Chapter Four
“Are you happy, daughter?”
I sigh and hug a branch of Yggdrasill from our place above the rest of the gods, my eyes trailing over Garmr guarding the door, the valkyries and dancers serving their sentences, and the warriors promised a blissful afterlife but who instead stand sentry along the walls like ghouls.
“What is it to be happy in a world such as this?”
A question for a question is only what he deserves. We are no closer to improving anything. The world is full of tragedy where there could be life. Vitality, Father says. But the gods care for themselves and make games of everyone else.
After another look across the hall of the highest god, shining and golden and full of silent misery, I turn to Father. He’s too quiet.
He watches me with an earnest, searching quality that leaves me breathless. Did he ask after my happiness because he cares? Does he have a solution that would see things change for the better, and our family restored?
Then, that smile stretches cheek to cheek, eyes alight with his signature chaotic mirth. A joke is coming.
He presses his thumb to my chin and quirks his eyebrows up. “Maybe you need a new world.”
I shake my face from his grasp. Still a child to him, then.
Dozens of glass beads tied in my braids clink together.
I’m weary of his flippant response to every serious thing I have to say, his insistence on either plans for revenge or attempts to distract.
How are we meant to make things better between all his schemes?
A new world? There are realms for ice and fire, then six more for each being - AEsir, Vanir, elves, giants, dwarves, and humans.
Everyone knows that.
“Are you tired, Father?”
His pleasant expression fades to a brief hard look before all the lines fade, revealing nothing. He could be a mirror of me in that moment. Perhaps I’ve always only been a mirror of him.
“If you’re tired, you’re dead,” he says.
“Gods can’t die.” Everyone knows that.
My response only makes that maddening grin spread again. I don’t have the patience for his tricky talk in a room full of beings who hate us.
I hug the column again, looking to my only ally as I finger the bright red bead I keep braided at my temple.
It’s the first one Garmr ever gave me. He’s so much bigger now than any other hound, the strongest of them all.
He's survived a dozen or more battles against warriors, other hounds, even monsters just for Odin’s pleasure, and has the scars to prove it.
But what if he lost? Half human, half creature.
Would he truly die? I’ve worried over it too many times.
“Your friendship with that dog will cause trouble.”
Dog. My jaw clicks. I shouldn’t have been looking at him so much. Of course Father would notice.
“You like trouble,” is all I say, staying cool, feigning disinterest as I gaze over the rest of the hall but see nothing.
“That I do.” Father leans on the banister, resting both forearms so our faces are close. Even still, his voice drops to a near whisper. “Speaking of, your brothers are coming for a visit.”
“Here?” My body flashes cold. I clutch at the secret pocket nestled at my breast, fingers closing around the eye I hold on to like a talisman.
Níe is much too big to carry these days, but I keep Odin’s eye as my secret treasure and comfort.
I never told Father, but it seems he keeps his own secrets from me.
Because if my brothers are here, something terrible is coming.
Odin begins the new moon meeting not with incense and poetry, but with the clamor of two dozen and more warriors rapping their swords against shield fronts, an ugly, cacophonous sound. Conversation in the hall dies down.
The All-Father rises from his throne. Both ravens fly in from windows to the east and west to land on his shoulders. He listens to their chirps and throws a quick glance at Father.
This cannot be good.
“Today, a ninth realm is born.”
The gods titter and mumble. Father’s hand squeezes mine.
“Hel means hidden,” Odin doesn’t yell, but his voice resounds. He walks to the well. “The girl is well-named to journey to the darkness below all known realms. The place needs a ruler.”
No one rules the void. It is chaos. Finally, I am being cast out as we knew would happen. But it is not into the sea or fetters like my brothers. I am to journey into the nothingness.
“Why, you may ask?” He takes a drag from his pipe and circles the well.
“It is not a punishment. I have three good reasons. Unlike her brothers, Hel is obedient. For years, she’s followed orders, collected and dealt with the trash.
Hel has shown she can be contained. A goddess too easily overlooked, she's never grown as monstrous as we feared. Lastly, Hel is resolute. The darkness does not scare her.”
The other gods’ eyes shift between Father and I on the platform and Odin below, murmuring to each other. My face is a mask even as my mind spins. Is this a way to punish Father, isolate him? Did we miscalculate?
