4. The Benumbed
Chapter four
The Benumbed
OLI
I awoke with a gasp, lurching into a sitting position.
Had I fallen? I remembered Loki’s words, that I was headed to Hel to meet his daughter of the same name, and the very floor beneath me had vanished, everything going dark, darker than when sleep took me after landing in Freyr’s lake.
Now I was in a bedroom, not open the way Heimdall’s had been, but a small, fully enclosed room, similar in décor and feel as where Loki had feasted with me to better catch me off guard before sending me…
Was this Hel? I almost dared not leave the room, but this one had a door, unlike Loki’s feasting hall, and I was alone, with no idea which god I was to meet next. Whoever it would be, it seemed I needed to meet them in Hel by first speaking to the goddess who ruled it.
Damn imp indeed, but at least my belly was sated, my senses appropriately hazy from drink to meet my mortality in the land of the dead, and my ass rested.
My clothing was neat, my hair still loose, but not unattractive, which I was able to check in my reflection through an oval of polished metal near the door.
Not bad for a dead man.
Oh, I hoped that was not the case simply by being here.
I steeled my resolve and exited the chamber.
I was in a city. Not quite like how Asgard looked, but I was in a bustling courtyard with throngs of people going about what seemed to be daily, happy life.
I was supposedly beneath the very roots of Yggdrasil, and indeed, in the distance, it seemed as though this city was in a great cavern, deep within a mountain, but the walls, impossibly high and spanning up seemingly forever, were knotted roots.
I thought perhaps straight ahead, far, far from me, was a gate made of those same roots, and I imagined Garm, the giant hound that protected its entrance, was chained on the other side.
Yet here, in the courtyard of homes and halls and something near a castle that the room I’d left connected to, it was peaceful for a place called the land of dishonorable dead.
The people here were of all kinds, but one thing they had in common was that they all seemed to be my age, returned—or maybe aged up in cases—to a time in their prime.
“It is not dishonorable to die other than in glorious battle,” a voice startled me to turn toward the expanse of the castle behind me. I would swear she had not been there when I took in the scene, but then, she was the daughter of Loki.
There was no mistaking Hel for anyone else.
She was beautiful, tall, lithe like Loki, and one half of her looked quite like Loki too with fair face and long fiery red hair.
It was intricately braided, and she wore a crown made of the same knotted wood as Yggdrasil’s roots.
The half with her fair side was lush and living with blooming flowers.
The other half was bare and black, her hair on that side black too, and her skin slightly sunken, almost like a skull, bluish black in color with runes tattooed upon her cheek that I thought might be prayers for the dead.
That side was somehow still beautiful, the whole of her a testament to being the overseer between life and death.
I’d expected her to be in armor, but like the delicate beauty of her crown, she dressed simply, wearing an elegant white tunic with dark blue trousers.
It was an asymmetrical tunic, shorter on her fairer side, and long to her ankles on the side of death.
Death lasted longer than life, I supposed, if that was its meaning.
Her eyes were blue like Loki’s too, but the death side glowed.
“M-my lady.” I bowed, for what else was one to do?
Hel inclined her head in return. “You yet live, Oli. Do not fear that. And do not fear me. Some of your stories call this a place of suffering, but it is merely a place for souls to live out more of the lives they lost. It is not for the wicked. Those souls are elsewhere. And Valhalla, while for heroes and warriors, is only for those who wish to reside there. Even some of them choose to come to me.”
I felt a great relief hearing all that, and as I looked again at the people, the happy, peaceful dead, living their afterlives in Hel’s court, I wondered if my parents were here. I didn’t know if they lived. I didn’t know who my father was, but my mother had been sold when I was young.
“It does not do a mortal spirit well to dwell on death,” Hel said, coming toward me and taking my arm with her dead-like side.
Only it didn’t feel like death, cold or unpleasant, although her touch did make me shiver.
She began to lead me deeper into the castle courtyard, away from the bustle of souls. “You are here to do me a service.”
