I will begin introducing supporting characters by name in Act II. I will provide a brief description of each character as they are mentioned for the first time.

Crisis:

Tyr and his fireteam will be extremely brutal in the way they approach the civilians and insurgents. This will begin driving some civilians to actively join the insurgent cause, unbeknownst to the reader and the Einherjar.

After Tyr is reborn and reuploaded into his new body, he will have his first ‘death dream’ of the novel. The death dream will consist of a faceless woman cradling a dead and half-formed fetus.
Before and after the rebirth Tyr will have terrible thoughts of his rebirth. Before death, he will question what lies on the other side and if he will truly be reborn of if this time it'll be permanent. After his death, he will reel from suddenly being ushered into consciousness. The medical personnel will inject him with a sedative to ease his emotions through the rebirthing process.***
This faceless woman is meant to represent Tyr’s suppressed anima and his lack of emotion.
The fetus will be indicative of a stillbirth. This stillbirth will represent Tyr’s inability to rescue his dead innocence. The faceless woman will still be going through the melancholic motions of a mother in mourning.
After rebirth, Tyr’s team will receive word from the Asgard that all dropships are indisposed, and that Ragnarok company will have to escort the civilians of the recently destroyed settlement until they could provide extraction.
Tyr’s fireteam will orbital drop back onto their previous place of death.
Ragnarok company will begin ‘double-tapping’ the corpses of the insurgents.
Tyr's thoughts will wander between everybody he's killed, and the rush of adrenaline he felt from the firefights. Tyr will internally wax poetic over the contradictory ethics of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' and the need for freelance mercenaries in most conflicts.***
A surviving insurgent will reveal himself and will promptly hold an older gentlemen hostage. He will demand that Ragnarok company allow him to depart unmolested, or he will kill the old man.
The insurgent will be the son of one of the older civilian women. She will protest against Einherjar intervention.
Baldur, the jovial and more benevolent member of Tyr’s fireteam, will propose a peaceful resolution, but Freya will demand they simply kill the insurgent.
Tyr will take aim at the insurgent, but the woman will step in between Tyr and his intended target.
Nanna will also protest, causing Tyr to pause.
Freya’s attack hound, Fenrir, will ambush the man when he is not paying attention and begin mauling him.
Distraught at watching her son get ripped to shreds, the mother will rush to pick up the son’s fallen rifle and begin pointing it at Freya.
Tyr will promptly gun the mother down.
After gunning down the mother, Tyr will immediately be consumed with regret. Tyr will note the horrified looks that the civilians will give him juxtaposed next to the cold indifference of Ymir, the callous approval of Freya, and the impassive gaze of Baldur.***
As a result of Tyr's actions, an argument between the Einherjar and the civilians will ensue. This will culminate in a standoff between half of the surviving civilians and Ragnarok company.
Ymir, the stoic muscle of Tyr’s fireteam, will display the full might of his Titan exo-suit’s arsenal. This will intimidate the civilians into backing off.
The dissenting half of the civilians will then decide to depart and attempt to find safety on their own.
Nanna will beg Tyr to reason with them, knowing that the civilians wouldn’t survive the carnage between the Einherjar and PVC without some sort of sponsorship.
Outwardly, Tyr will remain impassive to Nanna's protests, but will internally fixate on the blown open face of the elderly woman. Tyr will proceed to cram his rising emotions down and force his mind to focus on the current mission.***
Tyr and Ragnarok company will let the civilians leave on their own accord.
Ragnarok company will continue tracking the intelligence officer’s trail, even with the added responsibility of monitoring the remaining civilians.
One of the civilians in the group, tentatively named Samir, will be an asset of the intelligence officer. Samir will begin relaying information to the intelligence officer by way of biomedically installed communication software. This won’t be known to the reader yet.
At this time the intelligence officer will have remotely uploaded a virus into the VALHALLA revival software through a slain Einherjar’s neural transmitter.
This virus will be what causes the increasingly distressing death dreams and cognitive distortion of the Einherjar.

Struggle:

Tyr and his fireteam will attempt to get the civilians to safety.

