Free The Valkyrie Chronicles: Titans by Erik Schubach

and gave a playful smile back.
    That answered the two questions I had and father said, “Thank you Loki.”  He glanced at a chrono then added, “We will see you on the morrow.”  Then Loki cut the transmission.
    Then Odin turned to us.  “Now that that is handled the more pressing matter is...”  His eyes narrowed dangerously.  “...how do we get our people back?  Rhea is not answering any of our hails.”

Chapter 5 – A Warning
    We had strategized into the early morning hours before we retired to get some sleep.   We wouldn't do anyone any good if we were sleep deprived.  I slept restlessly.  I felt like I had failed my people.  It is the job of the Valkyrie to protect our innocents and ensure things like this didn't happen.  I am just a tool of violence, and in this case, my huge capacity for violence did us no good.
    When we woke and donned our armor, we heard Arina's entry chime in the great room of our quarters.  I grinned, even after all these eons she still acts like Kate's Second and prepared breakfast for us each day.  I loved the Little One with all my heart.
    Inatra was with her and Artemis came out of her room and we all ate solemnly.  She shared with us at long last, the details of the first and only meeting between the Olympians and the Titans.  Then she finished with, “Then when the Frost Giants returned and confronted us on our failure to fight the Titan's, they attempted to kill us all.  The beasts said that we were a failed experiment that needed to be terminated and reset.  We lost most of the Olympians who remained after Rhea had used her siren's song to lure our men away, and most of the population we had restored.  We were able to escape with fewer than one hundred.  We continued to evade and hide from the Jotunn until we found Olympus, the prefect hiding spot... in plain sight.”
    I laid a consoling hand on Artemis'. She said, “We have never known the fate of the others of our race who were enslaved by the Titans. Except for glimpses of their offspring, the Halflings that the Titans send out to hunt for us.”  Then she took a deep breath. “As our numbers grew slowly over the eons, having only twelve men in the genetic pool, we stopped procreating when we numbered five hundred.  Our genetic diversity wouldn't sustain much more inbreeding.”
    Then she chuckled.  “That's why none has ever won me over to their bed here in Valhalla... it is almost instinct for us Olympians to not breed.  It is a mental block I need to get over.  You have such great genetic diversity here.  I have almost forgotten what it is like to be intimate anymore.”
    I nodded slowly at that, I could not imagine what her race had gone through, they were an endangered species.  Even the Ragnarok, who were virtually annihilated by the Frost Giants so very long ago, had almost a half million people sprinkled across the galaxy to rebuild their race.  They now number twenty-three million.  A far cry from the twenty billion that used to live on this very planet, but an insurmountable number for a race that was thinned to just twelve males and eighty-eight females.
    Odin's beard, they had to breed from necessity, to restore their race.  Artemis was there!  Had she had been one of the ones to breed?  She never speaks about family or children.  Though we have been her friends for so many centuries, there is still much we don't know about our secretive Olympian.  Most of her long life she has had to think about what her race has been pressed to do to endure.  I can't imagine the things that may have bent their own morals to ensure the survival of their people.
    Olympians have an almost perfect genetic makeup, with such a dense chromosomal and DNA structure that their cells can regenerate almost infinitely.  We Asgard use nanites to accomplish the same, but to them, it is a natural ability.  They can heal almost any damage in days, their variable metabolism sees to that.  In all physical