by Matt Larkin
Its roar reverberated up the pit and only seemed to intensify the tremors running through this crumbling place. It was at once the nightmarish cry of the damned and the fierce bellow of a dragon. And deep below, it was shifting, starting to pull its bulk free from the abyss of infinite darkness that underlaid the cosmos. She was actually doing it. Hel was close to destroying reality.
And Odin could not get to her, not with the ground shaking so violently.
Gondul dropped down from the sky, diving at the goddess. Hel spun on the valkyrie, the red gleam in her eye seeming brighter than ever. She caught the haft of the valkyrie’s spear, ripped it from the woman’s grasp, and kicked her in the chest. Gondul hurtled backward only to plummet into the pit.
“No!” Odin cursed, redoubling his efforts to reach Hel.
She turned to him, perhaps forty feet away, and flashed him a grin. A look of utter madness, of one given into complete depravity. Tormented by her own withered soul.
Hel stepped off the edge of the pit.
Odin drew up short, gaping. What was she …?
Then, realizing he could afford no delay—the cosmos could afford no delay—he raced to the pit’s edge himself. Hel had landed on a platform that must have broken away from the pit’s side—a shelf thirty feet across supported by a nest of roots below, all of which were now bearing the glowing glyphs of her power.
In fact, glyphs had begun to form up along the entire depth of the pit, their fell glow casting a hint of light into those foul depths, though hardly enough to see all the way down to where Nidhogg thrashed.
Perhaps it was his imagination, but Odin could have sworn he heard a root snap in half, torn by Nidhogg’s wild gyrations.
For a bare instant, Odin could but gape at Hel. It was really happening. The eschaton cycle was breaking. Hel was … ending everything.
A flutter of wings, and Gondul landed on that platform by Hel.
Odin braced to jump, but a horde of draugar came surging toward him. If he allowed them down there, he’d hardly be able to focus on Hel. But even a moment’s delay …
But Tyr came crashing into their ranks, hewing and hacking, and leading an army of furious dead escaped from the gates of Hel. Those tormented by Hel’s legions for so very long might at last begin to claim their revenge.
Tyr’s missing leg was restored. Odin had bid him focus, to stop thinking on what he’d sustained and imagine himself as he had been. For the dead, self-image shaped them. Tyr could not restore his lost hand, for that injury was so old it had embedded itself in his personality. But man’s very nature was to deny a recent injury, and in embracing that denial, Tyr had regained his leg.
And his fury.
Odin turned back to Hel and, after pulling back several steps for a flying leap, ran and jumped, clearing the distance and landing on the platform.
Hel had Gondul by the throat, and ice seeped into the valkyrie. It spread through her flesh, until—Odin knew—her heart froze solid. The goddess dropped the woman, and Gondul shattered on the ground. Odin winced at the sight.
But the valkyrie had forestalled the incantation for a moment, a time long enough for Odin to reach Hel. To end this. Growling, he charged at her.
A scythe-like blade of ice extended from her arm and she swung, carving through the air. Odin dropped down, beneath the attack, and kicked her legs out from under her, then twisted, catching her in the gut with his heel. Hel tumbled backward with an oomph, and Odin scrambled forward, half jumping to pound his fist into her face. She rolled to the side and her heel caught him in the chest, sending him flying backward.
It would have knocked all wind from his lungs, had he still breathed. Instead, Odin managed to twist around in midair and land in a crouch. Momentum had him skidding precariously close to the edge of the platform. She had strength many times that of any other draug. Had to keep that in mind.
Odin held a hand to his half-crushed chest, flexing his shoulders.
Hel, too, stood, snarling at him like some beast. Coils of mist slithered from her mouth and wafted around her. She reached a hand out behind herself, then jerked it forward.
A shard of ice and rock as long as a house ripped free from the pit wall and launched at Odin like a flung spear. He broke into a mad dash forward and hurled himself to the ground an instant before the missile crashed into the edge of the platform. It blasted down in an explosion of debris that punched through both stone and the root below, sending a huge chunk of the platform tumbling down into the void.
