Chapter Four #2
A familiar growl skates up my spine, but it’s not my brother. It’s louder. Closer. Odin’s glare turns over my shoulder. His lip curls.
“No beasts in my hall.”
I turn to find Garmr prowling forward. A predator in perfect symmetry, honed by violence but a protector to his core, with only one thing on its mind. And I think it’s me.
Odin’s arm shoots out. I grab and wrap it around me, biting down to disarm him. That only makes Garmr run faster, full speed, gnashing teeth straight for us.
Lightning strikes him. Odin only has one eye, but I forgot he has two arms.
The flash is blinding, so cracking and thunderous that Garmr’s body takes flight, twisting in agony. His large beastly form lands in a smoking heap at my feet.
I fall to my knees and cradle his head. “No. Stupid, wretched fool. I can take care of myself. I don't need help. I don't need—”
You. I can't say it. It's a lie, and for no reason, a lie to myself I could never believe. I do need him. I need a friend more than anything.
A sob wracks through me. He isn’t moving. There is no hint of life in him. His body is a husk of fur and flesh and familiar smells.
He’s gone.
I can take a lifetime of disrespect. A curse for a gift. To be feared instead of respected. But I cannot take another loved one ripped from me.
“Stop the killing!” I scream up at the All-Father.
“It is madness. It is unnatural,” I shout at the entire gallery.
“The beasts you hold so beneath you behave better. No animal kills for sport, for boundaries that are meaningless. Only us! And you mold humanity to this same sick pattern. What is power but an unreachable delusion?”
My horns grow, I feel them aching. I want to scream but nothing comes out. My head falls back at the pain. When my eyes open, a mist of darkness and the stench of decay slithers up from the well over the floor.
The crowd scrambles to the side of the walls. Warriors line up to defend the gods.
But the smoke and mist and the decay, it’s all an illusion. My grief made manifest. The greatest trick of the eye I’ve ever played.
A bone-chilling screech echoes from the well. Níehoggr emerges in a flash from the dark pit, arching across the high ceiling and spewing fire at the crowd. My perfect boy. Five times again larger than me and still a child.
I brought him back. Garmr will be the same. I know it, like I know my own breath. My powers are new, but they are growing, no more so than the moment Odin placed this crown on my head.
I touch the thin ash branch now, and clean, fresh energy flows through me into Garmr. He is so very large and needs more. I crawl to the well, dragging him with me, and grip the first root I find.
“Alive, alive,” I murmur. Inside the swirling black fog, safe from prying eyes, I kiss the tip of his long nose, tasting my own tears.
Even in this form, he is beautiful. Perfect in every way.
I’d never tell him that, but it’s true. My thumbs travel up his muzzle to the knot between his brows, and I cradle his skull in both hands, barely able to hold the weight. “I’ll keep you safe.”
The cold expands, coiling around my insides.
Not Yggdrasill. Not an illusion. This is all me.
The dense ball of rage and hurt and loneliness I’ve held onto my whole life believes now is the time to make itself known, to grow and cascade.
To become something new. Faster now, that dark, wild energy within splinters through my veins, shooting out of every pore.
Garmr yelps. When his eyes blink open, one is silver, one is red. He is not alive, but he is not dead either.
He’s mine.
I spell him back to sleep and picture the mist hovering around us channeled into the shape of black roots, crawling and smoking up the walls of Valhalla.
The darkness does my bidding. What is real and what is my power of illusion, I cannot rightly say, but I always keep my ignorance a secret from others.
Let them fear me before I go.
Let them see how I feel, hideous and dead to them. I pass my hand over my face and know what they see because I place the image in their reality. I am half decaying skeleton, half maiden. My horns arch up, like roots and antlers all in one. I am more terrible than my brothers combined.
I embody the terrible promise that even a god could die if I willed it.
Níe screams but I blow him a kiss. Mother’s alright. He spits fire at the closest line of warriors to me and, snatching one in his great maw, disappears back into the well.
“You see why she must go? The monsters follow her orders. Decay is spreading.” Odin licks his lips, breaths shallow, but his voice comes out as commanding as ever.
“Hel shall rule the unknown space below the roots of Yggdrasill, taking in all who die ignobly, of sickness and old age with no valor to their name. The princess of true death.”
“Queen,” Father says, and there is no smile on his face today. “She rules the underrealms, but her power stretches to all nine.”
“No god can die,” Odin says.
“How sure are you of that? Who dares to touch her deadly mist? Her power does not need your blessing. It simply is. You have granted her the realm yourself.”
Odin gulps, watching the shadows stretch and climb the walls of Valhalla, the massive form of the world serpent coiling tighter at his walls, each scale larger than the biggest boulder, Fenrir howling from outside the entry, now guarded by one less hound.
The threat of my family enforcing this claim is very real, and the All-Father knows he’s trapped.
More than that, I can taste his fear in the air.
“It is as I have foreseen. The ninth realm.” He gestures to the well, as if to encourage me down into it. I will not move until he accepts my rule of death over all realms, though. Father thinks it’s important. Finally, Odin closes his eyes. “Death is born this day, the beginning of the end.”
“The beginning.” Father looks at me and grins.
I try to understand. How much did he plan and how much is he improvising? He’s so good at both and so bad at showing me what he truly feels.
But Father can take care of himself. I have others who need me now.
Garmr is alive, barely, but we will never know peace above the ground where the gods dwell. We need a safer place. We will make one of our own from the mud itself if we have to.
Trash day is tomorrow, and the well is full of muck.
It will do.
I call on the bones in the well, the discarded creatures thrown out like trash, stuck in the roots and never finding the bottom. They are mine now. I call them together, a cyclone of detritus and death. They form into a cage around me then open into two giant wings, enfolding us, keeping us safe.
My arm wraps around Garmr’s thick neck and I make a great bone wing hold the rest of him.
Then, I rise.
The fear in these gods’ eyes used to scare me. Now, it gives me strength.
I hover over them all, surrounded by bones, dripping with carnage and held together with spiderweb wings, clutching the secret eye at my chest and my wolfhound at my side. Níehoggr is already safe below, lighting my way.
Never again will anyone touch what’s mine. I’ll keep them all safe. I’ll keep them secret.
“From this day forward, beware all who call on Hel. When help was needed, you were silent, crying for none who needed your mercy.” I sneer at the gods trembling before me. “Life is not fair, but death will be.”
With that, I descend.
This beauty didn’t ask for a beastly bookworm for Christmas, but maybe she should have... Beastly & Bookish is a cozy, contemporary, holiday romance featuring a roller skating librarian and book-loving demon's emotional journey from friends to lovers.