Takes place in the same universe as my Sigyn's Saga, but many years before those stories.

I've combined a couple of myths here, such that Hel is the child born after Loki eats the woman's heart, so Hel's name for Loki is "Mama."

Many thanks to starsinyourwake for the beta!

Queen of Shadow and Starlight

When Hel is nine winters old, the Aesir come for her as they came for her brothers.

Fenrir her wolf-brother and cunning Jormungand they have taken already, to be raised in Asgard, as they said, though her brothers are not in Asgard now. Hel is the youngest, born after her mother's death, and when they come for her, they do not pretend at invitation. Hel knows as well as they that there is no place in shining Asgard for the half-dead daughter of a Jotun witch. And, though no one mentions Loki, Hel reads in their eyes that they are afraid of all her mama's children.

She is nine winters old, which is more than old enough to know what will come. She is not surprised by her sentence of exile. She is surprised by the rule of nine worlds below the worlds, given over to her, but when she sees the worlds of the dead beneath the lowest root of Yggdrasil, she will understand that this, too, was not meant as an honor.

Hel has never been proud, and it is not pride that leads her to do what she does next. She simply understands the nature of the worlds, and if she must go into exile, she would have it be her own choice.

Hel's mama is not there when the Aesir gather to proclaim their doom. But Hel isn't bothered by this. She understands necessity.

So she smiles at Odin, her mama's sworn brother, and before he can carry out his sentence, she herself steps off the edge of the world, falling down into shadow, and she laughs at the look of relief on their faces as she leaves bright Asgard behind.

Nine days and nine nights she falls: through deep water, through pathless stone, through unquenchable fire and boughs of trees with leaves uncounted. Past Vanaheim she falls, and past gleaming Alfheim and Jotunheim, ancient and unbowed. Past Midgard, circled in her brother's endless coils, she falls; past the shadowed lands and halls of stone where trolls slumber and dwarves work tireless at the bellows. Past lands older and darker still, where nameless things gnaw at the roots of the ageless Tree and shadows sleep undisturbed, and her brother Fenrir howls in his unbreakable bonds. Past the last root of Yggdrasil she falls, past light, past the memory of any living thing, and into silence.

She is alone. All is dark before her eyes. The air feels chill, and she senses an immensity of space about her, empty, unchanging. In all that vast dark there is no sound.

"Hello," she says, "is anyone there?" But the silence eats her words, and not even an echo comes back.

She shivers, there in the dark, and the chill damp sinks deep into her bones. There is nowhere to go, and nothing to do, and so she falls to the ground where she is, wrapping her shaking arms about her knees and drawing herself into the smallest space possible.

"Mama," she breathes into the devouring silence. She closes her eyes and waits.

She must have slept, though she does not remember it, and the darkness is exactly the same now as it has always been. Still she can see nothing. But Hel starts up, holding her arms defensively before her, waiting for she knows not what. Still the shadows about her are silent, but now the silence breathes.

"Mama?" she whispers.

And this time the darkness answers, but not in any voice her mama has ever used.

Who are you, witch-child? the hungry dark demands in a voice like grinding ice, dull and terrible. Who are you, and why are you here, who are not yet fully dead?

Hel draws her arms close about her, shuddering. In all her nine winters, and all the half-guessed time before that, she has never been afraid before. She decides now that she doesn't like the feeling at all.

"Who are you?" she demands, trying to sound like her mama, who can hide almost anything behind insolence. "Why should I answer you, when I know nothing of you?"

The darkness laughs, a deep, rumbling sound that echoes through the soles of her feet and clangs in her ribs.

Did you fancy yourself a queen, little ghost-girl? she hears through the shaking earth. Others, older and wiser and greater than you, have been taken in by the Allfather's words before.

That rankles. "Then those others may have been older and greater, but not wiser," she snaps. "I know I am an exile. But I am an exile by my own choosing."

The dark presses close around her, crawling oil-thick across her skin and laughing in her bones.

Do you think so, child? it breathes. Hel feels fear wrap about her like a blanket. She can't answer.

But then, shockingly, there is a noise. The first true noise in this echoing black. It shatters the silence like a sudden rush of water over tumbled stones, and with it comes a faint but growing light, like a burning star blazing blue in the night.

"Hel?" calls her mama's voice. "Hel, where are you?"

Hel leaps away from the strangling shadows, hardly noticing as they scatter about her like a forgotten cloak, and runs haphazardly over the uneven ground toward Loki's voice.

"Mama, Mama!" she calls, breathless. "Mama, here I am!"

Loki's torch holds itself flaming in the blue air as she kneels down to catch her daughter in her arms.

"I'm here, child," Loki murmurs, stroking her daughter's hair, which gleams bone-white in the light of the torch. "Nothing here will harm you."

Hel sniffles against her mama's apron. She doesn't mention the voice in the darkness. She's not certain it can't harm her, but as long as Mama is here, Hel knows she's safe. Mama can do anything.

Her tears dry, but she doesn't move away from her mama's comforting arms, and after a while she feels Loki huff softly in pretend annoyance, and then she's lifted in the air and held, safe and warm, against her mama's shoulder.

"You're getting far too big for this," Loki laughs, but she only holds Hel closer. She sets off walking over the shadowy ground, seemingly at random, and the torch goes on before them.

Loki hums tunelessly as she walks, and Hel snuggles against her mama's shoulder and basks in the beating of her heart.

