The bond felt fated. Skadi saw in the wolf a shadow of the man she'd lost. She couldn't prove it, and when she sought out the Goddess of Fate for answers, none came.
So she followed her heart. She left the Summer God. She left Asgard. She walked into the wind and snow with Kaldr at her side.
The memories blurred after that. The World Serpent had ambushed her, twisted her soul with the power of fear, rewritten her memories, and sealed her consciousness inside the Hammer of Skadi. Thousands of years slipped by in an instant. Even knowing she was a puppet, the wolf never left her side, waiting as though the vigil might last forever.
Daisy dragged herself upright. She channeled Shou-Lao's power to scour the lingering grief from her mind. The world was full of unlucky people. She couldn't carry their pain on top of her own, and nobody was lining up to carry hers.
But the emotional residue was potent. Looking at Skadi weeping blood over Kaldr's remains, Daisy couldn't bring herself to land a cheap shot.
Her red lips parted, and almost without conscious intent, she began to sing. An old song, a farewell of sorts for this love story.
She knew vibration the way she knew her own heartbeat. Normally she avoided singing; the resonance it carried was absurdly powerful. The result was always too good.
She cleared her throat, and the melody flowed out. It was a classic Chinese ballad, the kind that traced the arc of mortal love from its first careless spark to its inevitable end. It sang of a young woman meeting a young man by chance, of passion tangled in the red dust of the human world, of how a lifetime's worth of everything could be traded for a single moment's transcendence. It spoke of how easily people come together and how hard it is to part, of decades wandering the mortal world, of love and hatred winding through the ages.
Her voice wasn't loud. It had nothing to do with volume or pitch. But riding on vibration, it rippled outward, past the Floating Island, across California, until the entire West Coast lay under its spell.
Most listeners couldn't understand the words, but the grief and tenderness in the sound needed no translation.
Snow drifted through the air alongside the melody, as though heaven itself was mourning.
Skadi had gone still the moment Daisy began. All her memories, all her past, had been carried away when her soul was destroyed. What remained was residual memory stored in her body, fragments stitched together into a fragile semblance of consciousness. She didn't fully understand her own sorrow. She didn't know why Kaldr had given his life for her. But the love she felt was real, and it burned.
The clouds Storm had summoned earlier began to shift. Fed by the battle, fed by Daisy's song, the air grew colder and colder, until a massive blizzard blanketed the entire West Coast.
Skadi's outline softened, turning translucent in the swirling snow. The last shreds of her will peeled away from her body. The ghostly figure seemed to catch the tune, humming along for a few bars.
Then the phantom danced. Graceful and ancient, her movements had the rhythm of ritual and the fluidity of something beyond mortal choreography. She was an ice spirit in her element, a creature returning to the medium she was born from.
When the last of her will departed, Skadi's ruined body crystallized. The wind caught the fragments and scattered them in a glittering cloud that flew in every direction.
"Couldn't even leave me some?" Daisy muttered, exasperated. The song died in her throat. That final stretch of singing had burned through the energy she'd reserved for teleportation. She crumpled to the ground. Exhausted, starving, weaker than she'd ever been. She needed to rest.
She didn't see Skadi's phantom pause at the very edge of dissolution and blow a gentle breath toward the cloud of crystals. A small portion of the glittering dust was drawn into Daisy's body.
Crushing pressure hit her all at once: heart, veins, blood, cells, everything compressed under an enormous weight. The Phoenix Force kicked into a new chi-circulation cycle, following the K'un-Lun method automatically.
"My eyes are burning. Am I going blind?" That was her last conscious thought.
Her heart, overwhelmed by the sudden pressure, stopped. Her body's genes, supplemented by the foreign genetic material, began a slow process of correction. Heart, brain, every major organ entered a state of dormancy.
A soft sound, barely audible. Skadi's phantom reappeared, hand clasped in the hand of a man's ghost. They seemed to smile at each other. Then both figures dissolved, spirit and body alike, into the snowstorm.
She was born in the ice. In the end, she returned to the ice. She and her beloved, inseparable at last.
A bolt of thunder streaked across the sky. Thor, arriving from the East Coast, reached the West Coast just in time to see both women lying on the ground.
Daisy had no heartbeat. Thor assumed she was dead. He had no love for the red-haired woman, but he offered his respect without hesitation. For an Asgardian, every warrior who fell in battle stood higher than the living.
Considering that Skadi had been Bor's adopted daughter, a goddess from Odin's own era who had left Asgard before Thor was even born, this victory deserved every ounce of admiration.
"A true warrior," he said quietly. He straightened, jaw set. "Now, witness what Asgardian courage looks like!"
Seeing what he believed was a mutual kill, Thor's fighting spirit erupted. He wanted nothing more than to smash the World Serpent's skull in with a single blow.
The island wasn't large. He crossed it in seconds and threw himself into the other battle.
The World Serpent, even operating at a fraction of his power and weakening with every passing moment, had been manhandling the entire group. The only reason they'd lasted this long was that he'd been splitting his focus to control Skadi. Now that puppet string was severed.
Skadi's death also sent a psychic backlash through the portion of his consciousness she'd been sharing. In his view, her sacrifice had been pointless: she'd killed one Earth woman and gotten herself destroyed in the process, injuring him on top of it. He was livid.
His great axe swept in a horizontal arc that launched the Destroyer armor across the island. The ancient Asgardian weapon construct was scarred and dented; it had been doggedly tying up the Serpent, buying space for Cyclops and the others to attack freely.
Susan and Johnny and the Asgardian quartet had fallen back to a support role, mopping up the Serpent's mind-controlled infantry from a dozen different realms.
Three fighters could still hurt the World Serpent directly: Cyclops, Storm, and Iron Man.
Of the three, Cyclops contributed the most. His mutation connected his eyes to an alternate dimension that held effectively infinite energy. His eyes were the valve. The moment he opened it on Earth's side, that extradimensional force screamed out at devastating speed. An enraged Cyclops could shatter an asteroid. But like most mutants, his body was barely above normal human durability. Conventional weapons could kill him, to say nothing of the Serpent's axe. He spent as much effort dodging as attacking.
Even so, his optic blasts posed a genuine threat. The Serpent had tried tanking them at first, then realized the power truly had no ceiling and switched to evasive action.
Storm backed them up from the flanks. Iron Man filled every gap: durable, mobile, armed to the teeth, and capable of sustained flight. The three of them together, pooling everything they had, had managed not to lose.