Hel advanced on Odin even as he scrambled to his feet, her face a mask of fury and madness. “You think to fight me here … in Niflheim, the heart of my power? I will feast upon your soul … before I toss its dregs to Nidhogg.”
Tendrils of solid mist now wafted off her like writhing manifestations of her rage. Her one eye had turned opalescent, glowing with pale light. The vapors engulfed her lower half, obscuring her movements.
Odin raised his hands before himself, pacing sideways around her, waiting. Hel wielded powers he could not understand. He needed an opening. A chance to close in and land a blow that might stagger her. So … wait …
A half dozen tendrils of mist launched themselves at Odin. He leapt over one, twisting in midair to avoid the others. One slapped against his leg, filling him with an icy numbness that sent him tumbling back down to the ground. And then Hel was flying at him, a descending cloud of mist. Odin rolled to the side an instant before claws gouged the stone where he’d been. Shards of ice exploded from the ground, bursting through Odin’s shin, his hips, and his shoulder.
It was all he could do to pull free and scramble away, and then Hel was surging at him again, mist tendrils whipping about her like lashes. Odin leapt backward, desperate to gain his balance, but the lashes kept him ever scrambling, driving him closer and closer to the edge.
Her mad cackles tore through his mind like tiny daggers. A woman given over completely to the darkness and the cold. A woman driven beyond the brink.
Snarling, she lunged, a lance of ice jutting from her wrist and blasting through Odin’s chest. Its icy bite spread numbness through him like a flood. It rushed into him, devouring light and life and soul and hope.
Unmaking him.
And all Odin could have and should have done came undone.
Odin knew their destination, for Yggdrasil rose up from the valley ahead with glory beyond aught he had ever seen or dreamed. Every step down the path only intensified the tingle on his skin. The ground beneath his feet pulsed with energy so pure, so vital, it left him euphoric. His very soul screamed at him to grab Freyja and kiss her for hours. To slip inside her and never ever leave.
The Vanr woman glanced back at him, a twinkle in her eye that bespoke knowledge of exactly what he felt. That she felt it, too. How could she not? Stories claimed life itself rose from Yggdrasil, and Odin could no longer doubt those tales. He knew his breath had become irregular, but he didn’t bother trying to conceal it nor control it. Why should such petty things matter?
Freyja slipped her fingers into his hand, her soft touch sending fresh jolts of sensation shooting up his arm.
“Is … is it always like this?” he murmured.
“Yes … but not quite this … Mundilfari had a theory … he claimed Yggdrasil laid bare the connections between souls. Those meant to be together, soul mates, would be unable to deny their feelings in its presence. It was … just a theory.”
Odin’s body tried to break apart. To come undone and give in to the darkness that consumed. But she was there, had always been there, his beacon. And existence was, in a sense, a choice.
Self-image.
The will to exist. And that, alone, unmade not Odin, but the shard of ice freezing him. Reasserting his sense of self, for it existed, not isolation, as a refraction of all the other souls he touched in the great web.
Thoughts … memories … binding them all.
“You change the subject as if I might somehow be misdirected from the significant de
tail that Hel called you Father.”
Loki shut his eyes a moment before staring at Odin. “My daughter died long eras back … and had she not touched the Art maybe … maybe that would have been the end of it. Instead, she endured in Niflheim. And there, in time, she usurped the power of the first goddess of mist.”
The image of strangling Loki flashed through Odin’s mind again. Now, at last, it began to make a terrible and irrevocable sense. For how could the father of his greatest enemy truly be his ally? Odin, a father, knew well what lengths a man would go to for his own children. No matter what else might befall them, some part of Loki would never let go of Hel. For that, Odin could not blame him, but then, neither could he ever again endow the man with his full trust.
The avalanche of urd continued.
