God of War--The Official Novelization

by J. M. Barlog

  Atreus removed Mimir from his father’s belt, placing him in the location where the Jötunheim crystal should be.

  “Hope you don’t explode,” he said.

  “Wait! Should we talk about this?” Mimir cried.

  Kratos locked the destination into the table and started the sequence. A blinding light beam shot across the room into Mimir’s eyes.

  “Oh, most unpleasant!”

  Atreus pivoted while holding Mimir’s head out front, shielding his own as best as he could. The exploding energy from Mimir’s eyes struck the center of the Jötunheim bridge door. The doors shuddered, then opened.

  A golden staircase awaited them. For the first time on their journey, they advanced without trepidation.

  “A staircase? I was expecting another bridge,” Atreus commented. The glinting gold dazzled him.

  “A word please, before we continue,” Mimir asked from Kratos’ belt.

  Kratos paused, snaring Atreus’ arm to halt his advance while he lifted Mimir’s head to bring them face-to-face.

  “Listen, the last thing you two need up there is a decomposing head ruining your moment. Why don’t I wait here for you? This should be between you and the boy.”

  “That is true. But if someone were to find you…” Kratos replied.

  “By Lady Sif’s soft, perfect sloshers,” a voice erupted from nearby. All heads turned. Brok smiled, with Sindri beside him.

  “You done did it!” the blue man continued, amazement lacing his words.

  “Sorry for the intrusion. But we had to see this,” Sindri added sheepishly.

  Kratos stared blankly at the brothers, then back at Mimir’s head. His face turned up a smile.

  “Oh no, no, no! Fine, damn it, fine,” Mimir caved, anticipating what was to follow. He knew whatever Kratos intended would not prove beneficial to him.

  “Watch the head until we return,” Kratos commanded the brothers.

  “I knew it!” Mimir blurted just before Kratos released him from his belt, tossing him to Sindri. “Whoa, you do realize throwing me like that makes me dizzy.”

  “Oh no. I cannot do this. No, no. I can’t,” Sindri cringed, crossing his legs impulsively. He immediately shoved Mimir onto Brok, who just stared at the head.

  “Okay, but why?” Brok said, extending the head to arm’s length. He breathed only through his mouth, hoping to minimize the stench wafting to his nose.

  “Ready?” Kratos turned to Atreus.

  Atreus smiled, scaling the staircase leading into the sky.

  * * *

  In hours they reached the summit, still covered in blood and mud, where they stood near the crest of the mountain. A light snow spattered their faces. To their north were two more finger-like mountains nearby.

  “Look, we’re on the giant’s fingers. I see the highest peak ahead, right over there. We did it!” Atreus said.

  “We did do it, together,” Kratos replied. Relief swept through him. They had survived to fulfill his wife’s dying wishes. They had battled more than anyone would have expected to reach this place.

  Kratos unwound the bandages protecting his forearms, exposing his grotesque never-healing wounds to the snow.

  “What are you doing?” his son asked.

  “I hide nothing.” Kratos discarded the bandages into the swirling mountain winds, which accepted them skyward with a flutter.

  “Can we go? We are so close now!”

  Atreus took off impulsively up the mountain path.

  “Boy,” Kratos growled.

  His demanding tone stopped Atreus in his tracks. He turned back.

  Kratos removed the leather pouch from his belt, staring at it for a long moment. Visions of life with Faye played across his mind: her smile, the love in her eyes when she looked at him. He so wished he could reach out to stroke her rose-petal cheek. Finally, Kratos held the pouch out, knowing what he had to do.

  Their moment seemed frozen in time, as Atreus stared at the pouch, his hands in check. It was something he had wanted since their journey began. Now, faced with the moment that he had wished for, he wrestled with uncertainty. Should he?

  “Carry her,” his father said.

  Atreus stared at him. Overcoming an inertia that he could not explain, he advanced to his father, where he gingerly accepted the pouch—his mother. His heart ached at the touch of her in his hands. He felt so close to her now. After adjusting the leather tie, he looped the pouch carefully on his belt. With tears undetectable in the snow, he offered his father a nod of gratitude. Maybe his father no longer saw him as a boy. Maybe his father had accepted him for what he truly was—a fellow god.

  The snow turned to flurries, becoming nothing more than a cleansing mist when the flakes melted against their skin, stripping away the blood and the mud as they began their final ascent to the mountain peak.

  Within a few more hours, they reached the Jötunheim summit, a massive crest with jagged and multi-pronged rock formations like the very fingers of a giant. A maze of sharp angles, chipped, knife-edged corners, and steep granite faces stood between them and the final location. Carefully picking their footing, Kratos and Atreus weaved their way up the precarious, narrow path that twisted at times on a forty-five-degree incline, snaking in and out of the mountain.

  With the sun drifting lower in the western sky, they arrived at a half-collapsed Jötunn temple, which had been constructed within the mountain. The shrine stood as a final way station between them and the highest peak. Kratos entered first, through a large crack along the northern wall, with Atreus following a few steps behind. As he passed through the fissure, his hand brushed the wall unconsciously. His contact ignited a bright latticework of light spider-webbing along the surface.

