Foothills: The Wooded Approach to the Mountain of Midgard

The Foothills was one of the principal regions of Midgard, a stretch of hilly, forested wilderness that rose from the waters of the Lake of Nine to the very base of the Mountain, the highest peak in the world. Travelers came to it through the Vanaheim Tower on the Shores of Nine, and its climbing paths carried the road that Kratos and Atreus followed toward the summit with the ashes of Faye. The region held the shop and Sky Mover of the dwarf Sindri, concealed one of the Hidden Chambers of Odin in which the Valkyrie Geirdriful lay imprisoned, and kept a scattering of sealed treasures among its coffins, ruins, and snow.

Between the lake and the peak#

The Foothills formed the last stretch of open country before the Mountain, the tallest peak in all of Midgard. Its lower slopes were hilly and thick with forest, and as the land climbed the green wilderness gave way to snowfields and frozen ruins beneath the mountain's shadow. At its upper edge the region ended at Mountain Base, where the ascent of the peak itself began.

The way into the hills ran through the Vanaheim Tower, one of the towers linking the Nine Worlds that stood on the Shores of Nine. East of that tower lay the Cliffs of the Raven, a shoreline of drifting ice from which the road led up into the Foothills. Within the tower itself, on either side of a ruined door, stood two old signs written in the tongues of Muspelheim and Niflheim, legible only to those who had learned those scripts. Farther along the passage toward the hills, an icy chamber split by a small chasm held a fallen light crystal and a lore marker of the old world, one of many such stones by which the history of the Nine was remembered.

Sindri's shop and the Sky Mover#

It was at the Foothills that Kratos and Atreus first came upon Sindri, one of the two Huldra Brothers, as the dwarf worked repairs on a moving platform of his own devising that he called the Sky Mover. Sindri noticed the Leviathan Axe upon the stranger's back at once, for the weapon was his own craft, forged with his brother in better days, and he hurried over with questions about it. He kept a shop at the base of the hills, and from it he outfitted the travelers who passed on their way to the peak.

Father and son returned through the region later in their journey, after Atreus had been cured of his sickness and had learned that he was a god. They found Sindri at the Foothills once more, and when the dwarf again began to speak ill of his estranged brother Brok, the boy's patience broke. Atreus told him to either do something about it or shut up, saying that he and his father were sick of hearing it. The rebuke stung, and Atreus later apologized for the harsh words spoken at the Foothills, an apology Sindri had already forgiven, though Brok held that his brother had simply been told what he needed to hear. In the later days of the journey the Sky Mover still stood upon the snowy path to Mountain Base, its frame overgrown with creeping vines.

The Hidden Chamber of Odin#

Up the main path toward the mountain, a cave concealed one of the Hidden Chambers of Odin, sealed behind a door that no ordinary key could open. Only the magic chisel, a shard of the great chisel of the giant Thamur, could breach it, and so the chamber stayed shut until Kratos and Atreus came bearing that shard. Past the chamber's elevator and across a chasm lay a hidden arena, and in it waited Geirdriful, one of the nine Valkyries whom Odin's curse had bound into corrupting flesh and whom Queen Sigrun had sealed away for the safety of the Nine Worlds.

Geirdriful fought as a creature of speed and misdirection. She darted about the arena between blows, swept her bladed wings, hurled rings of conjured projectiles both slanted and straight, and readied great waves of force behind her scythe. From the air she was deadliest of all, rising to blind the ground below with a vast cloud of smoke from which she struck unseen, or looping into a spinning dive to seize her prey outright. Kratos weathered the assault with axe and shield while Atreus' arrows broke her risings, and in the end her corrupted body was destroyed and her spirit freed to rejoin her sisters.

Beasts and watchers of the hills#

The wilderness of the Foothills belonged to dangerous things. Ogres laired among the frozen ruins before the mountain, wolves whose bite carried poison ran the woods, and Reavers, Revenants steeped in venomcraft, Shadows, and burrowing Tatzelwurms beset those who strayed from the road. Two Stone Trolls slumbered in the hills near Sindri's shop, standing like weathered statues among the trees. They stirred from their long sleep when the Black Rune of Jotunheim was taken from the heart of Tyr's Vault, and afterward the pair vanished from the Foothills, leaving their posts empty.

The region was watched as well. Two of Odin's spectral ravens, the green-glowing Eyes of Odin, haunted the Foothills for the Allfather. One hopped about the rocks above Sindri's vine-choked Sky Mover, peering down at the lift, while the other perched on a stone crossbeam deep in the cave of the Hidden Chamber, near the elevator that led down toward Geirdriful's arena. Both were struck from their roosts by the thrown Leviathan Axe.

Sealed treasures of the slopes#

The hills kept old wealth under seal. Not far from Sindri's shop stood a locked rune chest of the Nornir, its face marked with three runes that had to be matched on spinning mechanisms scattered nearby. One of those mechanisms was guarded by a Scorn Pole, a cursed totem whose power had to be stilled with frost before the seal could be turned. Those who solved the runes found a Horn of Blood Mead waiting within.

Two greater chests lay hidden deeper in the region. In the snowy ruins where an Ogre prowled, a chest sat behind a pair of Scorn Poles beside an old coffin, its approach further choked by rubble and by red urns whose bursting could clear the way. Within it lay the Charge of the White Bear, a rune of battle. The second chest was sealed inside a stone tomb along the pole-lined path above Sindri's shop, and no strength of arms could open it. Among the coffins below, a captive gust of the Winds of Hel lay trapped behind a growth of Hel Bramble, and only by cutting the bramble away and carrying the wind to the tomb could the seal be broken. The tomb gave up the Blast of Hephaestus, a rune bearing the name of the smith god of the Greek world that Kratos had left behind.