It tore from him his greatest ally. It stole from him his family, those of birth and those of choice. Until, at last, it would leave him alone to face the final battle.
It was the first time Odin had known Hel was Loki’s daughter.
Hel was a madwoman. But still a woman … still caught in the same web of souls that bound them all.
And she gaped at him now, as if unbelieving he could reform his soul and continued to defy her in her own place of power.
“Where is your father?” Odin growled at her. “Does he join us in death?”
A slight hesitation, a faltering in her assault that allowed him to dodge to the side and avoid the pit.
“He will join you soon enough.” Hel charged at him.
Odin dodged forward this time, ducking under the lashes and coming up to land a blow to her gut. The woman stumbled backward, then slashed at him with a claw. Odin caught her forearm on his own and pummeled her with two uppercuts to the face. “Even through his shame at what you’ve become, still he has not given up on his love for you. Still, he somehow hopes to see you again.”
Hel snarled. “He was with me!”
“Then where is he now?”
She shrieked, hysterical, lunging at Odin with tendrils of mist slapping all around in wild fury. Odin ducked, twisted, and dodged. And still caught a lash across the side of his head. It hit him like a jotunn’s club, spinning him around and sending him crashing to the ground face-first.
Snarling, Hel leapt atop him, digging the claws of both hands into Odin’s shoulders. Pain shot through him, as if she rent his very soul. Gouging deeper and deeper, scraping over bone.
Odin roared in pain.
Hel hefted him up like that, then hurled him free, to land tumbling along the platform once more.
“You shall suffer eternity in Nidhogg’s vile sea!”
Gasping in agony, Odin struggled to reassert his self-image again. The injuries would’ve killed a living man, but he was dead. Naught save a soul. And yet … Hel’s claws seemed to have carved out pieces of that soul. He managed his knees and grit his teeth, forcing down the pain.
He had endured more terrible injuries in his thousand lifetimes. Even as Odin, he had endured, and continued to suffer the pain of having his throat and spine torn out. His shredded back meant naught.
Hel stalked closer, face a twisted mix of rage and lasciviousness, as if aroused by torturing Odin. But rage … that would cloud her judgment. Already, it had stopped her from killing him when she probably had the opportunity. She wanted him to suffer.
“You blame me … but you are the architect of your own damnation. No one forced you to delve so deeply into the Art. Even so, your father would’ve done aught imaginable to save you. To spare you from your self-inflicted torment. But you are addicted to the power of your throne.”
“Shut up!” she roared. “You know naught of him!”
Blood pooled in his mouth and he wondered, briefly, if that was a manifestation of his mind, of his self-image made flesh. “I know … Prometheus … Loki … I know he would … thank me. I was wrong. I don’t need to destroy you. I need to save you.” Odin closed his hands into fists and raised them once more.
It was all his self-image. All his wounds, all his pain, were his mind projecting his suffering physically. But he could control his self-image, at least for a little while.
“Your father … he wanted a Destroyer to stand against darkness. Right or wrong … his actions over the eons brought me here, to save his daughter from the throes of damnation. And I’m going to. Because while you lingered in the torment of death for all these ages, I have lived. Over and over, I have lived and loved and died and risen again.”
“Shut. Up!” she shrieked. And then she was racing at him again, a blurred, icy whirlwind of rage and torment. The very pinnacle of damnation, caught in her own trap.
It shifted within Odin, then. All his fury at all she’d done. How could he hold on to wrath, when it had begun to transform into pity? They were, all of them—himself, Loki, even Hel—caught in this web and drawn together. Suffering, together. And suffering more, because they thought themselves alone.
Her whirlwind fell into the mire, his perception of it slowing as he embraced the instincts of all those warriors. Her rage and pain clouded her thoughts, but Odin’s mind was finally, finally free. He ducked, dodged, and bobbed around her tendrils and claws as if she were a flailing child.
His hook caught her in the ribs.
