129 Days Remain…
A speculative essay on family, fate, the Jötnar, the Everywhen, and a very consequential funeral
I have moved my PlayStation 5 into the bedroom-slash-office. That is a mundane sentence, perhaps the least mythological opening imaginable for an essay involving dead gods, cosmic cubes and the possible end of reality, but there it is. The decision was practical. I’m finally playing God of War Ragnarök properly, for the first time (shock!), without reorganising the entire household around a television whenever an hour became available. The solution turned out to involve my 5K Apple Studio Display and a little cable choreography: swapping the display’s usual Thunderbolt connection for the PS5’s compatible video connection through the active adapter arrangement I had finally got working. There is a lesson here somewhere about modern entertainment and the ancient virtues of simply unplugging one thing and plugging in another. For the moment, I am satisfied to have solved it.
The arrangement produces an unexpectedly pleasing return to an earlier kind of gaming. In Curtin, Canberra, around the year 2000, I played Final Fantasy IX on the original PlayStation with an attachable screen. I was eleven or twelve then, and an extraordinary amount of the imaginative world I still carry was formed in bedrooms, on small displays, sometimes on the box televisions that preceded our present immaculate rectangles. Of course I also played games in the lounge, often at night, but the bedroom was a place where the scale of the screen and the scale of the adventure had nothing to do with one another. A tiny image could open a gigantic world. Now, more than twenty-five years later, the console is back in the room, the screen is rather sharper, and I am preparing to spend time with Kratos, Atreus and a woman whose absence has somehow proved as powerful as almost anybody else’s presence.
That woman is Faye, or Laufey: wife to Kratos, mother to Atreus, Jötunn guardian, warrior, rebel and the engine of a story that begins after she has already died. God of War (2018) opens with Kratos cutting down a tree, preparing a funeral pyre and honouring a final request. The ashes of his wife are to be scattered from the highest peak in all the realms. A game then unfolds because a mother is gone, and because the two people who loved her have been left to work out how to live with one another. For an adventure built around the familiar tools of axes and monsters, that is a particularly elegant piece of emotional engineering. The woman missing from the room is the person who organised the journey.
And yet, eight and a half years after that opening, what actually killed her? As of this essay’s date, the published games and official reveal material have not established a specific cause. We know she died, that her farewell was carefully prepared and that her absence precipitated the journey of 2018. Ragnarök gives us memories of her, a more complicated account of her agency, and the astonishing knowledge that she once fought Thor. In June 2026, Santa Monica Studio announced God of War: Laufey, which begins as she awakens after her funeral in the Everywhen, a strange afterlife of gods in which different mythologies intersect. Sony now gives the PlayStation 5 release date as 16 February 2027. As I write this on 10 October 2026, 129 days separate us from the answer we may finally receive, unless the studio decides to keep the cause of death as coy as ever. I would not put it past them.
My title is a deliberate nod to How I Met Your Mother, the television series whose central question invited nearly a decade of anticipation and increasingly elaborate predictions. In 2014, before the ending aired, viewers were already theorising that the mother might have died, trying to interpret small clues and the very circumstances of a father telling his children an enormous story. I remember that combination of affection, excessive deduction and the recognition that an unseen or deferred character can exert astonishing narrative gravity. God of War has accidentally furnished us with a companion title: How I Lost Your Mother. The difference is that the Norse saga told us about the loss immediately, handed the bereaved family a very large axe, and asked us to wait for the medical, magical or mythological explanation.
This is a theory essay, not a dossier of invented confirmations. The nine possibilities below move from remembered battles and divine conspiracies into more speculative territory: prophecy, spiritual transfers, tiny vulnerabilities, broken cosmic machinery and finally the possibility that death arrived for the most ordinary reason of all. Some can coexist. Some cannot. That is part of the pleasure. A mystery becomes more interesting when one can distinguish a fact from an inference and an inference from a really enjoyable leap. There is room for a few leaps here, given that the destination is a world officially described as the beginning and endpoint of magic.
One technical aside, before the metaphysical machinery begins: my monitor solution uses a connection swap rather than native PS5 Thunderbolt video output. A PS5-to-Studio Display demonstration was linked during earlier troubleshooting. I have included that reference here as a practical illustration of the arrangement, although the exact video I watched should be checked before publication.