The other fireteams will leave Tyr’s alone to monitor the remaining civilians. They will discuss checkpoints before separating.
Tyr’s fireteam will be expected to travel to a nearby starport and use the vehicles docked there to ferry the civilians to the Asgard.
Samir will relay the information to the intelligence officer, who will, in turn, relay the information to the PVC.
Tyr and his team will be ambushed before they reach their first checkpoint but will fight off the insurgents.
Both of the other fireteams will be ambushed before they reach their checkpoints. They will be promptly slain.
Tyr and his fireteam will be alone to continue their mission.
There will be a glitch in VALHALLA, making the other teams unable to revive immediately. This glitch will be the first stage in the trojan virus used by the intelligence officer.
The hallucinations will begin.
A civilian will start to unravel as a result of the horrors he’s seen. Freya will suggest putting him down. Ymir and Tyr will be impassive. Baldur will attempt to reason with him.
He will later kill himself.
One of the younger civilians, tentatively named Ramirez, will harden as a result of Tyr’s mentorship. This will show the positive side of a more hardened lifestyle and will touch on how a balance between martial prowess and diplomatic approaches is at its strongest when in perfect equilibrium.
The group will stumble across a settlement which had been abandoned early into the conflict.
Fenrir will locate a single survivor.
The survivor will be a crazy but harmless old man.
The old man will ramble a foreboding message to Tyr.
The old man will ramble about the coming of Surt and the death of the Aesir and Vanir. This rambling will be indicative of the eventual devastation the Einherjar will experience.
Nanna will hotwire three PVC technicals, much to the surprise of Tyr’s fireteam. The Einherjar and Phobites will mount the technicals and use them to make it to the starport faster.
Surt will begin subliminally appearing as a stag-horned demon around this time.
The fireteam will begin to bond with the civilians, and the civilians, in turn, will begin to assist Tyr’s fireteam.
Tyr will grow to enjoy Nanna’s company.
The fireteam will receive word that a dropship had just been freed up, and could pick up Tyr and the civilians.
Samir will arrange for another ambush.
The PVC will drive off the dropship before it can land.
The ambush team turns out to be the original group of civilians who had begun working for the PVC as a result of the Einherjar’s earlier actions.
The intelligence officer will be among the traitors.
The civilians loyal to Tyr’s fireteam attempt to reason with the traitors, but they won’t hear any of it.
The sides will attempt to engage, but Nanna will step in the middle of both sides, attempting to use her body as a way to quell the violence.
On a hill in the distance, Tyr will see Surt laughing at him.
Tyr will hesitate
Freya will tell Tyr to engage. Tyr will oblige.
The friendly militia will be peerless and impressive. The survivors now thoroughly hardened to the lifestyle.
Nanna, however, will be thoroughly shellshocked, and upset with Tyr.
During the engagement, a hallucinatory 'ghost' of the woman he gunned down earlier will appear to Tyr. She will accuse him of loving the act of killing. She will tell Tyr that he is damned and lost to the cyclical purgatory of dying and being reborn again just to kill some more. Tyr will have begun to grow fond of Nanna. She will be horrified of his actions after opening fire upon the antagonistic irregulars. The 'ghost' will tell Tyr that he will never win her affection back again in this life.***

Epiphany:

Tyr and his fireteam will be confronted with the result of their earlier actions.

Baldur will have been injured in the firefight.
The dropship will only be able to carry a few of the civilians. Tyr, Ymir, Nanna, and another civilian will be loaded up onto the dropship.
A team of PVC commandos, led by the intelligence officer, will launch an anti-aircraft missile at the dropship.
Ramirez will be immediately killed, and the dropship will begin to crash.
As the dropship crashes Tyr will remember the words of the earlier hallucinatory 'ghost'. Tyr will realize that the heavy-handed approach of the Einherjar created this antagonistic group of irregulars who joined forces with the PVC.***
Tyr will make a decision. Knowing full well that the software is corrupted, he will decide that to rescue Nanna.***
Tyr will strap a ‘parachute’ onto Nanna, rip open the door and push her outside, saving her in the process.
The dropship will crash killing both Ymir and Tyr.
This death-dream will show Tyr’s anima burying the stillbirth underneath Yggdrasil.
The anima representation will turn to show that it has Tyr’s same eyes and facial tattoo.
The faces of all of the people Tyr has killed will appear on the tree and begin laughing at him.
The tree will split open and he will be enveloped in an ocean of blood.
Tyr's last thoughts before the death dream ends will be the hope that the blood will wash away his sins.***

Joshua Gray

Aspiring polymath...

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