“ You a service? Um—”
“Not that.” Hel chuckled. “Well, not with me. But a service it will be for me regardless because, honestly, he is bringing everyone around here down. And this is meant to be a place of peace. He shouldn’t even still be here, but he refuses to ascend back to the living world, despite having been reborn and Ragnarok having passed. ”
I searched my mind, my knowledge of the stories, for whom among the gods who perished during Ragnarok would not have ended up in Valhalla. All would have died in battle…
No. One did not die in battle, but his death was the reason Ragnarok began.
“Balder.”
Hel laughed softly. The sound was very much like Loki’s. “You were well chosen. Balder expects you. He wants to leave here. But… well, he will explain.” She brought us to a stop in front of a new door, similar to the one I’d walked out of.
I hesitated on what to say next, not because I feared Balder. He was as beloved a god in the stories as Freyr. But to be in Hel, before Hel herself, I felt as though I was missing an opportunity to ask… I wasn’t sure what, but something .
“You wonder about the meaning of life?” she asked. “How long your thread of life might last? If anyone you love is already walking my streets? I am afraid I can answer none of it. But I am grateful to you, Oli, for where your thread of life leads.” Hel nodded at the door, and then released me.
“Wait! May I… ask something else?”
“You may, and if it is a question I can answer, I will.”
She had already denied me the questions most on my mind, but I was curious about something else. “If the gods, the beasts, basically everything that perished during Ragnarok, all came back after it ended… how did they all come back?”
“Spirits are eternal.”
“Yes, but the gods came back in the flesh.” And quite potent flesh, given what I’d experienced so far.
“Those of the realms other than Midgard are closer to Yggdrasil’s lifeforce,” she explained. “We paved the way for your realm’s existence, and thus, we can never fully die, not so much that we cannot reform.”
“So, it is the same as how burnt land eventually grows grass and crops again, only for the gods, they are the same as what died?”
“New growth is closer to its progenitors than you might think too.
A spark of the original life is always there, or burnt lands would remain barren forever.
But you know well that the gods are not the same as they were.
Many things must die to make way for the new, Oli.
Sometimes, more important is the death of how we used to think or feel or chose to act.
“Do you have other questions for me?”
I wasn’t sure, or completely sure if she’d answered my original question, but another one passed my lips. “Is Loki a good father?”
Hel smiled. “Would it surprise you to hear that he is?”
“I thought he barely got to see you or his other monstrous children. Not that you’re monstrous—”
She laughed. “I think you know this already, Oli. If there is someone Loki wishes to see, he makes sure he sees them.” She bowed her head, and then turned to head back to the busier streets of her kingdom, where the peaceful spirits of the dead greeted her warmly.
Warm. She was warm too. Some stories called Hel cold, but it wasn’t that she was detached or emotionless, more neutral, able to judge fairly and offer peace to those who earned it.
She was nothing like Loki in that regard, for he was all chaos, yet it was odd how his company felt peaceful to me too.
I couldn’t even be angry with the trickster, for none of this was as terrifying as I might have feared, but if he had warned me, it would have made me more anxious.
With firmer resolve, I opened the door before me.
This room was similar to the one I’d woken up in, but while the previous chamber had borne Loki’s style, matching where we had feasted, this room was all Balder.
Not decorated like Balder, mind you. The room only had a bed, but the walls depicted scenes. Scenes I knew. The most well-known stories of the beloved god, and not as murals. They were moving memories like projected plays, one on each wall.
Balder being praised as the greatest of the gods, while Frigg, his mother, wife of Odin, fretted on the sidelines, demanding of every living thing that they vow to never cause her son harm.
Balder in a fitful sleep, dreaming of his imminent demise despite his mother’s best efforts to keep him safe.
Balder dying amid his reveling brethren because Loki had tricked Hod, Balder’s brother, into killing him with the one living thing that had not made that vow, for Frigg had deemed the plant too fragile to ask.
Finally, the last scene showed Odin whispering into the ear of Balder’s corpse before his funeral pyre was set adrift and then set ablaze with a soaring arrow. What Odin had whispered was one of the ultimate mysteries of the old tales.
When each scene finished, they replayed from the beginning, over and over. If Balder was reliving more of his worst moments than his best, then Hel was a pit of despair, because on the end of the bed sat the god himself, staring at the scene of his fitful dreaming.
I let the memories replay twice more before I closed the door behind me.