“No, little man. You cannot fight the sky. You cannot fight the river or the sea or the mountains. And you cannot fight the Gods,” Alia says. “So I will do my duty. I will protect my people. I will send you to Asgard in chains. I will let the Gods on high decide your fate. My people will live on. Sefi will inherit my throne. And I will bury my son in the ice from which he was born.”

The sky is the color of blood underneath a dead nail as we fly away from the Spires. This time, we are imprisoned, chained belly down to the back of fetid fur saddles like luggage. My eyes water as the wind of the lower troposphere slashes into them. The griffin beats its wings, muscled shoulders rippling, churning the air. We bank sideways and I see the riders tilting their masked faces up to the sky to see the faint light that is Phobos. Little flashes of white and yellow mar the darkening sky as ships overhead battle. I pray silently for Sevro’s safety, for Victra’s and the Howlers.

Words failed with Alia, as Mustang said they would. And now we are bound for Asgard, a gift for the gods to secure the future of her people. That is what she told Sefi. And her silent daughter took my chains and, with the help of Alia’s personal guards, dragged me and Mustang and Holiday to the hangar where her Valkyrie waited.

Now, hours later, we pass over a land created by wrathful gods in their youth. Dramatic and brutal, the Antarctic was designed as punishment and a test for the ancestors of the Obsidians who dared rise against the Golds in the two-hundredth year of their reign. A place so savage less than sixty percent of Obsidians reach adulthood, per Board of Quality Control quotas.

That desperate struggle for life robs them of a chance for culture and societal progress, just as the nomadic tribes of the first Dark Ages were so robbed. Farmers make culture. Nomads make war.

Subtle signs of life freckle the bald waste. Roving herds of auroch. Fires on mountain ridges, glittering from the cracks in the great doors of Obsidian cities that are carved into the rock as they gather supplies and huddle behind their walls on the eve of the long dark of winter. We fly for hours. I fall in and out of sleep, body exhausted. Not having closed my eyes since we shared the pasta with Ragnar in our cozy hole in the belly of that dead ship. How has so much changed so quickly?

I wake to the bellow of a horn. Ragnar is dead. It’s the first thought in my head.

I am no stranger waking to grief.

Another horn echoes as Sefi’s riders close their gaps, drifting together into tight formation. We rise amidst a sea of ash-gray clouds. Sefi bent over the reins in front of me. Pushing her griffin hard toward a hulking darkness. We slip free of the clouds to find Asgard hanging in the twilight. It’s a black mountain ripped from the ground by the gods and hung halfway between the Abyss and the ice world below. Seat of the Aesir. Where Olympus was a bright celebration of the senses, this is a brooding threat to a conquered race.

A set of stone stairs, precarious and seemingly unsupported, rises from the mountains tethering Asgard to the world below. The Way of Stains. The path all young Obsidian must take if they wish to gain the favor of the gods, to bring honor and bounty to their tribes by becoming the servants of Allmother Death. Bodies litter the Valley of the Fallen beneath. Frozen mounds of men and women in a land where carrion never rots and only the industry of crows can make proper skeletons. It is a lonely walk, and one we must make if the Obsidian are to approach the mountain.

This is what it takes to make an Obsidian afraid. I feel that fear now from Sefi. She has never walked this path. No Stained may stay among the people of the Spires or the other tribes. All are chosen by the Golds for service. Her mother never would have let her take the tests. She needed one daughter to remain as her heir.

Unlike Olympus, Asgard is surrounded by defensive measures. Electronic high-pitched frequency emitters that would make the griffins’ eardrums bleed two clicks out. A high-charged pulse shield closer in that would hyper-oscillate the molecular structure of any man or creature by boiling the water in our skin and organs. Black magic to the Obsidian. But the sensors are dead today, compliments of Quicksilver and his hackers, and the cameras and drones that monitor our approach are blind to us, showing instead the footage recorded three years before, just as with the satellites. There is only one way to seek an audience with the gods, and that is along the Way of Stains through the Shadowmouth Temple.

We set down atop the forbidding mountain peak beneath Asgard where the Way of Stains is tethered to the earth. A black temple squats over the stairs like a possessive old crone. It’s skin ravaged by time. Face crumbling to the wind.

I’m pulled off the saddle and fall to the ice, legs asleep after the long journey. The Valkyrie wait for me to rise with Mustang’s help. “I think it’s time,” she says. I nod and let the Valkyrie push us after Sefi toward the black temple. Wind pours through the mouths of three hundred and thirty-three stone faces that scream out from the temple’s front façade imprisoned beneath the black rock, wild eyes desperate for release. We enter under the black arch. Snow rolls across the floor.

“Sefi,” I say. The woman turns slowly back to look at me. She’s not cleaned her brother’s blood from her hair. “May I speak to you? Alone?” The Valkyrie wait for their quiet leader to nod before pulling Mustang and Holiday back. Sefi walks farther into the temple. I follow as best I can in my chains to a small courtyard open to the sky. I shiver at the cold. Sefi watches me there in the weird violet light, waiting patiently for me to speak. It’s the first time it’s occurred to me that she’s as curious of me as I am of her. And it also fills me with confidence. Those small dark eyes are inquisitive. They see the cracks in things. In men, in armor, in lies. Mustang was right about Alia. She would never listen. I suspected it before we entered her throne room, but I had to give it my best. And even if she had listened, Mustang would never trust Alia Snowsparrow to lead the Obsidian in our war. I would have gained an ally and lost another. But Sefi…Sefi is the last hope I have.

“Where do they go?” I ask her now. “Have you ever wondered? The men and women your clan gives to the gods? I don’t think you believe what they tell you. That they are lifted up as warriors. That they are given untold riches in service of the immortals.”

I wait for her to reply. Of course, she does not. If I can’t sway her here, then we’re as good as dead. But Mustang thinks, as do I, that we have a chance with her. More than we ever did with Alia, at least.