  Atreus stopped to watch the magical effect spread from where his hand made contact. With the light came a series of carved images, covering the entire wall.

  “Father, wait. Something is happening.”

  Kratos came about, saw the light, and returned to join his son at a wall carving. At first neither understood the meaning of the drawings. A rotund woman ripe with child stood defiantly before a seated council of giants. Her face clearly angry, she was yelling at them, and she held Kratos’ axe. One of the giants pointed, as if to cast her away.

  “That axe is just like yours, Father. Is it not?” Atreus asked, moving closer to the wall to examine each line of the etching more carefully. “Is that… Mother?” The exquisite detail of the drawing clearly indicated it was. “The word says Laufey. Is that her?” The resemblance was undeniable.

  Before Kratos could form a plausible answer, Atreus raced to the next image, on the opposite side of a jagged crevasse. This one totally consumed his attention. It looked exactly like him, on a bed, the same way he was when he was ill. Around him was the interior of Kratos’ house.

  “How can this be? What manner of magic has conjured this? When were these etchings made?” Atreus rattled off in rapid fire. He turned to his father for answers.

  Kratos had none.

  Neither could understand how these things could come to be. Did they foretell the future, rather than record the past? And why would they record him and his mother?

  The woman from the previous image sat beside the boy, tending him with cloths. But this image was of his wife and son, with him in the background.

  Consumed with questions and disbelief, Atreus sought words to convey what his mind churned about uneasily. “That is her, isn’t it? And that… that is me?”

  Kratos could conjure no response. Instead, he stared blankly at the carvings, then at his son. He needed no more convincing.

  Atreus had never witnessed his father in such a state of helplessness. He didn’t know how to understand the things that someone had presented before him. Was he even meant see what they depicted? Was he meant to ever know the truth that these gods sought to convey? Who he was plagued his young mind. And just as importantly, who was his mother, that she would be on these walls?

  Kratos com
manded himself to find words that would ease the burden caving in upon his son. Before he could formulate a response, Atreus darted to the next carving, anxious to learn more about what his life was meant to be.

  The next carving showed Atreus locked in a fight with Baldur, stripping away his invulnerability.

  “Father, look, this one is me… and Baldur. But how can this be? This has just happened. What… what does this all mean?”

  Joining his son, Kratos studied the latest carving with a new sense of comprehension. There was so much now that he understood. There had been so much left unsaid between him and his wife. She was not who he had thought she was.

  “I was not the only parent with secrets,” Kratos muttered, more to himself than to his son.

  “You did not know?” Atreus asked, with unmasked surprise.

  Kratos stared blankly at his son. Was he saying that he knew? His own son knew more about his mother than Kratos knew about his wife. Would she have confided in the lad before revealing the deepest of her secrets to the man she loved?

  Did she even love him?

  “She was a giant,” the lad said, realizing that Kratos would now understand what that meant.

  “You knew?” Kratos asked, with a breathless voice.

  “I did not. She never told me who she was,” Atreus said. Minutes passed. Neither spoke. Then Atreus returned to the carvings. “I am a giant,” he added in revelation.

  Kratos stared at him, then at the carving. What was her true nature? How could she have kept such an important truth from him?

  “Why did she not tell us?” Atreus asked. “Did she think we would not understand?”

  “Maybe she could not reveal her true self to us. She sent us here, hoping we might find this and learn the truth on our own,” Kratos said.

  “But why conceal the truth from those she loved most dearly?”

  “You ask questions even I cannot answer.”

  “But why not just tell us the truth?”

  “Because maybe the truth would prove too dangerous, even for a giant.”

  The words churned inside Kratos’ brain. There was something in these etchings he had failed to understand. There was something in their lives he could not fathom at the time. But now…

  “We must trust that your mother would have had good reason to—” Kratos stopped himself. He needed to understand his past. He needed a moment to reassemble the puzzle pieces of his life.

  “Baldur was never sent to find me,” he muttered. “It was her he was tracking all along… unaware at the time that she had become only ashes.”

  Kratos laid a hand upon his son’s shoulder.

  “She was here. She saw every step we took before we took it. Like she was always with us… watching over us… leading us home,” Atreus said.

  The lad retreated toward the shrine’s exit.

  “Come on! Look, we’re on the giant’s fingers. I see the highest peak ahead—right over there. We did it! We are so close to the end now.”

  Kratos’ gaze lingered on the final image of the mural—a fragment only partially intact. It showed an enigmatic image of the boy holding a dead body, gazing up at the sky, weeping, and cursing. The rest of the fragment had been destroyed, making the identity of the corpse an eternal mystery.

  “Yes… yes, we are,” he said in a distracted voice.

  Leaving the shrine, Kratos and Atreus continued their tentative ascent, eventually reaching the tip of the highest finger. Billowing gray clouds crowded the sky for as far as they could see. The swirling air wrapped them with a sense of peace and calm.

  Awestruck by the sight, Atreus dashed ahead, stopping at the very edge. In that moment, he thought not about himself, but about his mother. He wished he could have shared such magnificence with her.

  Kratos approached, forcing Atreus out of his sadness and back into the world he must face every waking minute.

