FREYA HELVAR HAD just turned seventeen when yet another heartbreak had been delivered to her on a silver platter. It was mere days after she had finally earned her colours and received her first kefta. Finally, she had a kefta that meant more than simply symbolism. Something that was meant for more than pleasing the King.

She was led to the General's war room by Ivan, who had recently become one of the General's favourites – the bear claw amplifier hung around his neck was proof of that. His stern face remained as grim as ever, and he did not speak a single word the entire way.

Freya wasn't entirely sure why the General was calling her to him. She was not in command of the regiment she had been assigned to, and would not be for years if she ever actually reached such a rank. She did not know what he needed to tell her. All she knew from Ivan was that it was regarding the place where she was to be sent. The dark wood door at the end of the hall came to view faster than Freya had thought it would. She barely had time to sort her own thoughts before Ivan knocked on it and the General's voice called for her to come in.

She did so, turning back to the door for only a short moment to watch as Ivan shut it behind her. A deep inhale was enough to steel her for the moment, and she stepped further into the room. Her hands folded behind her back and she straightened her spine.

The General sat in a chair behind his mahogany desk.

"Moi soverenyi, you asked for me?" The General looked up from a piece of paper in his hand. There was a deep furrow between his brows, a show of his concentration. He set the document down and stood from his seat. He walked around the desk and towards her, eventually stopping a few feet in front of her.

"Yes, I did," he began, looking her up and down. For a moment, she thought she saw sympathy flash through his eyes. A cold hand gripped Freya's heart. "Your regiment is being sent to the Fjerdan front. I trust this won't be an issue."

Her breath caught in her throat when he said the words. The Fjerdan front. The battleground that separated from her home. From the burned-down village where she had grown up in. From the last of her family. The place that was forever marked in her memory by her father's death. They wanted her to go fight there now, to use her powers to help Ravka by killing her own people. Tears gathered in her eyes as she stared at the General.

Was Fjerda even her home anymore? She had spent a greater portion of her life in the Little Palace, the accent she had once had was almost gone, and she rarely followed any Fjerdan traditions. She had few Fjerdan friends here too, and most of them had forgotten about their homeland because of the way they would have ended up if they had stayed there. How she would have ended up if her powers had manifested in any other moment.

Freya had never realized her luck until now. She would have been dead, burned for being a witch. And her father might've shed a tear or two, but he wouldn't have stopped it.

Fjerda was where she had grown up though, where she had been happy and did not worry about anything. It was where her brother now was, where her sister was, where her mother was. There had been, up until now, a small hope in her that had said she would go back there eventually.

"If I go," she whispered with a quiver in her voice and shaking hands, "I could never go back to Fjerda."

Something softened in the General's gaze, a look that she had never seen on him. She knew that he understood the Grisha's strange predicament, despite being born and raised in Ravka. He was at least a hundred years old, though Freya sometimes got the inkling that he was perhaps a bit older – a poorly hidden secret in the Little Palace –, and had seen many stories just like Freya's own.

"Freya," he began, his voice gentle, as if soothing a crying child, "you never would have been able to go back." And wasn't that the truth? She would always be hated in her homeland. They would never accept her. Despite the terrible way she had been brought to the Little Palace, the General was her saviour, her shield, and her protector. Without him, she would be dead. Without him, she would have never learned control of her own powers. He had spent hours upon hours training her personally, something he had only offered to a few other Grisha.

A single tear fell passed the brim of her eye, sliding down her cheek and leaving a cold line in its stead. She would never be able to go back.

The small hope she had been holding onto dissolved in the palm of her hand, seeping between her fingers like grains of sand. She would never see her mother, her sister, or her brother again. The final dream of a little girl torn from her chest.

She wiped away the tear with a quick hand. The burn mark on her jaw felt incredibly taut as if something was pulling on it and straining the damaged skin.

"You can count on me, General," she said eventually. "I will do what has to be done."

The General nodded. "Good." He turned to walk back to his desk. Then, over his shoulder, he remarked, "There may be an amplifier waiting for you when you get back." Freya felt a shiver course through her. An amplifier, it was all she could hope for.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* 　　 *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

The wind near Ulensk was cold and harsh, beating down on their regiment even harder than the harsh storm. The fort was only a few miles away now and Colonel Sidorov did not want to waste any more time to take shelter. He was a tall man with so much muscle that Freya wondered if he was even real at times. His short and stocky neck sported a rough and jagged scar, white and faded from years of healing and Corporalki work. He was a powerful Inferni, but Freya had never actually seen him fight.

Just another hour, she kept on telling herself, pulling the hood of the cloak she had been given further over her face. The wind swept the rain directly into her eyes. She was not the only one suffering through these circumstances, it seemed. Luca and Vanya were somewhere behind her, and she swore she had heard Vanya complaining at least a million times by that point. Luca remained blessedly silent, but whenever Freya turned to look at him, he was curled in on himself and his shoulders were tense.

It had come as a surprise to Freya when she had learned that Luca and Vanya had been assigned to a regiment already. They were a year younger than her, only sixteen. Most Grisha did not earn their colours until at least eighteen years of age. Clearly, the Second Army was severely lacking in soldiers if the General was forced to send out child soldiers. Especially his own son.

The sky lit up for a few short moments when lightning struck, blinding Freya further. Then thunder cracked through the air. It was loud and deafening and Freya thought about using her power to make it quieter, but she doubted the Colonel would be happy about her doing something like that without an order.

Another crack of lightning and thunder. Freya blinked away the brightness, hoping her eyes would get used to the darkness of the night quicker. She was too busy focusing on that to notice that the sound that followed was not only the boom of thunder. A scream sounded through the storm as a gun fired somewhere to her right.

