But things didn’t get better as Odin visited the Jungle Realm after a while.
Odin stepped through the portal, expecting life to be abundant. Instead, what greeted him was winter and a familiar frozen landscape.
The massive trees that had stretched impossibly high were covered in thick frost. Their leaves, once crimson and amber and green, were blackened and frozen. Ice coated every branch, every trunk, weighing them down until so had cracked and fallen.
The pathways of light blue-grey stone were buried under snow. The golden sunlight that had filtered through the canopy was gone, replaced by the pale, cold light of the ice realm bleeding through.
Hundreds of birds lay frozen on the ground, with so of them missing their wings or other parts of their body.
Beneath the trees, Reinhard’s soul felt the last warmth bleed out of the realm. The colors, so vibrant in his mory, now seed washed out, as if the world had been overexposed to cold.
In the center of what had been a jungle’s green heart, a clutch of Frost Giants sprawled across the ground. They’d built a crude encampnt from the fallen limbs of the great trees, lashing timbers together with frozen vines.
One giant, his face painted with lines of soot and blood. He gnawed on the carcass of an animal so twisted by the cold that Odin couldn’t tell if it had once been.
Another had tipped back onto a throne of ice, his head thrown back in laughter, while a third attempted to arm-wrestle the fourth, their hands locked together in a contest of brute force, neither willing to concede.
The frost had not dulled the giants, it had only made them hungrier.
Odin’s approach did not go unnoticed, though the giants regarded him with indolent amusent. The nearest, a female larger than the rest, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, scattering blood and frost onto the snow at her feet.
"You have to leave." Odin said while trying again, summoning the authority he’d wielded not so long ago. "The realm is dying, and your presence is killing it."
The woman squinted, then grinned, exposing teeth the size of a man’s finger. "Don’t worry, it will regrow." She said, "They always do."
Odin took a step forward, feeling the cold bite through what little he wore. "What if it doesn’t? What if you’ve gone too far this ti? What if nothing ever grows here again?"
The second giant slamd down his drinking horn and let out a bellow of laughter, sending a ripple of snow off the edge of his seat. "Then the icy realm expands! More space for us." He spread his arms wide, gesturing to the ruined jungles. "And we find another to visit."
"Another realm to destroy, you an!" Odin felt old fury rising in him. The mory of the Light Realm’s wounds still fresh, he wanted to throttle them, shake sense into them, but he knew that was impossible.
The woman only shrugged. "The cycle of destruction and creation, it’s all the sa for everything. Only we are the eternal ones, and that’s the unfortunate thing, but alas, it’s sothing you will get used to one day."
Odin looked around, desperate for evidence of hope, but saw only more evidence of extinction. The smaller lives had long since frozen or burrowed themselves too deep to matter. The only living things left were the giants and the creeping ice that now spread across everything.
Reinhard felt Odin’s hands shake, a tremor that was not cold but rage, vibrating up his arms to his teeth. He wanted to scream, to curse the giants, curse the realms, curse whichever principle had made it possible for such creatures to exist and to destroy.
But he did none of that, instead he mustered the last of his rationality.
"If you go now." Odin said. "There may still be ti to heal what you’ve done."
One of the other giants, who’d been arm-wrestling, spat onto the ice. "No fun in that, the jungle realm was weak. It would have eventually died, it wasn’t like how it was the first ti we ca."
The fourth one, who had been silent, sighed and said. "At the beginning, it truly was an amazing place where we could eat all we wanted...Alas, now it’s just a husk of its forr self. If you were there with us, you would understand. Regardless, it was enough to satisfy our hunger, sothing you understand and would have done the sa."
Odin gritted his teeth. "We are not the sa."
They ignored him while the woman returned to her al, the arm-wrestlers resud their contest, and the other continued lying.
Odin stood his ground. "If you refuse, I will make you leave."
It was then that everything fell silent.
The giants turned as one, four pairs of eyes narrowing to icy slits and glee.
The woman rose to her full height, towering over even the tallest of giants. She wiped her hands clean on the pelt that hung from her waist, then leaned in until her face was only a few feet from Odin’s.
"You are small." She said evenly. "You are weak. You know nothing you will do will change the outco of it... So, why do you care so much for this place?"
"Because there’s nothing else worth caring for." Odin answered, surprising himself.
The woman considered this. "You could join us." She said at last. "Eat, drink, and grow strong. Or you can leave, like the rest."
Odin shook his head. "No. I’ll stand here until you go."
The giants looked at each other and then at him before they laughed out in delight. Then the first blow ca in a swift backhand that launched Odin a dozen yards through the snow, where he tumbled against the frozen carcass of a tree.
Pain lanced through his body, and for a mont, Reinhard’s vision darkened. He staggered to his feet, refusing to fall as he clinched his fist.
Odin tried again, forcing the power through his body, the way he had in the Light Realm. The energies responded, but sluggishly, as if the Jungle Realm itself was too numb to offer much aid.
Still, he drew what he could, feeling his muscles grow dense, his bones heavier. He rushed back at the woman, swinging a fist at her.
She caught the blow with one hand, barely flinching. "You have fury and chaotic violence within you." She said, almost kindly. "But you still lack the strength to make a difference."
The arm-wrestlers rose now, and soon the three surrounded him, while the sleeper watched with a smile.
They didn’t attack all at once. Instead, they toyed with him, shoving him back and forth with sledgehamr blows, laughing as he stumbled, fell, and rose again. Every ti he crashed to the ground, more of the snow stuck to his body, weighing him down.
Odin tried to fight them, tried to summon light, heat, anything that might drive them back. Once, he managed to blind one with a glow, but the giant only roared and swiped blindly until he regained his vision.
They were relentless, untiring, and with every minute that passed, the cold dug deeper into Odin.
Odin realized, in the middle of it, that this was what the giants ant. Not destruction for its own sake, but the joy of contest, the delight in resistance.
The fight was the point.
They would stay until there was nothing left to fight, and then they would move on, forgetting the realm they’d ruined in their wake.
After what felt like hours, Odin collapsed for the last ti.
The giants stood over him, breathing hard, but otherwise unhurt. The woman knelt beside him, her face soft with a strange kind of tenderness.
"You fought well." She said. "But it’s over."
She stood, signaling the others. "Let’s go. This place is finished anyway."
They collected what little they cared to bring and moved off, their steps shaking the ground.
The sleeper paused, glancing back at Odin, then raised his horn to him in a mocking salute. "See you next ti, tiny one."
Odin lay there staring up at the sky, now pale with the coming dawn. The pain was imnse, but the humiliation was worse. He had failed to protect the Jungle Realm, just as he had failed to preserve the Light.
The giants would be back, no matter where they went, and it was only a matter of ti.
He forced himself to rise, limbs screaming in protest. He slowly moved through the clearing, looking for survivors, but found none.
Even the smallest birds were now only delicate statues, soon to be ground to powder by the next storm.
There was nothing left to save.
Odin walked until his legs gave out, then crawled, then finally lay in the snow, unsure whether he wanted to get up at all.
It was in that mont, when surrender seed the only path, that he felt the gentle breath of Admula.
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