Within those ice-laden waters his small sailboat swam, the ghostly winds whispering their frost through his thick red beard and long hair.

He stood with one foot on a wooden seat and the other on the floor. His broad chest and shoulders blocking the sight of the entire boat behind him. On his thick fur cape covering his armor lay dried blood and wetness from massacred enemies and the unforgiving snow that before blocked his vision. A necklace with a magic talisman inlaid hung from his neck and clanged against his gold breastplate as she rolled and creaked in the calm waters. His fur boots were strapped with twine and lined by fur thickly.

The Arctic was unforgiving, but once held more lives. A curse, caused by the loss and tortured floating of agitated bodies, loomed over the great glaciers within dark clouds, and most life found the sun’s absence too much to bear. Only the fish survived, and their existence was next threatened, as the warriors who walk the bottom of the polluted depths swiped at the marine life in their anger and hate, weighed down by their armor. These armies of crashed hordes had taken residence beneath the curves and capillaries of the Arctic Sea, sorrowfully swallowed by uncaring waves and cold waters, dragged and digested by starved and lazy leviathans who had swam for millennia, not knowing when death would hither come and slay them.

Now Forseti saw a large glacier ahead and eyed it intently. The snowstorm had come and gone multiple times and too swiftly. The air was oddly humid, and the boat seemed to gradually warm through his thick boots. The air smelled of frozen rot, anguish, sorrow, and regret.

Then with lightning strikes upon the dying ocean around him the world boiled and the waves roiled. The sky took a bright red hue, as if a god had been gruesomely murdered and his blood leaked into space’s gutters.

He felt a slight pressure on the back of the boat and quickly turned around to meet his gaze with a monster, skinny and clad in frost-conquered armor. It moved slowly, loosening its limbs and jaw, ice bursting where joints moved, woken from its sleep and here in the Land of Ice it opened its white eyes and sprung a screech so loud Forseti covered his cold-crimsoned ears for fear of their collapse.

Quickly he withdrew his sword from the fine leather scabbard, but before a strike could land, other hands grasped the sides about and that icy water which preserved barely remnants of cold, gray, undying flesh dripped lazily off the corpses as they pulled and pushed aboard.

Now he leaped into action, cutting the first monster in half diagonally, so that his arm, head, and half his chest slid down with a final groan and his torso fell sloppily into the water with a spew of black blood.

The others and their frozen limbs unlocked, but their shrunken brains were revealed by Forseti’s just sword and the ocean quickly filled with the dead’s memories and night-dark fluids.

But more and more appeared, bobbing to the surface, floating and sinking, angered at their awakening, and soon the irregular movements of frost-nipped hair moving through the ice-laden water surrounded the boat. Forseti’s god-like muscles and stamina kept the singing sword swinging and covered with the death-dark blood of restless souls who could not withdraw their cruelly frozen weapons.

So now Forseti became Death’s Deliverer, and with great skill he slaughtered the thousands of soul-mined warriors, returning to deep rest what hopefully deserved it. There on the ocean floor sunk the loosened corpses, now free of their torment but lost from their families. Now the fish tore their bodies voraciously, finally able to complete Life’s circle and the starved mass of fish moved under the sea as one entity.

Now sea as black as ink on white paper, he sat in blood and kept sail.