Not with sound—with absence. With the tearing of something that was never meant to be torn.

I feel it before I understand it. A wrenching in my spine, between my shoulder blades, where my wings have been anchored since before I knew how to speak. Since before I knew what I was.

And then I'm falling.

The sky above me is not sky. It's a wound. A gash of pale gold and weeping grey, and through it I see faces I thought I knew. Faces that watched me kneel before Odin. That watched me refuse.

Freyja's face is the last one I see before the clouds swallow her.

She doesn't look away.

That hurts more than the fall.

The wind doesn't howl. It screams my name in a thousand voices, tearing at my hair, my clothes, my skin. I try to reach for them—for my wings—but there's nothing there. Just empty air where feathers used to brush against my fingers.

I hit the ground.

It's not dramatic. There's no crunch, no crack. Just a sudden, absolute stop that drives the breath from my lungs and fills my skull with white light.

My wings lie around me. I can see them from the corner of my eye. Broken. Tattered. The feathers I spent centuries preening are matted with blood and dirt.

I try to move my fingers.

Nothing.

The white light begins to dim at the edges. The world goes quiet. The last thing I register is the smell of damp earth and iron, and a voice—

Soft. Kind.

A voice that doesn't belong in this place of endings.

—

I wake to warmth.

Proper warmth. The kind that seeps into bones and loosens muscles, that makes the ache in my back feel distant instead of consuming. I'm lying on something soft. Furs, maybe. Silk beneath my cheek.

My back doesn't burn.

I breathe. Once. Twice. The air smells different here. Like herbs and woodsmoke and something floral I can't name.

A fire crackles nearby.

I open my eyes.