To begin with, apologies for yesterday and uploading chapter 17 twice. I don't know how this site handles replaced chapters, so I don't know if any of my/this story's followers got any heads up, but I DID replace the 'false dimitri' with the true chapter 18.

So sorry about that.

Back on Tuesday when I edited and uploaded the doc for chapter 17, I goofed and labeled it 'chapter 18'. In the limited time I had, I couldn't find a way to re-name the chapter, so I just shrugged and said, "I'll remember that tomorrow."

Sure.

So, yesterday, when I uploaded the doc for chapter 18, I remembered and labeled it 'real chapter 18', then – because I'm a boob – I just went ahead and immediately forgot and posted chapter 17 again.

AND. What makes it better is that I never would have noticed that. I don't really checkup on the stories I write once they're established, I just add chapters. The only reason I noticed is because Wildhorses1492 – who is amazing, btw – let me know.

Long story short, so sorry, and thank you again to Wildhorses1492.

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When he woke he woke suddenly and powerfully with knowledge not of where he'd been or what he'd learned, but only of those who had been beside him. He remembered Frigga. She'd confided much in him those days. He recalled his father in the room, in a rage that he should not have been the first to know and how coolly Frigga had explained all she knew and sent him away. He recalled the reports and the questions and the orders given within the golden room. Frigga had scarcely left his side. She had shunned his throne, Hliskjalf – the all-seeing, which he had crafted that he might see the happenings of the Nine with his own eyes if Heimdal ever played him false. She had shunned it for his bedside.

He remembered these things, light-headed as he stood, as one remembers a dream, of which one was fully aware while asleep, but becomes muddied in the waking.

And more than that. Not only did he see. He understood.

It took him a day or two to recover his heart, from that place where he'd been, and to make sense of all he'd gained. To comprehend the power that lay just beyond the confines of his mind.

Frigga saw it, and she worried after him.

He dared not speak to her in those first days. When she looked at him he would hear the things she'd told him while he had slept and answer would be on the tip of his tongue when he realized she had in fact been speaking to him and said something very different from that which he had heard. He shook his head and claimed that he was not yet himself. Then he would go out alone to the garden.

On the evening of the third day he drew her out with him, to the gardens and he told her what he remembered of her admissions to him. How she was lonesome for home and her family, how foreign Asgard yet was to her, and most how she longed for a child and how she berated herself for her inability to provide him with an heir.

Combing her hair back from her face, he smeared away her sudden tears and promised her that he desired nothing more of her than her heart.

Gathering herself, she told him she had not known that he could hear her, in his sleep.

He did not tell her what words he had heard, breathed in the dark, of a stormbringer to be born to them. But he had a palace made for her, on the edge of the sea, where Asgard looked most like the place of her birth. And when it was done, he gave it to her.

Fensalir – the palace by the sea.

Seeing it for the first time, she was without words. But her eyes glowed and Odin knew that he had done well.

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It's the end of an era, and the dawning of the next. I'll be updating 'A Little More' tomorrow, for anybody who's interested where Frigga's head's at through all this. And back with more on Saturday!