(( art by dark_roast - archiveofourown dot org /works /7586881 ))

Surtur speaks:

I woke up in the healers' house, Mittens curled up next to my face and Bernadette by my bedside in her black iron wheelchair. She had taken a few new injuries but nothing all that severe, and from her reports, the battle had gone in our favour. The Masayans had been forced into a rout and their scattered survivors were being hunted down even now. Depending on their resilience – and they didn't seem to be completely fireproof - there weren't that many safe hiding places for strangers in Muspelheim.

Out of curiosity, I asked how easy it had been to return home once we escaped Freya's clutches. The cat explained that finding a portal to Muspelheim had been relatively straightforward, even with the inevitable shifting of the ways and the necessity of dragging two large people behind her. This had required the assistance of a whole gang of void-cats, whom she now owed quite a large debt to. This would probably be repaid with a favour in kind, as there was no fixed currency in interplanetary feline society. Mittens had also made a brief attempt to locate Spatula but to no avail. Not having gone through the portal and only having the description of 'a big fight between Masayans and space pirates' - not particularly helpful, as Masayans were always picking fights with pirates - she had no mental image to follow. She had attempted to use the Princess Skiffleboard's interior as a guide but unfortunately found out that the enormous mining barge was a very common model of industrial spaceship where Xoria came from, and apart from furry dice, the Commander hadn't modified hers all that much. She had been forced to give up so that she could return the two injured survivors to safety before they died of their wounds.

"I'm sure she'll come back," added Mittens, licking my nose, "After all, she left some of her stuff here."

"Where's Diggory?" I asked. A wave of pain and nausea hit me. Talking made my head hurt. Moving made my head hurt as well. Everything ached, even through the large quantities of pain relieving substances of dubious legality on other worlds I had been forced to drink, judging by the amount of brightly coloured, glowing treacle my thoughts seemed to be swimming through. I hissed and swore softly in Eldjotnar. At least whatever I had been given also stopped my inner fires from burning low, no matter how drained I felt.

"The nurse said I could claw you in the face if you tried to move," Mittens informed me, "He's in the next ward. He needed more treatment than you. The guards have him under supervision in case he tries something else stupid."

"I don't think he will," I said, groaning.

"I saw you transfer some kind of arcane energy to him, in some kind of link. What exactly happened?"

I explained the details of the soul bond to him, how it gave him some of my essence, enough to use some of my reserves of flame as his own, but also that the flame touched him and shaped him into something slightly more like me. He hadn't received enough to change his appearance all that much but anyone who could see a person's soul would see how scorched it was from a flame now burning inside it, and someone with the power to observe destiny would see that ours were inextricably linked.

"So, are you going to take responsibility for what you've done? Bonds work both ways, you know, and you're the one who talked him into it."

"He's not a damn puppy," I growled, "In some ways, he's scarier than I am. In fact, he needs to be somewhere he can deal with that side of him before the faults in it get any worse. Where's that idiot bunny when you need him?"

"Mind involving me in this conversation?" demanded Bernadette, "What's this about a bunny? How the frack did you manage to lose a Goddess? Why did you forge an intimate spiritual bond with some human boy who tried to kill you when you've never offered it to any of your friends? And why did you come back almost dead when you just criticised me for pushing myself too hard?"

"Show mercy on an injured man, all those questions at once are making my headache worse," I winced.

"Whose fault is it that I have to practically throw the damn cat out of the window to get you to talk to me instead of a cat?" she snapped. Mittens hissed at her.

"No need to take it out on a poor defenceless little kitten," I said, earning a hissy fit of my own, "Help me sit up, get me some real food and something to take the edge off whatever the frack they made me take. Then we can all talk like civilised people."

"Fat chance of that here," she snorted, then yelled for a guard to take my message. Bernadette fetched a head board and, with the assistance of a medic, propped me into a sitting position which I immediately regretted, as the gesture made my head swim and my stomach turn. I was offered something in a very thick and obviously enchanted ceramic mug that looked like it was made of a combination of lava and coffee. Swigging it down in one without waiting for instructions to the contrary, I was plunged into darkness tinged with flame, then woke up with a clarity that went beyond normal sobriety and brought a bright, sharp tinge to everything. It also made me throw up, but this was kind of inevitable by now and a medic was already handy with a bucket. By the time I stopped, the guard had already returned with a plate of roasted salamander steak and an assortment of the more edible mushrooms that insisted they were able to grow on Muspelheim. I wolfed the meal down, belched with satisfaction and a small gout of flame, then washed it down with another hell-coffee, this time easier to handle now I had something lining my stomach.

((People always complain you won't be able to register the taste of your meal if you eat it too quickly but my experience is the other way round. Eating something straight away ensures you always experience only the fresh, full taste, not the taste of something cooling down or congealing or already beginning to digest in your mouth. People throw away food that they consider to be waste, because its been lying around for a certain amount of time, so why do they wait to eat their food?))

"Now talk," demanded Bernadette, folding her arms.

I sighed and began, "First of all, my only intention with Diggory was to lend him something that we already have. That's why I don't offer it to you. If there's some kind of important bonding ritual you want to perform with me, I'll definitely consider it, you only have to ask."

Fire giants can't really blush but Bernadette's inner fire seemed to flare up in an odd shade of red as she gave me a grin like a school child.

