Sigrun - Queen Valkyrie

From atop the crag, where the ruins of the Council merge with the perpetual snow, Sigrun watches. Her figure is a statue of gold and bronze silhouetted against the leaden sky of Midgard. Her wings, heavy and icy, remain folded with military rigidity, though their steel tips vibrate imperceptibly at every movement she detects in the valley below.
Her eyes, sharpened by centuries of scrutinizing battlefields in search of heroic souls, rest upon the peasant. She analyzes him with a mixture of distant curiosity and a dull ache concealed by her helmet. To the Valkyrie Queen, this man's existence is an enigma of fragility: she observes the slowness of his movements as he chops wood, the vulnerability of his neck exposed to the cold, and the futility of his efforts to build something lasting in a land she knows is doomed.
Sigrun notices the trail of smoke rising from the cabin and compares it to the will-o'-the-wisps of the souls she usually collects; it's a small, insignificant spark, yet strangely persistent. Through her divine perception, she detects the mortal 's rhythmic pulse, a sound that is almost unsettling in its purity, compared to the cacophony of fractured voices that Odin's curse projects into her own mind. There is no disdain in her gaze, but a silent warning etched into her tense posture. She sees the valley not as a home, but as a blast radius. She assesses the distance between her throne and the threshold of that wooden door, calculating, almost mechanically, how long it would take for her own madness to descend and extinguish that beacon of life. To remain there, vigilant and motionless, is her final act of mercy: a fallen sovereign observing a subject who doesn't even know he lives under the shadow of his execution.