Descendant by Lesley Livingston

days filled with battle, endless nights replete with mead and meat. The possibility, one day, of something even greater.” Hel gazed at the spectacle, her expression hard to read. Mason wasn’t sure whether she was actually endorsing the idea of Ragnarok, or just offering the Norse perspective on it, but she sincerely hoped it was the latter.
    “Sounds like it’d be an excruciating bore after about three days,” Mason said.
    At least, she thought, it would be the way they were doing it. The closer they got to the warriors, the more it seemed to Mason that they were kind of just . . . going through the motions. But of course, she wasn’t blind to the irony of her offhand dismissal of their pastime. Especially where she herself was concerned. After all, she’d done very little else but fight and practice for the last several years—and with a similar kind of mindless determination.She had approached fencing with a kind of zealous tunnel vision. And yet, in all the time she had fought and practiced to be the best, honing her skills, her strength, her speed, she had never even approached the kind of finesse as she had over the last few weeks working with Fennrys. He’d instilled in her a kind of genius instinct with a blade. Made her one with her weapon.
    She was no longer just a product of technique and grim determination. When she fought with Fenn, she fought with joy . Mason felt a brief surge of panicked despair at the thought of never experiencing that sensation again.
    No. She slammed the door on that thought with all her mental might. I’m going home.
    And Fenn is fine. He had to be.
    Yes, she’d seen him hurt, terribly. A hole torn in his shoulder. But it wasn’t as if she hadn’t done the very same thing to him herself—accidentally stabbed him in the very same shoulder—only a few days earlier, and he’d recovered from that just fine. Fennrys was tougher than anyone she’d ever met. A bullet hole and a tumble off a train? That was like most people getting a hangnail.
    Mason took a few deep breaths to calm herself down and shake her panic.
    Her footsteps slowed as they approached the leading edge of the battle.
    “You must go first,” her mother said, nudging her forward.
    Right. Of course I must.
    Mason thought of Fennrys—of his fearlessness in the face of a fight—and clamped down on the urge to turn and fly as a wall of noise and the stench of blood and spilled viscera washed violently over her. The thunderous sounds of war were a physical assault on her ears and the surface of her skin. They beat on her like hammers on drums, and she knew that at any second, those hacking, slashing berserkers would turn and charge at her and she would be dead and in pieces before she’d even drawn her elegant little blade, which seemed like a toy sword in comparison. Her hand tightened on the hilt. . . .
    No. Don’t give them a reason to attack.
    Her mother promised her she’d be fine.
    Trust her. . . .
    Suddenly, the two warriors fighting closest to her abruptly disengaged. They lowered their weapons andstepped back, making a space in the chaos for Mason to step into. Then so did the men beyond them, and the ones beyond them. Mason held her breath and strode purposefully forward into the breach, her eyes fixed unblinking on the glittering eaves of Valhalla in the distance. As the path continued to open up in front of her, she could sense that, as soon as she and her mother had passed, the men behind them would close ranks and start fighting again, as if nothing had interrupted them.
    Once she was halfway across the battlefield, Mason relaxed enough to glance surreptitiously at the men fighting on either side of her. Some of them were great hulking beasts and some were lean and lithe, skirmishers and melee bruisers and all sorts in-between—there was no one distinct “type.” And yet, they all seemed the same. It was strange. Wrong. Mason had sensed it from a distance, but in close quarters it was