Chapter 14 Bound by Blood #3

She thought about Thor. Thor, who had been watching mortals die for centuries, who had been alongside people and then been there when they weren't anymore.

She thought about what it would mean to not add to that. "What does it cost?" she said.

Freyja looked at her with the near respect that Elara recognized. The direct question. The right question. "What do you mean?" she said.

"Nothing from the gods comes without cost," Elara said. "The relic amplification has a cost. Everything in this world has a cost. What does the Iðunn gift cost the person who receives it?"

Freyja was quiet for a moment. "It's not it’s not a cost in the way you're thinking," she said.

"Not a price. But there is a change. The gift changes what you are, in ways.

" She paused. "You become not divine. Not Aesir.

You don't gain divine capacity, divine power, divine frequency generation.

You remain fully human in every other sense.

But the biological mortality is altered.

And with that alteration comes a relationship to time that is different from what a human experiences. "

"Different how?" Elara said.

"Longer," Freyja said. "That's the primary difference.

And patience. A different relationship to urgency.

Things that feel urgent at thirty-one feel different at three hundred.

Not less important, the importance doesn't diminish.

But the relationship to the timeline changes.

" She paused. "Some find this a gift in itself.

Some find it a loss the urgency of mortality is one of the things that makes human experience what it is, and the removal of the biological countdown changes how things feel. "

"Would I be the same person?" Elara said.

"You'd be a different version of the same person," Freyja said. "As everyone is, across time. The difference is the amount of time."

Elara looked at the desk. The documentation. The lefthand notes.

"I need to think about it," she said.

"Yes," Freyja said. "That's the right answer."

"I need to think about it away from away from the operational context," Elara said. "Away from the immediate aftermath of this." She looked at Freyja. "Can I have time?"

"Odin's discussion is not scheduled," Freyja said. "There's no deadline." She paused. "Though I'd suggest that part of what you need to think about is whether time is something you already have, or whether you're going to be in the South Island in six months looking for another window."

"You think the command source will be rebuilt in six months," Elara said.

"I think the command source has the patience of seventy years and the intelligence of something that predates our current classification," Freyja said.

"I think damaged and withdrawn is not the same as gone.

And I think that what Odin saw in the operation today in you, is someone he would like to keep. "

"I'm not property," Elara said. Flat. Without apology.

"No," Freyja said, without defensiveness. "You are not. The choice is entirely yours. The council can discuss, and Odin can want, and it means nothing unless you decide it. I am being clear about that."

"Good," Elara said.

Freyja stood. Her departure was the same as her arrival present and then not present. At the door she stopped.

"One more thing," she said. "Thor doesn't know about the council's discussion. He knows Odin wants to meet with you. He doesn't know the content."

"Why not?" Elara said.

"Because Odin wanted you to have the information first," Freyja said. "Before it was complicated by Thor's feelings about it." She paused. "His feelings are going to be significant."

"I know," Elara said.

"He's going to want it for you," Freyja said. "And he's going to be afraid of wanting it, because wanting it feels like choosing for you, and he understands that choosing for you is something he doesn't do." She paused. "It's going to be a complicated conversation."

"Most of our conversations are complicated," Elara said.

Freyja looked at her for a moment with the old eyes. "Sleep," she said. "The complicated conversations are better with sleep."

She left.

Elara sat alone in the office for a while longer. The documentation was unfinished in front of her. She sat and looked at the wall and she thought.

She thought for a long time. She thought the way she did her best thinking, which was without directing the thinking, without setting it toward a conclusion.

She let it run, and she let honesty be present in it, and honesty included things she had been keeping at arm's length and was now looking at directly.

She held it for a while. Then she thought about what she'd be giving up.

Not just the biological countdown but the character of mortal existence.

The urgency, the finite quality, the way every experience had the depth that finite things have, the depth of things that will end.

She had been a mortal her entire life and she knew mortal experience from the inside, and she knew that some of what she valued in herself the urgency, the intensity, the kind of commitment that came from understanding time as finite might be the product of mortality and might change.

She thought about Māia. Thirty-two years old, held in the resin for eight years, brought back to a world that had moved on without her, into a body that hadn't aged. The horror of that the time stolen, eight years. A life that had been suspended without her consent.

This was different. This was consent. This was choice.

Wasn’t it? She turned the question over.

The council wanted to preserve a resource.

Thor by Freyja's account would want it for her.

The operational situation wanted it, the ongoing engagement wanted it, everything around her wanted it.

Was a choice made inside that much wanting actually a free choice?

Yes. It was. Because she was who she was, and she had been making her own decisions since seventeen against the considerable weight of everything that wanted her to make different ones.

The weight of wanting around a decision was not the decision itself.

The decision was hers and she knew that and she trusted it.

She did not know what the decision was. Not yet. Not tonight.