Hel bellowed in icy fury. Lances of cold shot from her like a hail of arrows, forcing Odin to give ground, twisting out of the way of one after another. The so-called goddess unleashed a barrage of mist-fueled blades.
Odin’s foot brushed the platform’s edge. With no more ground to give, he dove into a roll and came up beside her. Her blades gouged his shoulder even as he did so, and he immediately retreated once more.
But still, it was slow. She was slowed. Predictable despite her rage.
More wild assaults that should have brought down any man in its twister of rage. Tendrils freezing and tearing up the platform where they fought. Odin leapt over them, flipped around in the air, his foot catching her chin. Sending her staggering. He twisted around her, and his elbow slammed between her shoulder blades.
Then Hel was the one teetering on the platform’s edge, flailing helplessly as she pitched forward. Toward the pit. Toward eternal suffering in the dark dragon’s hateful sea. Once, Odin would have cast her down there, considered the punishment of eternal damnation well fitting for the eternity of her crimes.
But maybe they had all suffered enough.
And she was his brother’s daughter.
Odin wrapped his hand in her white hair and caught her the instant before she would have fallen into the abyss. He yanked her back onto the platform, then kicked out her the back of her knee, driving her down.
“I’m going to give you a gift. The most precious of all gifts. I’m going to give you the chance … to start over.”
His other fist slammed into the back of her neck, crunching her spine. A sputtering wheeze escaped Hel and she collapsed, limp in his arms.
Odin eased her down and knelt above her. “Return now … return to the Wheel of Life. That you will one day see your father again … in sunlight.”
He crushed her skull. Squeezed, until that abominable red gleam went out of her eyes. Until, at long last, her essence dissolved, fleeing in ephemeral wisps toward the roots. And seeping into them, drawn back to the World Tree, and within it, the ever-spinning Wheel of Life.
There was a question, lingering, of what would become of Niflheim without Hel. An answer plagued Odin as he climbed the roots back up to where the last of his einherjar awaited his return. Hel’s defeat had broken what remained of the fighting, and her minions had fled, leaving Odin’s kin to stare at him in silent apprehension, unable to even give voice to the question of what happened next.
The answer, of course, was that he would return to her fortress and claim her throne. He, the dead god, who had gathered the einherjar must become the god of the dead. And perhaps, in time, despite the cold, he might make of this place what he had made of Valhalla. A place of hope even for those who
had fallen.
He might rule here, for all time, and make it better.
Freyja was there, on her knees, watching him as he climbed free. So many were gathered, though so many more were gone. Fallen and, Odin dared to hope, returned to the Wheel of Life and granted another chance. A chance to see their loved ones.
And maybe that chance was all that mattered.
So … who was he to claim this place? Hel’s arrogance in doing so had twisted her into something unrecognizable. Had she, at the first, been driven wholly by lust for power, or had she harbored some desire to do right here? But no vaettr could sustain itself forever without consuming souls.
Not Odin, and not those he loved who remained.
Thor, his precious son, was not among those yet standing here. Nor Freyja’s brother. Nor so very many others. Fallen, so that he could end Hel’s madness and return her to the Wheel of Life.
Did any of them deserve any more or less than that? Did he?
Odin gained his feet and made his way to Freyja’s side, then took her hand and pulled her to stand beside him. They were all looking at him, but he saw only her eyes. A whirling pool of fear and loss and love and hope. Urd had ever torn them apart, given them not half the chances they should have had together.
How very tempting it was to hold her here, in Niflheim, and try to stretch their time to eternity. But this cursed, lonely existence would devour them, as it had devoured Hel.
And he knew the truth.
Odin stroked her cheek. “It’s time. We must all return to the Wheel of Life.”
Freyja’s jaw trembled and Odin thought she might argue. Instead, she nodded. “We can … try again?”
“Wash away the pain,” he said. “Wash away the loss and start fresh.”
Hermod’s hand fell on his shoulder. “I have to do something.”
Odin looked at his apprentice in sudden understanding. “You still intend to break the seals and free Achlys.”
