52.024° N, 123.691° E

Helplessness is a raging sorrow and a sorrowing rage.

He fell through eight layers of skies off the Bifrost, and the impact created a crater in the middle of an eastern forest.

The booming noise awoke the sleeping forest—the echo scattered birds and rodents whose activity invited the indigenous predators to hunt. The shake of the earth signaled the heavens that His banishment had commenced, and everything was having an early morning.

The air surrounding him smelled of the fresh aroma of the soil and the searing stench of his flesh. His skin was almost completely burnt off during the fall. However, the pain seemed to be overlooked as he got up on his feet with ease and started to clear his fractured mind and concussed skull.

If memory flows like a river, his was a flood made of whirlpools.

As confusion and anxiety overwhelmed him, a calming and familiar scent distracted him and calmed his nerves. Using the scent as guidance, he located a plant yards away from the crater.

The tree barely reached the height of his knees; half of its leaves appeared to be dim and decaying, and the other half seemed to be healthy and lively. It was impossible to assume whether the plant was growing or dying.

There were no flowers, nor fruits. He wondered which part of the plant created the familiar smell, but his tangled mind could not provide any answers.

“Nourish the tree and wait for its fruition.” The tree whispered to him, or at least he thought so then. “Epiphany awaits you, o liberator mine. The offerings are here; begin the ritual.” The voice felt familiar, but then again, everything sounded familiar to him.

The smell of blood stopped him from thinking, albeit there was nothing his mind could figure out then.

Beasts were drawn to the crash site. Vicious ones. The local mortals called those approaching ursine creatures Lí Lì, which literally translates to raccoons’ strength. The misnomer was an obvious understatement. Those restless predators were armed with avian talons and giant porcine tusks. Their bulky and snouty heads resembled a mixture of warthogs and bears. The local bards named them Hog-bears to make sure everyone knew what they were describing in their stanzas.

They were there for him. An outlander with no scale or fur could make a great early breakfast.

The local woodcutters specialized in tracking those hog-bears since those foolhardy creatures always leave logs and twigs behind them. Nothing survives a hog-bear’s charge in this forest.

The sounds of crushing woods and heavy breathing were closing. He lowered his stance and prepared his body for dodging or jumping.

The sun was barely showing, and everything was dim and grey.

Then he saw it, the large, arching, and pale tusks of those feared and revered beasts. Like three charging calvaries with their proud lance drawn, the hog-bears lowered their heads and sprinted without looking at what was in front of them. It is simple, brutal, yet effective, and they could destroy a whole village with twenty humans in only four charges.

As the tip of the tusk closed on his torso, he jumped and backflipped on the back of one of the hog-bears with his back. His weight alone could do anything to its back or its neck, so he sat up, pinned its neck with his legs, and attempted to reach its left tusk.

The Lí Lì noticed something fell on its back and started choking its neck. It slowed down and started to shake its massive head. The sudden shake almost made him fall off its body. The tusk was too much of a reach, and he decided to go for its ears. He grabbed both hog ears to keep himself stable on top of its head.

Felt pain in its ear, the hog-bear stopped shaking its head and moving. It raised its head, changed direction, and started to sprint towards a tree that was thick as two humans. It was going to charge through the tree and use the impact and kill him.

He noticed its intention and decided to jump off its back as soon as its head hit the tree. The timing was all that mattered. He held his breath, slightly loosened his legs around the neck of the hog-bear, and released the hog ears from his grasps.

The tactic was sound, but nature had other plans. The second the hog-bear no longer felt the pressure around its neck during the charge, it decided to swing its massive head while sprinting at full speed. Such a move was risky, even for the crude predator. With such a high speed and rapid movements, the hog-bear could hurt its neck or tusks.

It appeared fortune favored the beast rather than the banished Immortal. Seconds later, the hog-bear was stumbling around due to disorientation and slight dizziness; except for a snapped tusk, it suffered no injuries. On the other end, he got launched yards away and hit his chest against a rock-solid trunk.

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He heard the alarming cracking sound coming from his chest. Probably a broken rib, he thought. Then he felt a burning sensation in his chest and liquid blocking his trachea. Sitting by the roots of the tree, he coughed out a mouthful of blood, wiped his mouth with a hand, spitted out more blood, and stood up.

Well, fortune did not have to favor an Immortal in the first place. He was a banished spirit, but a spirit nonetheless. Pain and internal bleeding were mere temporary discomfort to him. In his other hand was an arching, pale, and sharp piece of tusk. He managed to grab on to the hog-bear’s tusk when he was being shaken off by it. The reckless hog-bear used too much force that it snapped its own tusk.

In other words, it had provided him with a weapon.

The two younger and smaller Lí Lì were wandering around and waiting for their matriarch to make the kill. Their saliva kept drooling uncontrollably as the pungent stench spread across the forest—their eyes, unwavering from their strange yet dangerous prey.

The matriarch recovered from the minor disorientation and was enraged by the loss of her tusk. A snapped tusk meant someone would defeat her in a duel and take away her territory. Tusks were more than hunting weapons or digging tools. More majestic tusks meant fewer challengers; fewer challengers meant secured domain and secured territory kept their hungry mouths fed. Nature is as unforgiving as it ever has been and will be.

It was time for a bloody conclusion. The matriarch and the immortal stared at each other, lowered their bodies, and simultaneously charged at each other. Between them was the crater he made, about three feet deep in the center. If the beast were to jump up to attack, he would slide down and attack its throat, chest, or abdomen. If the beast were to lower its head and make a sweep, he would jump up and mount its back.