  “Father?”

  He offered his father the ashes. It would be the last time he would touch his mother. It felt like this was to be their final goodbye.

  “No. We do this together,” Kratos said. “She would have wanted it this way.”

  In this life, Kratos had experienced more death than any one man could ever fathom. Yet this loss tore at the very core of his being. Gods were never to feel the way he felt at this moment. Gods were never to surrender to their human feelings.

  Kratos released the strap securing the pouch. Spilling the ashes between their hands, together as father and son they released her. The last of Atreus’ mother and Kratos’ wife spiraled away, caught up in a now snowflake-laden breeze.

  Neither spoke as they paid tribute to her in their minds. There could be no words that could convey what this moment meant to each of them. Kratos’ life was never supposed to come to this point. Unconsciously, he put his arm round Atreus’ shoulder to bring him closer. Atreus turned away, hiding tears. He wanted to speak, had things he needed to say, but refrained, fearing a tremulous voice might make him appear weak. He had to keep his frail emotions in check, just as his father was doing. He was a god, and he must always act like one, though there was still so much he needed to learn and understand about who and what he was.

  Atreus stared out at a vast graveyard of giants sprawled before the horizon.

  “They really are all gone. There is nothing for us here,” he said, allowing sadness to stitch his words together.

  “Come. We must go. We have accomplished what we came here for. We must leave this behind,” Kratos said.

  Atreus pulled away reluctantly. He wanted to remain with her, remain part of her for as long as he could. Leaving meant turning his back on her, yet he knew staying served no earthly purpose. They had to turn around, begin their long journey back.

  * * *

  For the next few hours, they carefully and swiftly picked their way through the rocks. Each had so much to think about.

  “So… I understand that Mother was a giant. Which makes me part giant and part god,” Atreus said finally.

  “And part mortal,” Kratos added.

  He shot his father a puzzled look. How was he to interpret what he was? How was he expected to live? And what was his destiny that his mother spoke of?

  “I am. Still I do not understand. My name on the wall… Mother called me Loki.” The words forced Atreus to stop, and Kratos paused beside him.

  “The giants called me Loki? Is that supposed to be my name?”

  The word triggered thoughts buried deep in Kratos’ memory. “Your mother bestowed that name upon you at your birth. She may have called you that to her people.”

  “But why? How then did I come to be called Atreus instead?”

  “By my choice. Atreus was the bravest of all the warriors in Sparta. I sought to honor his death by bestowing his name upon my only son. Now I understand why your mother eagerly agreed when I asked that of her. You were meant to remain hidden from your own kind. She intentionally instructed me to destroy the protection rune in the forest, to force us on this journey of discovery.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “A question for another day. It is time we go home, son.”

  In the fading light at the end of another day, Kratos and Atreus left the Bifröst bridge from Jötunheim, crossing the surrounding caldera lake thick with ice, the aftermath of their battle with the stonemason now covered in deep banks of snow.

  As Mimir explained it, Baldur’s death had seemingly unleashed Fimbulwinter upon Midgard, even though it was not prophesied to fall for another hundred winters at least. Now, by virtue of their run-in with the local gods, fated events were already underway. Three winters with no summers between would plague the land. It would become a time when all creatures sought refuge from the bitter elements, burrowing in extended hibernation until warm winds arrived to thaw the frozen tundra.

  But those same winds were to usher in something else.

  Kratos and Atreus continued through the biting cold, traveling mostly at night unde
r the light of the moon, while sleeping hidden during the day to avoid confrontation with any who might be seeking them. In time, they reached the snow-shrouded forest overlooking their valley. In the distance, their house sat quietly tucked within the folds of drifting snow mounds.

  Atreus searched the sky.

  Huginn and Muninn lazily circled the crown canopy.

  Ensconced safely within the shadowy depths of an entwined thicket, father and son patiently held their position.

  Atreus slowly nocked an arrow to his bowstring. He raised it skyward; his father lowered it back down with a calm, firm hand.

  “I can hit them. I know I can,” the boy said.

  “Hit one, and the other knows we’re here, lad,” Mimir said, hanging at Kratos’ belt.

  Upon their return to Midgard, Kratos had intended to abandon the head with the dwarves, but Mimir surprised him by requesting to join them on their journey home. As he consumed no provisions and could prove an asset in dealing with the uncertainties of their future in this land, Kratos acquiesced.

  “So what do we do? I’m so cold and hungry,” said Atreus.

  Kratos thought. They could attempt to slip into their house under the cover of night, though neither wished to remain in the elements for such an extended period of time. As Kratos pondered the problem, as if Laufey herself was watching over them, a solution came. Jöphie swooped in from high above to attack the ravens, forcing the Allfather’s feathered minions to abandon their surveillance and flee noisily away to the north.

  “They’re gone,” Atreus said.

  Creeping slowly out from their hiding place, Atreus snagged the badger carcass slung over his shoulder on some thorny branches. He tugged viciously to set it free, uncertain of why such a trivial matter should so ignite his anger.

  “You were right. Mother’s falcon knew we would return,” Kratos said.

  “I knew she’d never desert us. From now she’ll protect us from Odin’s little spies.”