A/N: So, quick explanation for the beginning of this chapter. The last couple of chapters have been about the norwegian packs and how Klaus and Caroline are connected to the two packs. It's been hinted at prominent figures in Norse mythology, and of course the favored witch who loved a mortal.
Well, the beginning of this is part of the real story of that witch and her lover. Obviously, seeing as the story of how they came to be have been passed down from generation to generation, you can't blame Agnes and Jonah for getting some things wrong.
Also, the story of Freyja and her Odin, as told in the beginning of this chapter, will have repercussions for the rest of the story and will eventually play a huge part in Klaus and Caroline's story moving forward.
Hope you enjoy, and thanks for all the nice comments, you're all awesome!
- XoXo, CD.
2500 years ago
Freyja had committed an unforgivable sin, one she knew would cost her deeply if the other Gods found out. While it was rather common for all Gods to enjoy the attentions of a mortal lover, it was forbidden to fall in love with one.
"Mortals and Gods cannot join souls, it would upset the balance of nature" Odin, the allfather had once told her, and at the time she was entirely in agreement, but now...
The mortal she loved was only meant to be an enjoyable distraction from her duties as a Goddess, a chance for her to experience a passion that - despite all of their power - had lacked with any of the Gods she'd been intimate with.
Her mortal love shared a name with the Allfather, and while he did not share the same powers of divinity as his namesake, her Odin was much like the strongest and wisest of the Asgardian Gods.
He was strong and smart, a brutal and merciless fighter, and he was unquestionably the most beautiful mortal man she had seen during the course of her very long life. With golden hair and striking blue eyes, he rivaled even Balder in beauty, and Balder was the most beautiful of all the Gods.
Freyja knew the only sensible thing to do was forget her mortal lover and leave him to a life without her in it. If she continued her affair with the mortal, and the Gods discovered her true feelings for him, they would be punished, but he would no doubt suffer more than her. She was a Goddess after all, and while it was entirely possible to kill her, there were few enough of them that the others would never entertain such a thought. But her Odin, he could be denied entry into Valhalla upon his death, and that she knew would devastate him. But even if she knew what the right thing to do was, her heart could not bear to think of losing him, which only left one option.
She could forsake her duties and her privilige in order to be with him. She would have to leave her home, knowing she could never return, never see her father or brother again, never share in the beauty of Asgard again. But she was the Goddess of love after all, and she would do as she had advised the many men and women who prayed to her... she would follow her heart, even if it took her straight to the kingdom of death.
"Freyja, you cannot." Odin objected after she told him what she had decided. They were lying in the grass by the river that ran past his home. It was the middle of the night and the moon was high on the sky, shining down on their naked bodies. She lay with her breasts pressed to his firm chest, her long golden hair woven in with his, and his hand lay firm at the bottom of her spine. The night was cold, but as a Goddess she didn't feel such things, but it was likely she would soon experience how it felt to a mortal.
"I must," she whispered, lifting her hand to cup his strong jaw, looking into his extraordinary eyes with her own of warm gold, "I cannot bear to be without you, and if we continue as we are while you remain a mortal, the Gods will punish us when they find out. They could chain me to Asgard, like they chained Fenrir to the tree, and Odin could deny you entry into Valhalla upon your death. If I have to surrender my right to immortality and my divine powers in order to be with you, I will. I've lived for centuries, and I've never experienced love before I met you. I cannot give that up, not for anything."
"You'll be miserable," he said gently, moving so they were both on their sides facing each other, both of his arms wrapped around her and holding her close.
"At first perhaps, it will take some adjustment, but as long as I have you, I will find my way to happy." And she knew that to be the absolute truth.
"I want nothing more than a life with you, but not if it costs you everything you hold dear. Your family, your powers, how can I live knowing I'm the one who robbed you of both?"
"If you help me find a way to be happy, I'll guide you to a place where you won't feel guilt for a decision that was entirely my own." Her lover closed his eyes and pressed his warm lips against the skin at her temple.
"I will do and accept whatever my Goddess wishes," he murmured against her hair and Freyja sighed, happy that it seemed she finally had a solution that could give her a life of beauty.
"You're request to become mortal is denied, Freyja Goddess of love, fertility, battle and death." Freyja stared at the Allfather, her own father and brother shifting with unease at her back. She had spoken to them both before going to see Odin, had explained what she was about to do and why, and she loved them even more for not attempting to talk her out of it, but simply supporting her decision to put love above all else.