First, who exactly is this “giantess”?
Before the theories, a terminological rescue operation. Laufey is called a Giant, yet visually she is about the size of an ordinary human woman, and there is no reason to suppose we are witnessing an enormous person who has been conveniently reduced for the camera. In the game’s cosmology the Jötnar are a people, with their own culture, memory, magic, politics and prophetic traditions. In Norse myth, jötunn is commonly rendered as 'giant', but the category is not a reliable statement of height. Such beings can be immense, human-sized, wise, beautiful, monstrous, divine relatives or adversaries. A lineage and a mythic role are being described. 'Giantess' is a serviceable translation so long as we do not imagine she is obliged to look down through the roof of her house.
There is a wonderfully apt wrinkle in the surviving literature. In the Prose Edda, Loki is the son of Fárbauti and Laufey, also called Nál. More often than one might expect in a culture of patronymics, he is identified by the name of his mother: Loki Laufeyjarson, Laufey’s son. The historical texts tell us surprisingly little about this woman herself. Santa Monica Studio has built an entire personality, marriage, resistance movement and cosmological importance inside those gaps. Its version of Loki inherits the naming relationship and reimagines the father as Kratos. This is how adapted mythology becomes interesting. The old story is respected enough to remain legible and altered enough to develop another life. The character of Faye is, in a sense, already an act of recovered possibility.
1. The thunder that never really stopped: Thor’s delayed wound
The first suspect is Thor, and he arrives with an evidentiary advantage over almost everybody else on this list: we know he fought Faye. Ragnarök’s optional exploration of Vanaheim’s Crater makes their confrontation part of the landscape. The Leviathan Axe and Mjölnir met with a force violent enough to leave frozen lightning and terrible collateral damage. Spirits remember the catastrophe and its human cost. Thor was the terror of the Jötnar, operating within Odin’s campaign against their people; Faye, their celebrated defender, was precisely the kind of opponent he would have sought or been sent to destroy. If this were a detective novel, the thunder god would be the extremely large person standing in the doorway asking whether he needed a lawyer.
The obstacle is timing. The battle is a remembered event, apparently predating Faye’s final years with Kratos, and the surviving account presents a stalemate rather than her death. An honest theory must therefore describe a delayed consequence, not quietly transform an old fight into a confirmed murder. Imagine that the clash inflicted a wound neither of them understood: an injury in the body, a fracture in Faye’s soul, or some unresolved magical charge that slowly consumed the protection by which a Jötunn could otherwise endure. The image of frozen lightning invites precisely this sort of extrapolation. We have already been taught that the meeting of their weapons can leave energy where ordinary physics says it should have disappeared.
The reveal of Laufey adds a further imaginative possibility. Sony now explicitly describes Faye as a manipulator of souls, the Golden Hand of the Jötnar. Her powers intensify inside the Everywhen. What if Thor’s hammer did damage that resisted conventional healing because it struck her on two levels at once, physical and spiritual? She could win the fight, go home, raise a child, refuse to speak about its deeper cost, and finally succumb years later. Such a discovery would let the game revisit Thor without making him responsible for a conveniently timed off-screen assassination. There is also dramatic irony in the notion that a violent instrument wielded long ago continued to reverberate through a much quieter domestic life.
I find this theory highly plausible as a piece of plotting and only moderately supported as a prediction. The battle is real; the lingering injury is not established. It might also diminish Faye’s own agency if it reduced her entire life with Kratos to a slow-motion consequence of one man’s violence. The writers would need to make her response to the wound, rather than Thor’s blow, the centre of the revelation. She fought him and lived. The story could tell us what she did with the survival, and what surviving eventually cost.
2. The All-Father’s long game: Odin’s unseen intervention
If Thor is the obvious suspect, Odin is the suspect for readers who have learned to distrust obvious suspects. The All-Father’s campaign against the Jötnar was systematic, informed by a terror of prophecy and a desire to monopolise knowledge. His preference for manipulation over straightforward violence is well established in Ragnarök. Faye was both an accomplished opponent of his regime and someone connected to traditions of foresight that he desperately wanted to understand. Removing her, weakening her, tracking her or pressuring her through some indirect enchantment would be consistent with his larger pattern of behaviour. An Odin scheme tends to arrive wearing the face of something helpful, and that alone broadens the possibilities considerably.
