Saint Seiya: The Legend of Seiya

94 - The Stellar Odin Sapphire

The high court aristocrats of Asgard, usually from ancient and once very wealthy families, each had what they called a forest retreat. A humble hovel, but far from the hardships of the city, although hunger and despair swept both the more affluent, but especially the miserable. So that in that year of Lord Odin, it no longer mattered which side of the fortress's walkway you lived on: it was certain that you were hungry and prayed at night asking the All-Father for mercy.

A few years before that winter crisis that took Asgard, however, the region found peace within its walls, and although the winter was always harsh, at least there was no shortage of food for its people. A young Princess Freia sat on a frozen fountain in front of her family's retreat, with whom she often shared walks with her sister Hilda.

"You should go back to your room, Princess Freia." said Hagen beside her, also younger, thin and already very tall, as if he had been stretched out in adolescence.

She looked at him beside her, his complexion darker than the people of the north, his hair scorched by a sun that didn't exist there. The fountain in the form of horses was entirely covered in ice, which the Princess was trying to scrape off with her hands, removing plates and breaking small stalactites that had formed. Seeing she couldn't do much for the ice-filled fountain, he sat down on the stone bench next to her.

"Hagen, have you ever wished you were born in a land bathed by sunlight? Fertile and green?"

Her eyes were sad looking at the snow covering the ground and the question surprised the young Hagen beside her. But perhaps out of politeness and decorum in front of her, Hagen didn't dare answer that question, so Freia continued as if talking to herself.

"It's not right, Asgard is so cold that it takes away our freedom to live. We suffer all the time. Sometimes I look at our homeland and hate it for imposing so much sacrifice on us. Have you ever felt like this?" she finally asked him.

"Princess Freia, I..." but the boy seemed to hesitate, afraid of cursing and suffering greater consequences from that land.

Young Hagen, however, manifested around him a clear aura, as if his body sublimated the cold air around him, like steaming, dry ice. But it was also brilliant, and beside her, Freia felt a certain warmth reach her ever-icy face. With a movement of his hand, the young boy melted all the ice that covered that fountain so dear to Freia, turning the ice into pure sublimation in the air.

The Princess smiled back at him when she saw that Hagen's face was no longer lit up by that sublimation around his body.

"I just want to be by your side." he said seriously.

She pressed a smile into her heart, and together they heard the footsteps of someone in the snow approaching the retreat's wooden hut wearing her pretty pale blue dress and her almost white hair flowing in the wind: it was Hilda, her delicate sister.

"Now, Freia, poor Hagen will never say a word against our homeland, stop making him unconfortable." she said with the sweetest, most brotherly smile on her face.

Hilda, who at a very young age was already responsible for the people of Asgard, joined them on the stone bench.

"It is a beautiful seidr this one that your heart manifests, Hagen." she said about the boy's strange energy.

"I've been training a lot, Miss Hilda." he justified.

"Look, sis'." Freia pointed to three initials roughly scratched into the legs of the fountain horses that reappeared when Hagen thawed them.

Two of them were precisely the initials of their own names, but between them there was a third letter in the ancient language of Asgard that made them both briefly silence in sadness.