A chill deeper than the Pacific Northwest winter has settled into Bjorn Halvorsen’s bones.  Haunted since childhood by visions of gaunt, spectral Valkyries, he sees not the glorious dead of Valhalla, but the mundane tragedies of the living—a heart attack in a grocery store, a car crash on a rain-slicked bridge. Even his own death, a spectral hand reaching for him in the whispering pines, replays with nightmarish regularity.  He's always believed it a curse. Until he meets Astrid.

Astrid, a Valkyrie burdened by a terrible secret, reveals the horrifying truth: the Valkyries are not *choosing* the slain, they are *creating* them, siphoning the life force of mortals to feed a dying god in a forgotten war raging beyond the veil.  She offers Bjorn a perilous choice: join her rebellion and save humanity, or remain silent and complicit in his world's slow demise.

Torn between Astrid's desperate plea and the seductive power offered by Freya, a Valkyrie leader whose breathtaking beauty masks a chilling pragmatism, Bjorn delves into ancient Norse texts, his anthropological training becoming an unexpected weapon. He discovers a forgotten ritual, a third path, a way to restore the Valkyries without sacrificing human lives.  But the ritual demands a sacrifice of a different kind: something precious, irreplaceable. His own memories.

As the realms converge during the Lummi Stommish Water Festival, the line between Midgard and Asgard blurs. Bjorn’s cabin becomes a nexus, a battleground not of steel and blood, but of ethereal energy and unwavering will.  Astrid and her rebel Valkyries clash with Freya’s loyalists, the very air crackling with their conflict.  Caught in the crossfire, Bjorn must complete the ritual, the sacrifice tearing through him, leaving him vulnerable and disoriented.

He awakens to a changed world, the Valkyries restored, Asgard revitalized, but his past erased.  Astrid offers him a choice: remain in Midgard, rebuild his life anew, or join her in Asgard, a realm reborn.  Standing on the threshold of his cabin, the familiar pines now whispering a promise of peace, Bjorn must choose his destiny, forever intertwined with the fate of two worlds.