There are versions of this hypothesis that require very little new machinery. Perhaps Faye was marked by Odin’s magic during an earlier confrontation or contact with an artefact. Perhaps he laid a curse on the remaining defenders of Jötunheim, one that remained dormant until Faye’s protective work exhausted her. Perhaps she discovered a secret that made her uniquely dangerous to him, and he took steps whose consequences surfaced much later. In each case the important distinction is between an event the games have shown and a motive the games make thinkable. Odin’s obsession, cruelty and curiosity are canonical; any act of poisoning, soul-binding or direct involvement in her death remains conjecture.
One objection should be allowed to breathe. In the 2018 story, Baldur appears in search of a Giant and does not seem to understand that Faye has already died. The search is part of the machinery by which Odin’s attention turns toward Kratos and Atreus. A neatly completed assassination by Odin, in which all his agents possessed reliable knowledge of their target, would complicate that situation. The theory works better if his action was indirect or imperfect, an old spell that finally came due without his knowing when, or a set of circumstances he set in motion without fully controlling the outcome. That would also suit his central dramatic flaw: the man who claims to know everything repeatedly mistakes power over information for actual understanding.
A satisfying revelation would let Faye expose the mechanism while in the Everywhen, perhaps encountering people damaged by comparable attempts to control the origins of magic. She would then have a personal stake in resisting a system resembling Odin’s predatory curiosity, even after Odin himself has lost the opportunity to govern her life. This would connect the new game’s intermythic politics to the old Norse conflict and supply an antagonist who is present through consequences rather than resurrection. Whether the studio takes that route is entirely open. The temptation is narratively clear: some of the most effective villains remain troublesome long after they are gone.
3. The forbidden answer: something looked back through the mask
The third possibility is the one that pulls hardest toward the Everywhen itself. Ragnarök gives Odin an extraordinary obsession with a mysterious rift and a mask that might make its secrets comprehensible. His questions concern existence, origins and what lies beyond the apparent boundaries of the gods’ knowledge. Laufey now presents the Everywhen as a realm beyond the familiar afterlives, one in which all magic originates and to which it returns, with its natural circulation disrupted. Those facts make an eventual connection between the old rift mystery and the new cosmology an attractive piece of narrative architecture. They do not, by themselves, establish that Faye ever handled the mask or that the mask killed her.
Imagine instead that she encountered something related to it. One damaged fragment of a larger instrument, a broken pathway, an early manifestation of the same cosmic force, or a glimpse of knowledge that a finite body cannot safely retain. As the Jötnar’s most formidable guardian and a woman close to their prophetic heritage, Faye could plausibly have been among the rare figures able to recognise an imbalance. She might have understood an otherwise invisible danger and spent years trying to contain it. Her final illness, if illness is what it resembled, would then be the human scale of a cosmological catastrophe. Instead of a blow from a hammer, she dies from contact with a question the universe was not designed to answer.
The attraction of this approach is its ability to make the game’s two structural mysteries speak to each other. How did Faye die? Why is the circulation of magic broken? What exactly did Odin fail to understand when he stared into the unknown? Three questions could turn out to describe the same phenomenon from different angles. In the Everywhen, Faye’s sharpened ability to dislodge souls from bodies might become more than combat flair. Perhaps her gift is precisely what allowed her to recognise that souls, memory and magic were being misrouted long before the old worlds noticed. The sword guarded by Rue and the friendly cube Phranque would then be companions in a story about repairing something broken rather than merely collecting exotic mythological trophies.
The danger is the familiar franchise habit of explaining every intimate loss through the biggest available cosmic mechanism. The death that begins a father-and-son story does not need to have caused a universe-sized fault to matter. I would enjoy the audacity of the reveal while hoping the writers resisted treating Faye’s body as a mere switch in a metaphysical circuit. A mystery becomes emotionally persuasive when the character’s choices survive the explanation. Perhaps she chose to look where Odin only wanted to dominate, and the difference between those motives is why she eventually has a chance to repair what he could not.