I am being cast out under the guise of a gift.
Father straightens, and like a doll on strings, I let him lead me down the stairs. I’m numb. I see my hand on his forearm. I watch my feet move. The glass beads in my hair catch the light.
This is some joke of theater calling the void a ninth realm and claiming I will rule the unrulable. What will happen to me there? If I disappear, would anyone even know? No one has ever come back from the underrealms.
“I’m scared,” I admit my first weakness to Father.
The words barely make a sound as we pass the door. We could have flown down, but he chose this route down the spiraling stairs instead. It must be the ceremony of it.
I keep my eyes from flitting around, staying focused on the well and the immense old god hovering over it.
A low growl rumbles behind me. Garmr. Will I ever see him again? I make a sharp inhale and mean to turn around, but Father’s free hand grips my arm.
Don’t show weakness. It would only hurt my friend. I'd never do that. If Garmr enters the hall, it is certain death.
“Life isn’t fair,” Father says. It’s a game. He doesn’t have to say it. The phrase is known to me. I’ve heard it countless times growing up. And what is Father playing at now?
“Trust me,” he says. “We are with you.”
Valhalla darkens.
A sudden shadow covers the north windows. Cerulean scales shimmer a mirage of ocean water across the floor, and the east windows black out. Gods and attendants gasp.
“Jor,” I whisper. My brother. The serpent who circles the seas.
Surely it is only the tip of his tail that can even crawl up Yggdrasill for all his size now.
My heart warms, imagining him hugging the tree the way he hugged me as a child, encircling the walls of great Valhalla just to be close to me.
“And Fenrir,” Father says. A howl splits the air, so pained and so terrible, it can only be my oldest brother, the terror of the gods. “We are always with you.”
I take a breath, unsure of what is to come but steady. If I am to be cast out, at least I’m in good company. I roll my shoulders back and school my features to face the All-Father.
I am Hel, daughter of the Great Trickster, sister of the world-ending monsters, the princess called death, and they will never see me tremble.
Odin’s nostrils flare, smoke streaming around his wizened face, eyes locked on me, half-lidded with derision.
Jor blocks out the last of the windows with a groaning creak of the Great Tree, and the hall falls into deeper darkness.
Only then does Odin falter. His gaze skips to the ceiling.
Dozens of chandeliers swing. Their flickering candlelight casts shifting shadows on the walls.
Torches blaze in hand-dug sconces. Valhalla is a large place with many windows, but there is still plenty of fire to see by, at least for one accustomed to shadows.
That’s when I realize something.
The All-Father enforces strict order. He surrounds himself with light and glittering treasures. He seeks knowledge above all.
Each truth holds an opposite in equal weight.
He’s afraid of chaos, darkness, and most of all, the unknown.
Father was right. He fears me.
He sends me to the place he is most afraid of.
Little does he know; the curse of my family cannot be escaped. Every time he casts us out, we are made stronger. Prophecy cannot be undone.
Another truth I cling to - the underrealms have called me for some time. What if I choose not to be like him, afraid?
What if his curse is my gift?
“Come and receive your crown. Then, you may descend.”
A simple crown of twigs, surely part of this farce, dangles from one of his fingers. Father stops and lets me walk the last few steps alone. Only an arm’s length away, I bow to Odin, unlooping my braids as I do, revealing the horns none has ever seen.
The crowd gasps. He places the crown upon my head, and whether he intended it or not, the trickle of some strange new power flows through me. I finger the thin braided wood. It is a still-living cutting from Yggdrasill.
“Give me back the eye, you little monster, and I will welcome you back home.”
Now the manufactured theater makes sense.
He can't call me a thief without revealing what I stole – his precious eyes – the thing he lied to everyone about. His infamous wisdom would be called into question. I have something he wants - the myth of his integrity. But I’ve spelled an illusion around the eye so well, he’ll never find it, even when it's right in front of his nose.
Odin has eyes everywhere, except the one in my front dress pocket.
We both straighten and face each other.
“Never.” I smile. “And you will rue the day you tried to bargain with Hel, gifting me a realm that does not exist. Because I will make your lie true. Just as you say, there is a ninth realm, and it will have its queen.”
“Curse you and your secrets to the nether forevermore.” He spits at my feet.