The matriarch chose to leap over and deal the killing blow with its talons with only one tusk. He followed through with the plan and returned the snapped tusk back to its owner, just right through the heart, though. The tusk punctured the matriarch’s heart and gave her a quick death.

Any creature’s carcass meant feasts for those omnivores, even the carcass of their kin. The two younger hog-bears ignored his existence and went straight for the fresh corpse. The bone-crushing and flesh-tearing sound somehow angered him.

No one takes his trophy from him. The corpse belonged to him because he fought for it. Staring at the shaking tails and the stinking rear end of the two opportunists and cannibals, he picked a piece of birch twig and snapped it in two on his knee, and charged at the unsuspected hog-bears.

He hopped onto the neck of one of them and stabbed it in the back of the head. The birch severed the connection of the skull and the creature’s spine and put it down instantly. He jumped onto his next victim and tried to finish the fight as soon as possible in the same fashion. However, he was not fast enough as the beast heard him and made a step backward. With the support of its strong legs and an upward swing of its head, the tusks found his torso the exact moment his birch met its eyeball.

The birch punctured the orbital bones and made its way into the hog-bear’s brian. Compared to the merciful incisions he made on his victims, they repaid him with a hole in his chest and a fracture in his waist. Laying on the ground, he was shocked to discover the absence of recovery and strength. He felt cold and stiff, and colors started to fade away from his sight. He was clueless yet positive that his body was shutting down like a mortal due to missing organs and blood loss. He fell alongside the hog-bear, with a tusk impaling his body. His numbing and seared skin felt warmth from the rising sun.

He moved his eyes, the only few remaining muscles he had control over. There he saw it, a fully grown pomegranate tree. The tree was unnaturally oversized, and so were its flowers and fruits.

Pomegranate, sacrifice, ritual, escape, hound, death, friend, betrayal, family.... Memories of the past reappeared as words to serve him as reminders. He vaguely remembered he made someone a promise. He was trying his best to piece up his memories, but his body gave out first.

“Ko...ree!” A name flashed through his mind. With his last strength, he cried out that name as if it could stop his bleeding.

What a horrible and humiliating defeat. He thought.

A touch of fruity aroma awakened him.

His eyes were still closed, but he had already begun to chew and taste. He slowly opened his eyes and swallowed the exotic fruit in his mouth. Strangely, the aftertaste was bitter and sour.

"Slow down, your kardiá, uh, your divine-heart is repairing and transforming your body. There may be some discomfort. " A familiar and soothing female voice greeted him.

Laying with his back against the tree, he turned his face and captured a glimpse of a canine head approaching him. He tried to stand up from the ground but unexpectedly stepped on the moss beside the tree. Slipped and fell, he landed on his rear end.

The canine figure beside him laughed with a female voice. "Ha, I told you to take your time. You are not a Vanir anymore; your body recovers differently no; it might take a while until you can talk or fight again." The voice’s owner took off the hood made out of a canine’s head and revealed a pale and alluring side of the face that could silence the most populated festivals. There was serenity and somberness to her beauty.

"I am Persephone. I have just returned to the earth from the underworld. You may not remember me, it’s fine. The fall through the realms probably stripped your power and your memory."

He was still as bewildered as the moment he hit the ground and made that crater. Without any time to process any information, he quickly discovered his lower body was covered by brown fur, and a pair of hoofs appeared where his feet were.

Seeing him staring at his legs, Persephone explained: "When I came back from the underworld, your injury almost killed you. Well, I was partially to blame, and my mother Demeter did not mention that the ritual would require divinity. Anyway, when I was here, your kardiá was collecting blood and flesh to reconfigure your injured body. But your chest was nailed on the tusk, so the process could not complete. I had to move your body from the tusk. It looks like your kardiá mixed up some codes from the dead beasts to heal you.”

He was eager to ask her more. However, his consciousness cannot be expressed into language. Grunty noises came out of his body as if his mouth had forgotten how to speak. He could feel the change in his body: the stiffness of bones reshaping themselves, the tension of skin expanding and thickening, and the itch of thick furs punctured his pores.

"It seems that your kardiá conflicts with the pomegranate I gave you. These mediums of life and death can cause your body to recover and decay simultaneously. Your kardiá should be frantically re-editing your body with all the blood and flesh it can find by now. Your body would be more and more like those creatures, just lay there and wait for your body to be reconstructed and hardened. Fear not, I am here for you. The ritual has established a bond between us. Well, as you would say, we are crickets tied by the same string now.”

The rising sun greeted them with a gust of gentle and soothing wind, which sent warmth down his spine. The divinity-infused words of the spring goddess finally comforted and calmed him. He leaned on the trunk, relaxed every muscle he could control, and let his body adapt to the changes. A sense of deja vu reminded him that he had undergone such metamorphosis before.

He laid there, resting and allowing his memories to come back as words again: crickets, past, family, exploitation, gift, escaping, hellhound. However, those were not his memories; those were hers. That is how divinity works. Divinity came from memory and emotion, strengthened by words and deeds, and empowered immortals like coals sustained fire.

“That’s right, take a break.” Persephone sat on her knees right next to him, reaching out her hands to his temple. “Here, let me show you what I remember about you; this might help you.”

With a flash of bright light blinding him for a brief moment, his mind was brought back to the first time the two of them met--