4. The last Guardian’s last transfer: a soul given away
Here is a theory whose strongest foundation comes from what Laufey has officially revealed about Faye rather than from an extrapolated enemy. She is the Golden Hand of the Jötnar and can manipulate souls. Ragnarök already gives the surviving Giants a strange relationship to embodiment and preservation, including souls held in small stones. The precise metaphysical rules of that process are not exhaustively explained, but the premise is plain enough: personhood need not remain fixed to a familiar body. This turns an apparent question about Faye’s physical death into a possible question about the expenditure, division or relocation of her spiritual power.
Suppose that saving the remnants of her people required a final transfer, something closer to a rescue operation than a duel. To conceal endangered Jötnar, or to safeguard Atreus from prophecy, she might have used part of her own soul as a vessel, a key, a seal or a bridge between living persons and hidden places. The act would leave her gradually diminished. In ordinary language she grows weak and dies; in mythic language she has distributed the substance by which she was alive. This would explain why her preparations were so deliberate and why her death seems to have been a known horizon rather than a sudden unexplained killing. Notice, though, that these explanations are inventions proposed here, not established descriptions of how Jötnar soul magic works.
The old poetry offers an attractive image to set beside this speculation. Laufey in medieval Norse sources has little independent narrative, but Loki is repeatedly identified as her son. The fictional Faye might literally survive in the choices of the person who bears her name, though the game need not make inheritance a measurable magical resource for that relationship to carry meaning. Atreus’s inquisitiveness, compassion and willingness to question inherited conflicts all suggest that his mother’s influence survives in him. So perhaps the story makes that poetic statement material: she has placed something of herself beyond death for others to use. The cost is that she cannot keep all of herself at home.
This theory could lead to a particularly strong late-game revelation. Phranque and Rue, each an unusual kind of person or guardian, might help Faye discover that the Everywhen treats identity, memory and form more flexibly than the living realms. She learns what she gave up, where it went and whether it can be reclaimed. The moral decision would then be whether she should reclaim it at all. A bargain that saved lives is still a bargain, and retrieving the payment might undo the rescue. I would welcome a climax in which her heroism is measured by what she declines to take back, a refreshing departure for a series historically associated with taking everything that can be hit until it stops moving.
5. The prophecy she broke: a death paid to make the future open
One of Ragnarök’s most affecting discoveries is Faye’s refusal to let prophecy dictate the people she loved. The Giant shrines record futures, but she interferes with what her family would discover and resists treating the predicted end of Kratos as a binding instruction. The saga eventually places extraordinary weight on the possibility of choosing differently, even when gods and prophets have already arranged the story on a wall. The fifth hypothesis takes that theme almost literally: Faye did something to disrupt a predicted sequence, and her life became the cost of creating room for an alternative.
It would be easy, and perhaps a little too easy, to introduce a cosmic rule stating that one life must be surrendered to save another. Ancient and modern myth contain plenty of substitutions, ransom bargains and fatal promises. The more interesting version would avoid turning fate into an accountant who requires exact change. Perhaps Faye had seen several branching futures and knew that remaining alive would pull Kratos and Atreus toward the wrong one, not because she was a burden but because certain enemies would keep hunting the Golden Hand so long as she remained visible. Perhaps she made an irreversible choice that removed herself from the pattern the seers had assumed was inevitable. Perhaps the death was neither commanded nor desired by fate, but emerged from the practical work of making room for human freedom.
This would produce a devastatingly complicated portrait of motherhood. The temptation to describe Faye’s demise as a purely noble sacrifice should be resisted. A woman is entitled to want to live with her family. It would be much stronger to show her wrestling with the choice, refusing it for as long as she could, and looking for another path before taking action. The phrase 'for their sake' does not remove the pain of leaving a child or a partner. God of War is at its best when immense mythic choices remain recognisably human in their consequences. Faye’s most radical act might have been believing that Kratos could change and Atreus could grow even when the paintings insisted otherwise.
