She landed in the silence like a verdict—wings spread wide, black as storm clouds torn open. A lone Valkyrie stood over a field that should have been crowded with dying warriors, but the ground held nothing except dust and the whisper of wind across abandoned soil.
No broken shields.
No blood-soaked banners.
No last breaths worth carrying to the halls of the honored dead.
She tightened her grip on the air itself, searching. A Valkyrie does not arrive early. They are never mistaken. They come when the heroic have spilled their final truth, when courage has been tested and proven. But this battlefield was barren of valor. The only bodies here were already forgotten, and the unworthy do not call to her kind.
It wasn’t that she failed to see them.
It was that they did not exist.
A Valkyrie’s sight is not for everyone. They do not see the coward who died begging. They do not hear the liar’s last plea. They do not carry home the warrior who fought only to survive. Their eyes open only to those who meet death with conscious, deliberate bravery—those whose courage says: If this is where I fall, then let me fall well.
Today, there were none.
So she stood among emptiness, her wings quivering with disappointment. For the first time in a long age, she felt a flicker of something unfamiliar—uncertainty, perhaps even grief. What becomes of a Valkyrie when there are no worthy souls left to claim? Does she wait? Search another field? Or does the world change so much that a warrior’s honor becomes as rare as the gods who once demanded it?
She turned away from the barren expanse, feathers shaking like thunder about to break.
If mortals had forgotten how to die with honor, then perhaps they had also forgotten how to live with it.
And that, she decided, was far more tragic than an empty battlefield.
She did not return to Asgard.
Instead, she stood on the edge of the mortal world, wings folded tight, watching a different kind of battlefield. Not of swords and shields, but of words, hunger, betrayal, and noise. She searched again for those whose courage outlived comfort—those who fought for truth without spectacle, loyalty without reward, mercy without applause.
But the war she found was not fought in open fields. It was scattered through homes, screens, headlines, systems, and silences. The dying here did not bleed—they burned out.
And so the Valkyrie began to speak, not as a collector of the dead, but as a witness to how a world falls apart when no one chooses honor.
She told its story the way skalds once carved sagas to warn kings, the way ravens once carried omens across the sky.
Not a prophecy.
Not a history.
A reckoning.
And she named this new saga