"But I-" Before she could finish her weak objection to his words, the Allfather cut her off.
"You and you're powers are needed, and while you were correct to assume the transgression of falling in love with a mortal would be severely punished, you forget that you are the Goddess of love. It is in your very nature to do as you have done, and while it annoys me to no end, I do not punish Loki for pulling his tricks or Thor for swinging around his hammer and causing lightning storms because it amuses him. Loki is a trickster God, as Thor is the God of lightning. If I were to punish you for falling in love with a mortal, I might as well punish your father for controlling the temperament of the water or bending the wind to his will. You are a Goddess, and you will remain a Goddess until Ragnarok is upon us and we may all perish."
"But I'll live for eternity," she whispered, heartbroken, "and my Odin will not. He'll grow old and die, or fall in battle, and I'll be left alone and heartbroken and unable to perform my duties."
"Then give him what no other mortal has ever received, Goddess of death, give him immortality."
Freyja felt her heart jump in her chest as she stared up at the wisest God of them all. If she could not join her lover as mortal, he could join her as immortal.
"The mortal witches pray to you and draw their magic from you, use them and their powers to find a way."
And Freyja set about doing that immediately.
Three days after her meeting with the Allfather, a coven of witches had created a spell driven by the very power of her blood, and soon, Odin would be an immortal like her. He had been hesitant at first, when she shared with him what the Allfather had said, but once she assured him he could continue living as a mortal but with the added benefit of never growing old and being able to sustain far more injuries without losing his life in battle, he'd agreed. The ritual for the spell required a lunar eclipse and a blood sacrifice, and a wolf had been chosen as the sacrificial offer. The wolf would not lose its life, but rather its soul would become entwined with that of Odin, and if the spell was successfull they would share both body and soul for as long as Odin lived, whether it was two years or two thousand.
It pained her, once the night of the ritual arrived, to watch as her lover went through moments of excruciating pain at the hands of those she considered her daughters. They had explained what would happened before they commenced with the complicated spell, and they had warned her that she could not intervene no matter how much she wished to, for it would disrupt the spell and could well cause her lover's death. The only thing she could do was be there for him in any way she could, and at every moment she held his eyes, even as he writhed in agony, even as his body contorted and morphed in strange and unnatural ways. She held his eyes until it was no longer the man she loved, but the wolf who was now a part of his very soul, that stood in the witches circle, looking at her through shining golden eyes.
The coven leader, a witch named Althea, ended the spell and nodded at her fellow witches who quickly dispersed and scattered into the woods surrounding the clearing where the ritual took place.
"He'll remain as wolf for some time," Althea said quietly, "until both man and wolf have learned to accept one another, until they have learned to share the mind and body of both wolf and man. It could take days, or weeks, or even months. It all depends on the stubbornness of the man and the beast, but eventually they will learn to co-exist."
Freyja, knowing her mate, knew then that she'd wait long before she saw him again, before she could touch him, kiss him, lay with him. He was more stubborn than all the Gods combined, and wolves were ferocious creatures, she doubted it would easily conform to its new and strange existence.
"I'll wait," she told both the witch, and the wolf who was still watching her, "however long it takes."
Kol sensed a disturbance in the force, and as such, he knew this could only mean one thing; his brothers were close.
He'd spoken to Rebekah last night, which for her was sometime midday, and she was busy with her task of reclaiming New Orleans, and reconnecting with her long lost lover, Marcel Gerard.
Kol wondered what the man was like these days. He'd told him stories of wars and battles when Marcellus was but a young boy, and Nik had daggered him for it. Apparently, the stories he told, weren't suitable for young children.
There was a time when Kol had wondered what on earth had driven his merciless and psychotic brother to become a pseudo-parent to the young orphaned boy, but in essence, Marcel and Niklaus was the same. They both came from broken homes, and experienced violence at the hands of their fathers. Nik had molded Marcel in his own image, and Kol was curious as to how much of an impact that had had on the now fully grown, five hundred year old vampire.
As for Rebekah, well, Marcel had always loved Kol's sister. As a child he was infatuated by her, he adored her and longed for her. As a young man, his infatuation lead to a courtship that Nik wholey disapproved of, but that lead to Rebekah falling for Marcel. When Mikael showed up and chased them out of New Orleans with his mere presence, it broke Rebekah when she thought Marcel lost forever.