There is also an elegant connection to the 2018 no-cut camera, a formal decision Santa Monica Studio famously defended and engineered with considerable effort. The camera seems to move continuously through a world unfolding in real time, while the Giants’ shrines offer the visual opposite, a future compressed into panels already completed. If Laufey begins by letting us inhabit the missing moment of Faye’s life or death, the camera could make us feel the passage from one fixed image to another, from a painted outcome to an uncertain choice. The fate theory would then be expressed not just in dialogue but in the relationship between cinematic form and what the story permits us to know.
6. The mistletoe principle: the smallest thing in the world
The sixth theory comes from one of the most elegant traps in Norse literature. In the story of Baldr, his mother Frigg extracts promises from the world’s creatures and substances that they will not harm him. One thing escapes the arrangement: mistletoe, considered too young or harmless to require an oath. Loki learns of the omission and guides the blind Höðr in using it to kill the apparently invulnerable god. The story is often reduced to a memorable object, but its real power lies in the logic of exemption. The threat that succeeds is precisely the one that a system built to prevent threats fails to classify as dangerous.
Apply that logic to Faye and the possibilities multiply. Perhaps the Guardian of the Jötnar was proof against familiar magic and ordinary weapons but vulnerable to some neglected plant, shard, word, promise or small spiritual contaminant. Perhaps she was harmed inadvertently by a minor instrument connected to an otherwise immense piece of magical technology. Perhaps a protective bargain around her family contained one tiny exception that nobody had taken seriously. Even if the game never uses literal mistletoe, it could take from the Baldr episode the dramatic pleasure of an almost absurdly small cause producing an irreversible consequence. The grand mythological figure is undone by something she would barely have noticed on a walk through the woods.
This is where the comic register has its place. I do not want Faye’s explanation to turn out to be a tree falling on her, an ill-advised mushroom, or an unfortunate domestic accident involving a weapon rack that Kratos clearly should have installed more securely. A playful essay can enjoy these hypotheticals without insisting that the game should. The finer version takes the same disproportion seriously. A powerful defender has dedicated her life to the threats that everyone can see. The one threat that gets through is trivial, overlooked and perhaps wholly unmalicious. The grieving family is left searching for an enemy when the world has furnished no one to blame.
The Baldr parallel also invites a caution about adaptation. In the game, Baldr’s death belongs to a different dramatic and mechanical system from the precise medieval narrative, and it would be a mistake to assume that any botanical image or small shard in an early trailer has already confirmed a plot point. The so-called mistletoe principle is a framework for thinking, not an evidence-backed prediction about a particular prop. Nonetheless, it is the sort of structure Santa Monica Studio knows how to use: a familiar mythic event becomes recognisable through transformation, as though someone had found an omitted page of a story we thought we knew.
7. The wrong side of time: a wound from the Everywhen
The Everywhen’s name invites speculation almost too openly. A realm where magic originates and ends, in which the dead gods of different mythologies coexist, need not obey the temporal intuitions of the Nine Realms. What if Faye’s death is caused by something she will only encounter after dying? That is deliberately paradoxical, but it could offer a distinctive third-act turn. A wound received in the Everywhen might be echoed backward into her earlier life; an effort to rescue Kratos and Atreus in the future might diminish her past self; or an event in the gods’ afterlife might affect the living world at several points simultaneously. The death would become both the doorway into the story and, eventually, one of its results.
The appeal comes from older traditions of mythic time, where a visit to another world can distort the relationship between duration and experience. Celtic and Arthurian otherworld stories offer numerous imaginative models of altered time, enchanted sleep and places where the ordinary rules of return no longer hold. They are separate literary traditions, and there is no official announcement that Avalon, Merlin or Morgan le Fay appears in Laufey. Nevertheless, an intermythic setting gives writers the means to juxtapose those traditions without pretending they were historically one mythology. An observatory-like structure glimpsed in the key art might eventually become an apparatus of perception, prophecy or timekeeping. That is a reading of the image, not an identification of a confirmed Merlin location.
A time-loop reveal could also satisfy my wish for a more audacious adaptation of the Arthurian material. Imagine that Faye, in trying to get home, passes through a court of enchantment whose stories will later remember an enigmatic woman as Morgan le Fay. The name resemblance would be a creative invitation rather than proof of shared ancient identity. She might inherit a title, inspire a legend or simply meet characters who show us how the tale of one woman changes when carried across cultures. If the story simultaneously revealed that one of those encounters cast a shadow back across her mortal life, the Everywhen could become more than a parade of pantheons. It would function as a place where legends affect the conditions of their own telling.
