The ancient, tyrannical queen of the Valkyrie and Ragnar's mother, who knew her gods were mortal and served them anyway—beheaded by her own daughter.
Alia Snowsparrow, mother of Ragnar and Sefi, is the colossal, ancient Queen of the Valkyrie, a warrior who conquered the White Coast and gave four of her children to the false gods, keeping only Sefi as heir. She hunted the heretics preaching Ragnar's return, breaking their bones and setting them out as carrion. When Darrow brings her son's corpse and pleads his cause, she receives him with her dead boy across her lap and speaks flawless HighLingo Aureate—for she has long known the terrible secret: her gods are mortal men, and she serves them still to keep her people alive, choosing the lie over the terror of a world without gods.
She rejects Darrow and Mustang's alliance and orders them sent to Asgard in chains. But when Sefi returns bearing the corpses of the slain gods and Alia commands her warchiefs to kill the blasphemers, Sefi steps forward and decapitates her mother with a single stroke, spitting on the corpse and speaking her first word in twenty-five years: 'She knew.'
A colossal, ancient Obsidian woman as tall as Ragnar, face armored in wind-dead skin and calluses, stringy dirty-snow hair, pitch-black eyes deep in ravined wrinkles, a crown of black glass, knotty blood-stained hands.
Antagonist; the tyrant queen of the Valkyrie who knowingly serves false gods and is slain by her own daughter for the truth.