Chapter 1: Awakening
[Midgard Wildwoods — Unknown Date]
Cold.
Not the kind that comes from leaving a window open or forgetting a jacket. This was cold that lived inside bone, that turned breath into white ghosts and made fingers forget they existed. Ethan Blackstone's cheek pressed into something frozen and wet, and his body refused—absolutely refused—to move.
Get up.
His fingers clawed into the snow. Wrong. The fingers were wrong. Too long, knuckles too thick, calluses ridging the palms where there should have been the soft skin of a man who'd spent six years typing dissertations and grading undergraduate papers. He pushed himself to his knees and his arms strained with unfamiliar weight—muscle packed onto a frame that was broader across the shoulders than anything he'd ever owned.
He looked down at his hands. Turned them over. The veins stood out against skin weathered by outdoor living. A pale scar hooked across the left thumb, healed ages ago from some wound he couldn't remember because he'd never received it.
This wasn't his body.
The last thing—the very last thing—was headlights. High beams flooding through the driver's side window while his car sat at the intersection, the light coming from the wrong direction, too fast, the horn blaring from a truck that had run the red, and then a sound like the world folding in on itself. Metal screaming. Glass spraying. The steering column punching through his chest like a fist.
Then nothing.
Then snow.
No tunnel of light. No robed figure offering a deal. No floating text asking him to choose a class. Just a corpse-cold forest and a body that didn't belong to him and the distant howl of wolves threading through the trees.
Ethan dragged himself upright. His legs held—barely. The body wore rough-spun clothing, a tunic cinched with a leather cord, trousers tucked into boots that had seen better centuries. No coat. No pack. No weapons. Whoever this body had belonged to, they hadn't planned on waking up here either.
The forest pressed in from every direction. Birch and pine, trunks white as stripped bone, branches heavy with snow. The air tasted like iron and pine resin and something older, something that tickled the back of his throat with the flavor of myth. He knew that taste. He'd spent his entire academic career trying to describe it—the weight of a world where stories were load-bearing, where narrative wasn't metaphor but architecture.
Because the mountain in the distance—that mountain, the one with the broken peak and the waterfall frozen partway down its face—he knew it. Not from a textbook. Not from a photograph.
From the opening cinematic of a game he'd played eleven times.
The marked trees confirmed it. Birch trunks scored with the golden handprint of Faye—Laufey, the Last Guardian of the Jötnar—glowing faintly in the grey morning light. Protective wards carved into the forest itself, forming a barrier that had kept Kratos and his son hidden for years.
Midgard. The Wildwoods. The beginning of everything.
Ethan's legs gave out and he sat down hard in the snow.
Somewhere beyond those trees, a Greek god turned reluctant father was building a funeral pyre for his dead wife. A boy who didn't know he was Loki was practicing with a bow he couldn't aim. And within hours—maybe less—a barefoot stranger with dead eyes and a body that couldn't feel pain was going to knock on their door and tear that cabin apart.
"Okay," he said out loud, and his voice was wrong too—deeper, with an accent that sat somewhere between the Scandinavian and something more guttural. "Okay. Okay."
The word meant nothing. It fixed nothing. But it was the only word that fit between I just died in a car accident and I'm sitting in a Norse myth.
His dissertation on comparative mythology. Two hundred and forty-three pages on the intersection of Greek and Norse eschatological traditions, the cyclical nature of divine destruction, the thematic parallels between Ragnarök and the fall of Olympus. His advisor had called it "overly ambitious." His committee had called it "promising but unfocused."
A laugh scraped out of his throat—raw and fractured and nothing close to funny.
He knew the plot. Every beat, every twist, every death from the first game through Ragnarök and the Valhalla epilogue. He knew that Freya was the Witch of the Woods. That Mímir's head would ride on Kratos's hip. That Atreus would learn he was a god and nearly burn the world with arrogance before finding himself again. That Baldur would die on a mistletoe arrow and Freya would swear to kill Kratos for it. That Brok would be murdered by Odin wearing a dead god's face.
He knew everything.
And he was standing in the snow, alone, freezing, wearing a dead stranger's skin, with absolutely no way to use any of it.
The headache hit without warning.
Not a headache. A detonation. Something cracked open behind his eyes and light poured in—not real light, not anything the forest was producing—and he was somewhere else. A woman's hands, brown and strong, pressing into the bark of an ash tree. Runes flowing from her fingertips like ink bleeding through water. Her voice—low, steady, rhythmic—speaking words Ethan had never heard but understood with a clarity that terrified him.
You will remember this.
The words weren't for him. They were a memory stored in blood, encoded in the genetic chain of whoever had owned this body, passed down through generations of Giants who had woven prophecy into their children's DNA like thread into cloth. The woman was carving a protection ward—the same kind that marked the trees around Kratos's cabin—and the knowledge of how she did it flooded through Ethan's mind like water through a cracked dam.
Then it stopped.
He was on his knees in the snow. Blood ran from his nose in a warm stripe, dripping off his chin, making small red craters in the white ground. His skull throbbed with a pain that went deeper than bone—it ached in whatever part of him had been ripped from one world and shoved into another. The memory was already fading, details going soft at the edges, but the core of it remained: a woman. Runes. A voice that spoke to the future.
The body had Giant blood. Not strong—Freya would later describe it as faint—but present. Enough to trigger something that felt less like a superpower and more like a seizure with educational content.
Ethan wiped the blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand. The hand that wasn't his. On the body that wasn't his. In the world that shouldn't exist.
Priorities. That was what his dissertation advisor always said when Ethan spiraled. You're spiraling. Priorities.
One: don't freeze to death. The body's core temperature was dropping, and hypothermia didn't care whether its victim was a transmigrated grad student or a native Midgardian.
Two: find the cabin. Not to approach—approaching a Greek god who'd just lost his wife was a good way to get a Leviathan Axe through the sternum—but to orient. The cabin was the fixed point. Everything that mattered in the next forty years of this world's history radiated outward from Kratos and Atreus.
Three: survive long enough to figure out what the hell to do with everything he knew.
He stood. Wiped his nose again. The blood had mostly stopped.
Smoke drifted above the treeline to the northwest—a grey column climbing into the overcast sky, too thick and too steady to be anything but a funeral pyre. The scent of burning reached him a moment later. Sweet wood and something else, something that didn't burn like a normal body. Faye had been a Giant. Giants didn't burn like humans.
Ethan started walking. The snow crunched under boots that fit well enough, and after a dozen steps, the body's muscle memory kicked in—a stride longer than his old one, knees lifting higher to clear the drifts, shoulders angled against the wind. Whoever this person had been, they'd known how to move through a forest in winter.
The wolves howled again. Closer.
He walked faster.
The trees thinned as the ground rose, and through the gaps in the canopy, the smoke column grew thicker. Somewhere below that smoke, a father who'd killed every god in Greece was saying goodbye to the only woman who'd ever made him want to stop. Somewhere in that clearing, a boy was watching his mother's body burn and trying not to cry because his father had taught him that tears were weakness.
And somewhere behind them both, already walking, already hungry for answers, a god who couldn't feel anything was on his way to ask questions that would crack the mountain in half.
Ethan moved toward the smoke. His hands were numb and his nose still ached and the forest around him was full of things that wanted to kill him.
Good. At least the stakes were honest.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them. No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more. Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1