I place this theory below the more grounded possibilities because unrestricted time travel can turn consequences into accounting problems. If future actions kill past characters, why not simply do something else, or retrieve the dead, or undo the first cause? Writers need rules, costs and resistance. The best version would make temporal intervention costly enough to preserve the finality of Faye’s goodbye. She might learn what happened and gain a way to protect her family, while still being unable to unlive the loss they have suffered. Some doors can open without obliging the past to disappear.
8. The ward around the home: protection that spent its protector
The eighth theory returns to the very beginning of God of War (2018), to those marked trees and to a home that seemed simpler than it was. Faye did not merely prepare a funeral. She left specific instructions whose execution altered the protection around Kratos and Atreus’s dwelling. The opening act of cutting down the marked tree is consequential, because the barrier that had shielded the family is removed. That detail, visible before the wider mythological stakes are apparent, makes the forest surrounding the house a more interesting piece of architecture than it first appears. A protective space is also a constructed space, and constructed protections usually have limits, makers and maintenance costs.
Imagine that the ward was sustained by Faye herself. Its apparent stability depended on a continuing expenditure of magic, or on a bond she had woven among her body, her family and the trees. As danger increased, its cost rose. The death then becomes the conclusion of many years of sheltering the household, a drawn-out act of protection that no one inside the shelter fully understood. This would make her final instructions a carefully planned transition: remove the old barrier when the family is ready to move into the world, follow the marked path and discover what the protected child needs to know. It would also give her death a functional connection to the timing of Baldur’s arrival without needing Odin to have identified and killed her.
A different version is that she knew her approaching death would end the ward and built the tree-cutting into a plan for how to deal with the exposure. That version is closer to what the game actually shows and demands no lethal magical cost. The theory lies in imagining the reverse, that keeping the barrier intact was what killed her. One should not confuse these causal directions merely because they produce a satisfying symmetry. Still, the motif would be thematically powerful. The family’s refuge has been kept safe by someone who is slowly losing the ability to remain in it. Kratos, whose old response to danger is immediate violence, must learn that protection is not always an act of striking down an enemy.
What I particularly like is how ordinary the metaphor feels. A parent organises the world to keep a child safe, builds routines, absorbs worries and carries invisible work that the child may not recognise until much later. Translating that ordinary labour into a magic ward would be both a fantasy device and a legible emotional image. It would be less satisfying if the game implied that mothers are supposed to die in the service of their families. The choice matters, the cost matters and the character deserves a life beyond her obligations. A strong story would give Faye room to be angry about what she lost as well as proud of what she protected.
9. No prophecy, no murderer: the ordinary end of a remarkable life
Finally, the possibility that feels almost indecent after eight elaborate theories: perhaps nothing supernatural killed Faye. Perhaps she became ill. Perhaps an ordinary physical condition progressed in a way that even a formidable Jötunn, warrior and practitioner of magic could not reverse. Perhaps the cause was the sort of unforeseeable misfortune that happens to people despite their intentions, talents and careful preparations. The published story does not identify a terminal diagnosis, so there is no justification for presenting one as established canon. But an ordinary death is fully compatible with what has been shown. The fact that Faye could fight Thor does not grant her permanent immunity from the limitations of a body.
I am increasingly fond of this possibility precisely because it refuses the gravitational pull of the biggest available villain. God of War (2018) begins with grief rather than a murder investigation. Kratos does not immediately receive a convenient enemy whose destruction would solve the sorrow. He receives a son, an impossible request, and a world that will not return the person he has lost. His anger is not granted the clean satisfaction of naming a culprit. If Faye died of natural causes, the story quietly requires something much harder of a character trained by centuries of vengeance: to live without being able to kill the reason he is sad.
