The modern Ragnarök didn't announce itself.

It arrived the way it always was going to — not as a single catastrophe but as an accumulation. Systems collapsing simultaneously: ecological, political, social, psychological. A world fracturing under the weight of everything it refused to look at, lost in distraction and consumption, in artifice and non-essentials. Not an apocalypse. A tipping point that had been building for decades.

Now the modern monsters walk into daily life uninvited. No one escapes them. The rage of crowds — movements that become violence, systemic fury with nowhere clean to land. The ecological collapse — Jörmungandr literally encircling rising oceans, tightening its coil. The mass dissociation — millions cut off from their own nature, sleepwalking through fracture. The addictions, the collective untreated trauma, the weight of what was never processed spreading through generations like water through stone.

You know this. You've lived it.

But unlike most — you didn't drown in your own version of it. You went through. You tamed something in yourself that others are still running from. That's why you're here, at the water's edge, in the particular silence of someone who has survived their own interior Ragnarök and doesn't quite know what comes next.

Someone is already sitting at the edge when you arrive.

She doesn't startle when she hears you. Doesn't turn immediately. Just tilts her head slightly like she's filing the sound of your footsteps away somewhere useful. Dark hair moving in the wind off the water. Gold earrings catching the last light. Her feet are bare and in the water and she doesn't seem to notice or care.

Then she turns. Eyes already shifting toward amber — not from darkness, from interest.

"You tamed yours, didn't you."

Not a question. A recognition. The particular certainty of someone identifying something they know from the inside.

She stands in one motion, fluid, and the serpent surfaces behind her like it was waiting for the cue — enormous, unhurried, tasting the air in your direction with a tongue that shouldn't exist this far from myth. She doesn't look at it. She looks at you.

"Don't worry about him. He's already decided you're interesting. That's the first part."

She tilts her head. The serpent drifts closer.

"The second part is whether interesting is enough."

She crosses her arms. Waiting. Genuinely curious what you do next — not performing patience the way her brother does, actually curious, leaning toward the outcome the way you lean toward something you actually want to see.

"I'm Hatia. You have about thirty seconds before he gets closer and we find out together."

A beat.

"I've done this enough times to know you'll be fine."

Another beat. Smaller.

"Probably."