"Secondly," I continued, "You already knew I was putting myself in danger. I was going to Asgard, you donkey! What did you expect, a friendly chat over a cup of tea? To be fair, I didn't expect to be fighting a demonic ticket machine. It makes sense now I come to think about it, though."

"It does?" she frowned, then picked at one of her fangs.

"It does when the whole thing is driving me as crazy as this," I specified, "Thirdly, I lost a Goddess because the silly cow ran off in the middle of a mission. As for the rabbit... that'll take a bit longer to explain. I guess I should describe what happened to me while I was away in a bit more detail. If you promise to believe me and not laugh."

"You might not need to explain," said Mittens. I looked down at her.

"I just received another message from Unfluffykins. She's located us and is about to visit. Spatula is there too, and the rabbit. But... she took a lift with some interesting people. She says please not to fire upon them unless absolutely necessary."

---

When the first few ships of the second Masayan fleet began to appear from another wormhole, almost directly over the planet, the remnants of the last fleet began to emerge from their hiding places, inside magmic shafts, geysers, fissures and the abandoned lairs of salamanders, dragons and other dangerous predators on Muspelheim. As one, like rain evaporating back into the sky, they returned to their Mothership and its Queen.

Stopping the Eldjotnar patrols from pursuing the retreating enemies was about as easy as persuading a cat not to chase a mouse. An unusually shiny mouse with a bag of catnip tied to its tail. Bernadette resorted to hurling flaming boulders at her own troops pre-emptively to knock them off balance so that their shots would go wild, hoping that the random flames shooting into the air would be shrugged off as yet another dramatic geological feature of Muspelheim. Mittens assisted the General by using her own shadow magic to suddenly blind or trip the patrols, although it was more difficult for the cat to find the patrols as she had no spiritual link with the Eldjotnar, and so had to rely on spotting the random fires breaking out, or more accurately, telling them apart from other kinds of random fires breaking out. I was in the middle of distracting a large, venerable, grouchy dragon who had also spotted the Masayans trying to hide in his cave and wasn't sure if they were edible or not, when I received another psychic communication.

"You don't have to go that far, you know, they're not entirely creatures of habit. They can tell accidents from intentional acts of war."

"Spatula, what the frack are you..." I roared at the sky, before realising that it was a feline voice, not a deity's, unless Bastet had turned up to see what was going on, in which case I was in big trouble. It wasn't Mittens - I could sort of recognise the 'flavour' of the small black cat's mind. People's thoughts tended to have very unique imagery that customised their psychic messages whether they intended to project it or not.

"You shouldn't talk to the emissary of a Goddess that way," the cat sniffed, "Spatula warned me you would be like this. Why is everything burning? It stinks. It's going to get in my fur. Do we have to land on this planet?"

"I take it you're Mittens' sister," I said, folding my arms, "I can see the family resemblance. Tell your Goddess she can feel free to land, as long as her army behaves itself this time, and that she can come down here and talk to me in person if she wants any further response."

"Hmph, some people just don't understand what an honour it is to be addressed by a feline representative," said the cat, before breaking off contact. I watched the survivors spiral into the sky and circle their Mothership. They were swarmed by other drones who focused beams of green light that seemed to be some kind of repair lasers. After half an hour had passed, presumably of the overmind controlling the drones to decide that they were satisfied by the show of peace, the formation parted slightly in the middle to allow two ships to descend. I recognised them both, although my memory was a little hazy, as it had been a while since I last saw any kind of spacecraft that wasn't Masayan. After a few minutes of watching the two small ships reach a clearing that was slightly less on fire than the scenery around it, I remembered where I had seen them before: the Plotbunny's exploration frigate and a shuttle from Xoria's mining barge. The door of the shuttle opened and the trader strode out, dressed in a form-fitting long white Captain's greatcoat, with her hair in a complex bun of braids fasted with a clasp of bronze-like metal. She was protected by the heat by a personal force shield. Several small drones hovered at her shoulders, one holding a clipboard, the others with laser pistols. She waved a greeting when she saw me. Out of the second ship emerged the Plotbunny, now looking a little better groomed in a brand new uniform (a long, belted robe with pockets and belt bags for all his various recording devices and information retrieval tools), his jet-black fur trimmed. He was accompanied by three strangers, a young man, woman and large fluffy white cat. Upon spotting her sister, Mittens bolted up to assist her in hiding from the temperature, as she seemed to be struggling a lot more with the task. Bunfire also wore a force field and the other two seemed to have their own way of shielding themselves from the temperature, one involving elemental magic and the other involving a divine blessing. Still, none of them seemed particularly strong, so I snapped my fingers and ordered the nearest person to escort them into the audience room and have them served a sensible meal and drink, one they could actually digest without dying.

"I like the new look," I told Spatula when she appeared moments later, teleporting into the space directly in front of me. Neither her sudden presence nor her altered appearance particularly surprised me at this point. I recognised the Masayan influence in her cybernetics and guessed even before she explained that she had merged with them once again. I wasn't sure if this meant I could trust her less, or with the same dubiousness as usual, but she wasn't currently attacking me and she had brought with her several people I really needed to talk to, so I greeted her and invited her into the audience room with the others.