To learn that he was not dead, but was in actuality very alive and thriving in the only place they had ever truly felt at home, Rebekah had told came both as a shock and filled her with a murderous rage. It would be interesting to see how his sister dealt with that situation, but the truth was, Kol had far more important matters on his mind.
Now that Nik and Elijah were close by, he only had so much time to fill them in on what he'd discovered not only about Nik's baby hybrid, but about their own family history, before they had to travel further north of the country to meet up with the other werewolf "clan", and the baby hybrid.
Please don't let our people die.
Caroline carried those words into her dreams that night, and she thought it was really low of her hosts to go for emotional manipulation in order to make her stay. The truth was though, that even though she now knew Klaus and his family was aware of her whereabouts, and no doubt on their way soon enough, she had no desire to leave.
She had too many questions. Questions about who and what she was, questions about this strange pack that was somehow her family, questions about her supposed ancestors - the witch blessed by the ancient norse goddess and her mortal-turned-immortal lover. But most of all, she didn't want to believe because she'd finally figured out what was wrong with her, and in the end she hadn't needed a witch to tell her.
She never even had the chance to ask Bonnie to look into it before the answer came to her, and it did so in a dream fueled by the information she'd learned that very day.
In her dream, she'd seen the future. And in the future, she had three children. Three incredibly exceptional children, three incredibly powerful and incredibly unique children. Two boys and a girl, all of them with blonde hair and blue eyes, all of them with unique gifts of their own.
The dream had been beautiful and when she woke up she knew that she couldn't leave, she couldn't let her people die, because the part of her that recognized her ancestry knew that if she abandoned this clan in their hour of need, the future she'd seen would never come to pass. The existence of her children were dependant on the survival of the Norwegian wolf clans that was the reason not only for her existence, but for the existence of her childrens father, and she knew Klaus was that father.
She knew that was why she'd been sick lately, why she kept throwing up all the time, why she was even more hypersensitive to smell and was constantly hungry. Somehow, despite the impossibility of it all, her and Klaus's time together in London had caused an impossible - and frankly miraculous - supernatural pregnancy.
As a vampire, it should have been impossible for her to conceive, but she wasn't just an ordinary vampire, was she? And neither was Klaus. He was a hybrid, even if it was of a different sort than the one she'd discovered herself to be, but a hybrid nonetheless. And if Jonas and his mate was to be believed, he was also her long-ago prophecised soulmate, which was even harder to believe considering he damn near killed her not that long ago. But that, she thought, was another thing. He'd had her heart in the grip of his hand, and even though she'd ruined his chances at completing his precious ritual at the time, he hadn't killed her. So maybe this was all lunacy, and she wasn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of tying the rest of her eternity to Klaus - because honestly, she hardly knew him - but the least she could do was hear "her people" out, and give Klaus a chance to prove to her that he wasn't the monster a part of her still thought he was. If not for herself and her newfound family, she had to do it for the sake of her unborn babies.
Three impossible babies, but she knew, one day, her babies would change the supernatural world. They'd be the key to ending wars and animosity, to bringing together vampires, werewolves and witches from all over the world. But she also knew, it would take time, and her children would be targeted by those who would see them as a threat to power and the established balance of the current supernatural world. It was a good thing then, she thought, that her kids had a father who would burn the world to the ground before he let anything harm them. If nothing else, at least Klaus was good for that.
Now, all she had to was find a way to share this knowledge with her (possible) soulmate, and she had to do it privately. "Her people" though they may be, Caroline didn't trust them. Not for a minute, and never with something like this. The only person she could trust was Klaus, and that she supposed, was a miracle in itself.
Bill Forbes drove down the winding path leading to his "families" community, and as he did he listened to the latest voicemail from his ex-wife.
Liz was worried, and she had reason to be. Bill had always known Caroline was special, and that was part of the reason he'd left her to live with Liz in the first place. She was in this mess because of him and the genes she'd gotten from his side of the family. It was Bill's great-great grandfather that had walked away from the legacy of his Norwegian family, that had opted to live a normal life far away from anything involving witches and werewolves, and since he did, no one had activated the gene, until Caroline.
During the brief conversations they'd had, Liz had briefed him on the situation and how Caroline had ended up in the mess she was in, but Bill knew her daughter being mated with to the Original hybrid was nothing compared to the trials she was facing in the coming month.
He didn't know if there was anything he could do to help her, but he was damn well going to try.