His Queen | Book 1

One: Asgard & Vanaheim

"You've struck an alliance?" A women flustered, twirling a lock of long blonde hair around a slender finger. She looks on to her husband with wide golden eyes. The moment the words passed his lips, time around them stopped. She was frozen to have heard such words from such a prideful man - at war with one just as equally stubborn. Two donkeys butting heads at the stream and refusing to find another watering hole.

"Why?" she questioned him.

Bright white light breamed into the Hall of Vanaheim, reverberating off the white marble structure in glistening blindness. Here it was bright, warm, joyful, and full of nature; the true state of Vanaheim. There was never a cloudy day or a drop of rain. The birds always sang their praise, the horses roamed the far stretched fields, and the people prospered. It was a realm full of nature and vast forests of green that stretched further than the eye can see, an odd lone structure long left forgotten scattered here and there.

But here in the City of Vanaheim where a taint village surrounded a large elegant palace sparkling off the sun, surrounded by a backdrop of mountains, and a void of water to the left dropping into a massive body of water snaking through the valley, are the Vanir.

Some say, if you stand in the centre of the village and gaze up at the pointed towers of the palace, you can see them turn to glass before your very eye.

A man shrugged elegant shoulders clad in silver drapes embroided with black patterns of vines. He continued to slouch on the throne which he ruled, a crown of reserved twigs from the tree Yggdrasil, budding with fresh tiny green leaves. In the winter they were red and orange.

"Odin offered a peace treaty first." Iwaldi inclined a delicate pale hand, speaking with a voice laced with silk and the smoothness of a running stream. He was a tall, lean man. Everything about him and his composure brought comfort in the thought that he always had everything under control. A man who seemed incapable of love, a complete facade to keep up his elegant demeanour. His motions where always swift and agile. Almost like if you were to touch his skin, it would crack like porcelain.

"Demanded an audience with me." There was amusement in his voice.

His wife, Freya, inclined a thin golden eyebrow. Freya. The most beautiful women in the whole Nine Realms; it is known. Always desired the best of the best. Clothes, jewellery, men and women. Everything. Her motions were always strong and stable. A women with strong ambitions. A perfect match for her husband. She was not a women to defy.

She swept up a golden cape into her arms and climbed the steps to the throne. "And then?" A golden tiara of leaves sits on her head.

"And then he offered the most strangest thing. He sat as far as way as you are to me in shinning gold armour, Gungnir in hand, as mighty as ever, his Einherjar at his back!"

"What did he say?" Freya was eager to know.

"The All-Father said, I want peace for our realms. For the Nine Realms, he said, he has brought peace to even Jotunheim. Where I reminded him Jotunheim is now just another barren wasteland like Svartalfheim left by his father Bor, before him." Iwaldi sneered. "I said to him, if my armies and the Vanir Fleet weren't as strong as the Asgardian armies, would you have done the same to my home world?"

"What did he say to that?" Freya came closer.

Iwaldi scoffed, turning his head away, part of his beautiful white hair fell over his shoulder, reflecting off the sun. "He sneered at me, reminded me he is my All-Father, ruler and protecter of the Nine Realms... Destroyer of the Nine Realms, more like. Odin then told me he was willing to put past differences aside because we were fighting a war over a reason neither can recall, and I agreed with him. Why are we at war? Is there was a reason we need to be at war? We quarrel like children at our mothers breast."