I am not yours, vile creature, the vision of Frigg spits at him, and even as Grim’s eyes narrow in confusion, a white-hot stab of pain in his abdomen drowns out all his other senses. He doubles over with a grimace of bared teeth, ears lacing back against his skull and chin pressed into his chest. Whatever else the red mare says, he does not hear it - at least, not in full sentences. Fragments drift to him through the cotton-wool cloud that dulls his senses: all of your kind… over the bones and ashes of… gods will sing… Her droning is like the persistence of a buzzing bee, stoking the embers of anger within him that had all but guttered out.

When the pain has passed and a blessed numbness returns to his broken body, Grim spits blood onto the snow and looks back up at the mare. His vision swims in and out of reality, one moment showing him Frigg, the next a mare he does not immediately recognize. The spirits are taunting me, he thinks, but it’s enough to sow a seed of doubt in his weary brain. He watches as the mare turns away, the unfamiliar contours of her stocky frame a dark silhouette against the brightening orange of the eastern horizon. She is not of his people, he realizes then, and a faint ripple of horror pulses through him.

She is a Yakut, his sworn enemy.

Go home, ormr. Tell them that I am dead, if you wish. There is truth enough in the statement to spare your honor - if your kind even value such a thing, she says.

Grim is weary, so weary. His eyes flutter closed, and for a moment he wants nothing more than to lean back onto the snow, fall asleep, and never wake up. He may as well; he has nothing left to live for now. Veigar, he thinks again. After all those years... After all we endured together… There’s the lightest of touches on his eyelids, so faint his numbed senses almost do not detect it, and he opens his eyes to discover that it’s snowing. Fitting, he thinks. His mother had always taught him that the snow was the frozen tears of the dead: neither a good or ill omen, simply a reminder that death is part of the cycle of life.

“Your prattle is tiresome,” he finally growls at the mare as he attempts, once more, to stand. He is so weak and stiff, however, that it results only in the slightest quiver of his pale legs. Strangely, though, he no longer feels cold; he cannot even bring himself to shiver. He snorts with frustration, sending a splatter of blood into the air.

“I am going to die here, and then only my bones will trouble you,” he continues after a resigned moment, his voice softer but still sour. His tongue feels thick and cumbersome in his mouth; his thoughts are slow and heavy as rocks. “Perhaps your savage mind can find peace in the fact that I will not be granted a warrior’s death. I would… I would ask if you might at least grant me that, but I’m guessing you wouldn’t sully your hooves with my blood. Especially not the blood of one who is a traitor to his own people.”

He lays his head back down against the snow with a heavy sigh, and stares up at the flakes of white as they drift downwards from the deep lavender heavens. “Leave me to die in peace,” he says in a half-whisper, a note of finality in his voice.

In his last moments before he either bleeds out or freezes to death, he wants to think of nothing else but her, and the life they might have lived had he succeeded.