The old Norse literary world knows death through more than battle. The Prose Edda’s account of Hel includes those who die from sickness and old age, even as the text belongs to a mythological system very different from the fictional Everywhen. To say this is not to assign Faye automatically to Hel, or to convert a medieval categorisation into a rule for Sony’s cosmology. It is simply to notice that myth has always had room for deaths without duels. Gods and extraordinary people are not narratively diminished because their bodies remain subject to vulnerability. Sometimes that vulnerability is what brings the myth closest to the people who tell it.
The sitcom that supplied my title has an unexpected bearing on this version. In the months before the 2014 How I Met Your Mother finale, viewers were arguing over whether the mother was dead, and whether a long narrative framed by her absence had left enough hints to make that outcome inevitable. The actual ending confirmed that she had died after illness, provoking a separate debate about whether the story had given her enough space as a person. That is a useful warning for Laufey. If we learn that Faye died naturally, the answer must be accompanied by a better understanding of who she was when she was alive. Otherwise a mystery solved on paper could leave the character strangely underwritten.
My preference, were I choosing the ending, would be for a natural cause complicated but not overturned by myth. She did not need to be murdered. She may have used her final months to prepare an extraordinary farewell. She may have been frightened, stubborn, warm, impatient, tired, hopeful and more aware of what lay ahead than anyone guessed. The gods’ afterlife can expand her story after death while preserving the fact that the family left behind really lost her. This is the least baroque of the nine answers and perhaps the most emotionally risky. There is no final boss for a fever.
What I would bet on, and what I hope they preserve
If I were placing a genuinely speculative wager today, I would separate the most cinematic answer from the one that best fits the series’ emotional intelligence. A lingering consequence of the Thor encounter would be a satisfying way to revisit the old Norse wars. Odin’s manipulation would offer political continuity. The mask or rift could connect the original saga to the Everywhen in a visually spectacular fashion. Soul-transfer magic and prophecy might give Faye more active authorship of her departure. An ordinary illness, perhaps accompanied by a non-causal supernatural mystery she was trying to resolve, would allow the old and new games to retain the emotional force of loss while still opening the enormous new cosmology. My imaginative favourite is the combination of a finite life and an unfinished act of protection: something Faye knew she could no longer do alone, for which she prepared Kratos and Atreus to become responsible.
The biggest trap is explanatory overkill. We have spent years with a death whose mystery is strong because its consequences are known. We know what it did to Kratos. We know what it demanded of Atreus. We know that the ashes had to travel to a mountain, and that the journey changed both of them. A plot that announces Faye was secretly assassinated by seventeen gods using three interconnected masks, two prophecies and a cursed branch might be wonderfully entertaining but would also risk making the simplest parts of the saga feel strangely insufficient. We should welcome the next story without insisting that it retrospectively turns every quiet moment into a clue.
The countdown therefore has two questions. The obvious one is how Faye died. The richer one is how she lived, and what it would mean for her to learn that the people she left behind have already begun changing. At the centre of the new game is a woman who, according to Sony’s own premise, awakens after her funeral and discovers her preparations for Kratos and Atreus are in danger. She is already in motion while they are beginning the journey we remember. The narrative may be concurrent with the adventure of 2018, which makes the old no-cut camera feel especially appropriate. At one end of the story, a father and son walk away from a pyre. At the other, someone the audience had accepted as gone opens her eyes.
Back in my bedroom, the PS5 is ready, the 5K screen is finally cooperating, and I have Ragnarök to experience properly before February arrives. I find that prospect oddly full-circle. A boy in Curtin, with Final Fantasy IX on a small PlayStation screen, learned that entire civilisations could be carried inside a room. An adult has returned to a bedroom and found the same invitation, this time through a family trying to navigate the absence of its most mysterious member. There are 129 days left until God of War: Laufey. My nine theories will almost certainly contain at least eight errors. I hope the ninth is wrong in an interesting way too. Whatever the answer, I want the game to remember that the whole thing began with a woman, a marked tree, and two people learning to go on.
Sources and further reading
PlayStation Australia, “God of War Laufey.” Official game description and release information.
Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, Baldr’s death episode, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur translation.
Editorial note: The nine numbered sections are original conjectures. The sources above support historical, mythological and announced-game background, but none verifies a specific cause of Faye’s death. This document is dated 10 October 2026; the release countdown will decrease after that date.