Freya's horse startled and she had to hold onto the reigns tightly to not be bucked off as it reared. She whipped her head around, the hood of her cloak falling away at the sudden movement. It was too dark to see anything properly and the light of the lanterns some of the other soldiers carried was too dim. Her eyes flicked between every small movement of shadow she saw, unsure if it was the attacker or just the movement of leaves.

Then there was a sickening wet crack. "Drüskelle!" someone shouted from the back of the line. Freya turned her head in that direction. A gasp hitched inside her throat. One of the soldiers had an axe embedded deep in her chest, staring down at it in shock. Freya wanted to cry out to her, but then someone was grabbing the back of her throat and pulled her down. 

A shout broke its way past her lips and she lashed her hand out. Her fist met the face of whoever had grabbed her and they let go. She had no time to wonder if the person was a friend or foe. She scrambled across the muddy ground, dodging the trampling hooves of the horses that tried to flee from the chaos. The sound of battle raged around her, the clinking of metal or metal, the shouted orders from the Colonel, the whizzing of bullets.

She pushed herself to her feet. She was utterly disoriented, the darkness and sudden flickering lightning dizzying her.

"Helvar!" the Colonel shouted from somewhere to her right. "Cut off the sound!" She did not know what sound he meant specifically, but she lifted her hands into the summoning position. She paused only for a moment. The soldiers needed to hear the enemy. She pulled her hands apart, and suddenly the raindrops and the thunder were completely silent. Everything was suddenly so much louder and clearer to her ears.

Someone was running straight towards her from behind. She whirled around on her heels, lifting her hands into a fighting position. A man with a ragged beard and a wolf's pelt around his shoulder charged towards her with an axe lifted high into the air.

It was only then that she realised what someone had shouted before. Drüskelle. Freya felt something lodge in her throat and her lungs falter. These were her people. Men born and raised in Fjerda. How was she supposed to fight them, hurt them, and potentially kill them? The few seconds of hesitation was an almost fatal mistake.

The drüskelle slashed with his axe at a downward angle. Freya lifted her forearms, blocking the axe just in time from coming down onto her chest. The blade cut through the fabric of her kefta like a knife through butter. Fuck, she thought, feeling her own flesh split and hot blood pour from the wound. So much for a blade-proof and bulletproof kefta. The axe must have been Fabrikator made too.

She did not have much time to scoff at the irony. The man shoved her to the floor, using his large form to topple her off balance. Her mind was ticking with ideas of what to do. She rolled out of the way of another axe blow and kicked the man in the shin. It did little in terms of subduing the drüskelle, but it bought her enough time to bull the dagger she had around her waist. It was not much, certainly not a pistol or a sabre, but it was something at least.

The man lunged at her and she pushed her arm forward to stab at it with the dagger. She felt the power of her own blow when the blade of the dagger hit the man's armour, hidden beneath his clothes. The contact of metal on metal reverberated through her wrist painfully. She lashed out again, this time actually cutting him when the dagger hit his shoulder. The man cried out in pain and let out something akin to a growl.

Freya tried to scurry away from him, but the muddy ground was wet and slippery and she did not have enough time to find enough leverage before the man was kicking her down again. The dagger flew from her hand. Freya cursed herself inwardly as she was flipped onto her back. A heavy booted foot slammed down onto her chest painfully, knocking the air out of her.

This is the end, she thought, looking up at the man with glassy eyes. She was to die this soon at the end of a drüskelle blade. A Fjerdan blade. She began to mutter a prayer to Djel beneath her breath, but the man must've heard her because he paused with the axe lifted high into the air. He let out a cruel laugh.

"Djel will not absolve you, drusje," he said in Fjerdan. And then he was bringing the axe down. Freya squeezed her eyes shut, preparing herself for the feeling of the axe splitting her chest wide open. But it never came. Instead, she hurt the man's grunt loudly, then gurgle as if he was choking.

Freya opened her eyes. The axe has fallen from his hand, buried deep in the mud. The drüskelle clutched at his chest, his eyes wide and bulging. Blood seeped from his nose and mouth. He fell to his knees, a seeping breath coming from between his gritted teeth. Freya turned to look over her shoulder.

She almost laughed in relief when she saw Luca standing not far from her, arms outstretched as he clutched the drüskelle's heart with his Heartrender power. There was a stern and determined look fixated on his face, fire burning in his striking quartz eyes. By then, the man was already in the mud, the last wisps of life leaving him. Finally, Luca let go of him. The drüskelle lay dead and unmoving.

Luca rushed to her, grabbing her arm and pulling her onto her feet. Her knees felt wobbly and unsure. The hammering of her heartbeat against her ribcage was borderline painful and it made her sway for a moment. She could hardly inhale without it being shaky and unfocused.

"Thanks," she breathed, grasping Luca's shoulder to stabilise herself. Luca kept his hold on her, not letting go until he was sure she could stand without toppling over. The sound had returned amidst her scuffle with the drüskelle, her focus taken up by something different. The rain battered down on them, washing away the blood from her forearms.

"Happy to help," Luca said sarcastically, though Freya knew he would never leave her to die if he had the chance to save her. The fighting had stopped, most of the drüskelle dead or fleeing. Only two of the dead bodies surrounding them belonged to Grisha. The woman who had been killed in the beginning and a man she hardly knew. The Colonel was shouting orders at a few other Heartrenders. Luca let out a scoff, followed by a dry laugh. "Welcome to the Fjerdan front."

Author's Note

Kinda a short chapter today, but I hope you enjoyed it! Nikolai comes back next chapter and then there will be only a few more chapters before we get to season 1. At that point I'll start writing some of the other fics in this series.