has the Blessing of Longevity…"

Even she has to spend a few moments mulling it over. "…Oh!" she exclaims. "I see why you're angry. You've just given that boy near eternal youth! His body will hardly age anymore! Haha! You'll never have him now! He'll be taken by any Reaper but you!"

"Grrr…!" Das snaps, "I'll figure out how to get that Blessing out of his Dra Rune. If you can do it, so can I."

Freyya conjures up a new tea cup and tips it up at him while he leaves. "Oh," she whispers, "I do enjoy it when his calm mask comes off."

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When Haalfrin finally wakes up, he finds himself…lying down on one of the beds with a blanket draped over him. "Huh?" he mutters. 'I don't remember laying down...! I went into my soul realm while sitting on the floor.'

He looks around and sees that the rabbit stew is no longer perpetually over the fire. In alarm, Haalfrin sits up and shouts out, "Is anyone there?" He looks around for his sword, but it's out of reach - just on the other end of the room.

That confirms it! Someone visited this place and moved him while his mind was stuck in his Soul Realm; there's no way he'd ever let his weapon be out of immediate reach.

He gets up, and he feels his stomach growling. Even though the body's functions slow to a near stop while you're in your Soul Realm, he was still in that place for several weeks straight, so he's incredibly hungry right now.

Just as Haalfrin is trying to get up, he reaches for his wooden leg and starts to reattach it. Then, his head snaps to the side when he hears the door creak open, and the figure of a woman come inside.

"…Freyya?"

"No, it's just me," Frey pouts. "Do we really look alike?" The girl has heard Freyya's voice before, but the goddess has never directly appeared before her in her life while showing her face.

"Yeah, you look pretty similar; I forget sometimes. Anyway," he looks up at her, "I thought you had chosen to stay behind on Stanrock Island? What changed?"

Despite his calm attitude, Haalfrin is actually very happy to have little Frey here; parting with old friends has always been depressing for him, thus having an unexpected meeting would always be a happy surprise.

"…Dunno," Frey shrugs, "After you left, and the others all moved out of the Pit, it didn't feel like home anymore."

She only had to spend a few years alone in the dark before a vexing, unscratchable itch landed on her heart. She thought she had preferred that cage, deep below the earth… but she was wrong about that.

Frey then looks at Haalfrin's leg with sorrow in her eyes. "Here, let me get that for you." She reaches down and starts attaching his wooden leg for him.

While she's bent down, focusing on her task, Haalfrin pats the top of her head and says, "Thank you for coming out here. I know being outside your little cage is uncomfortable."

She pauses for a moment and stares blankly at the ground. "That place isn't my cage…"

"Oh?" Haalfrin pauses. "You were so insistent it was when we parted ways. What changed? Do you still have a cage?" He was hoping she'd say "no", since he thinks her whole philosophy on that is silly.

She glances up. "Of course I do! Nobody is completely free! Everybody has something dragging them through life – preventing them from going away."

Seeing her skirt around the subject, Haalfrin gets a little curious. "Well, what is it? What's your cage now?"

Frey looks down and has a staring contest with the floor. "…########...," she mumbles unintelligibly with a voice so low and fragmented that Haalfrin couldn't hear her.

"What was that?"

"N-nothing!" she stutters out while staring even harder at the floor.

The girl's face is burning hot at the moment, and her heart is beating furiously right now. Haalfrin doesn't notice it, but Dakka does, as dragons are so sensitive to heat that he can feel her body heating up with embarrassment.

"Oh…?" Dakka chuckles to himself while watching the two of them become reacquainted after their long parting.

…

If dragons had good hearing, and if Haalfrin had had a hearing enhancement spell on, he'd have heard Freyya say, "...You're my cage…"

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"So," Haalfrin asks while he watches Frey continue to heat up the rabbit stew, "How did you get through the Threshold? I mean, I blasted my way through. What about you?"

She lifts her head back and gives a satisfied smile, "Yeah, I heard about your little stunt. It was hilarious." She goes quiet again while glancing at his leg.

Then, she says, "My Yiir Name lets me meld into Death Aura, turn ethereal, and pass through it. The Threshold is permeating with Death Aura, so the moment I stepped through the gate, I just disappeared and was never seen again in that fortress."

"How'd you get past the pavilion just outside the World Gate?" Haalfrin asks, "I remember there's a spatial barrier there."

"Oh… that?" She looks away and starts tapping her foot and fiddling with her fingers uncomfortably. "I killed a couple guards, then used their Death Aura to slip past all the defensive enchantments."

Of course, Frey is lying right now. She never killed any guards. However, telling Haalfrin that she killed a couple of guards is easier than telling him that she knows his Yiir Name, and that she can release his Death Aura from her own body. She's even learned to do it now without him noticing.

'He's gone on mass killing sprees before,' she thinks, 'so he won't mind my lie, right?' The girl is pretty sure that she was a lot more sneaky this time about extracting Aura from his soul. She was even careful to put it all back without disturbing his meditation.

Haalfrin looks down and sighs. "Ok. Welcome to the Otherworld." He glances back up at her and asks, "So… where are you going now?"

Frey shuffles her feet. "This is where I wanted to be, so I'm not going anywhere."