"A queen will need a hall," Loki says, coming to a slow stop, and Hel pulls her head back to look around them. The torch casts a faint blue pallor over the tumbled ground, and in the dim light she can see that they are in some kind of fenland. Pools of water surround them, soft mosses and deep green lichens squelching beneath Loki's feet. The air is moist and thick with the smell of the slow decay which gives birth to new life.

Hel squirms in her mama's arms, and Loki laughs and puts her down. Instantly, her feet sink into the brackish water, and she giggles as she wriggles her toes. But when she meets her mama's gaze again, her face is perfectly serious and far too old for a child of nine winters.

"I am not a queen, Mama," she says. "I am an exile."

"You are my wise child," says Loki firmly. "And you will be whatever you wish."

Hel thinks about this for a moment. The terrible voice from the shadows that laughed at her had seemed quite certain of what she was, and what she was not. But she can't imagine her mama being afraid of that voice, and anyway, the voice had never identified itself. She doesn't see why she should listen to something that doesn't even have a name.

"All right," she says, taking her mama's hand. "We'll build a hall. And then we can have visitors."

"As many as you like," Loki says, swinging Hel back up onto her shoulders. The torch goes before them as they set off again, toward the distant hint of a patch of firmer ground and a land suitable for laying foundations.

The first hall Loki builds is really more of a hut, or perhaps a cottage. It's built on a dark outcropping of rock overhanging one of the great dim pools, and the smell of moss and dank water drifts through the windows on three sides. The fourth wall of the house is not really a wall at all, but the rough and enormous bulk of the root of Yggdrasil which trails down into the depths of the underworld. At its foot, just beside the house, a well springs up, bubbling and laughing in the shadow of the great tree, and carrying with it the smell of ancient darkness under the numberless stars, older far than all the nine worlds.

There's light here, by the house. Loki has cast her torch into the distant sky, where it flickers and gleams bright as a star. The star alone casts a pale, ethereal light over the rocks and sinking marshland of Hel's new home, but it is not the only light. There are strange glowing pinpoints of illumination that appear, now and then, just on the edge of sight, like candles seen dimly guessed in distant windows. Hel isn't certain her mama can see them at all, but she can. She follows them with the corners of her eyes, and sees where they disappear, most times over piled mounds and raised cairns of rock.

They are corpse-lights.

But Hel isn't troubled by this. She likes the lights. They're peaceful, soothing, and they bring little flashes of beauty to the wide, stretching sameness of the landscape.

"I need to go on a journey," Loki tells her, one morning. (There is no time here, of course, but they have just woken from sleep, and so Hel chooses to call it morning.) "I won't be gone long."

She hugs Hel close, stroking her hair and rubbing her back. Hel clings to her, but doesn't ask her to stay.

"Where are you going, Mama?" she whispers.

Loki gives her an overly cheerful smile. "We need supplies," she says. "And food. And a few other things. I won't be gone long."

Hel nods, swallowing dry words unspoken.

"Can you wait here for me?" Loki says. Her voice only breaks a little. They both know that Hel can never leave this place.

"I'll be all right, Mama," Hel says, squaring her shoulders and drawing herself up to her full height.

Loki smiles down at her proudly. "I will not leave you alone here," she whispers fiercely. "Remember that."

"Yes, Mama," Hel says, and watches as her mama becomes a bird, swift and light, disappearing rapidly into the gloom.

She knows it won't be long until the voice returns.

But the star is still there, shining in the murk, and just beyond the reach of her gaze there are the dancing, gentle corpse-lights. She is not alone. So she waits.

When the dark comes, it is like the sudden and total extinguishing of a fire in a rain-soaked howling wind. Black night falls as though it has always been.

By what right do you build here, witch-child? the voice breathes in the silence and the dark. This place is not yours. You have no right to it.

"But I do," Hel says quietly. "If this is to be my home, I must live here."

The dark laughs.

Your home, little ghost? You have no home, not on any of the nine worlds. A queen, did they say? But you are a corpse.

The hiss of the words echoes in her bones. Hel shivers and clasps her arms about her middle, touching warm skin in one moment and rotting flesh in the next. She tries to recall her mama's words.

"I never said I was a queen," she whispers. "But I am Loki's daughter, and Angrboda's, and this is my home now."

The dark shudders around her like the rumble of fire in distant mountains that sleep unquiet in the surrounding sea. This time, it is not laughing.

You are alone. The voice rolls out from the depths of the earth, pounding to the beat of her heart. You are no one's daughter. You are forgotten, a corpse buried in darkness, and I will devour you.

Hel shakes, curling against herself and sinking to the ground. She can see nothing. Even the memory of sight seems strange, distant, lost in the consuming black. All around her, she can feel it breathing.

But she remembers her mama's words. Crouched tight against the earth, she digs her toes into the soft mould and feels the thick water wash over her feet, rich with loam. The scent of the well at the foot of the Tree still fills the air, though she cannot guess where it is in the gloom. But she grounds herself in the smell, breathing deep, and opens her eyes wide in the dark.

"No," she says, so quiet that she is almost inaudible even to herself. But her voice is even. "My mama will come back." She draws herself up, thin and trembling with false courage, and spits into the shadows, "And you may devour me, but I will consume you from within."

The darkness laughs again, but this time it is more threat than amusement. Around Hel, the whole world shakes. But she squares her toes in the moist earth and stands, swaying in the shivering air but rooted too firmly to fall.

She grins fiercely, bearing all her teeth and snarling into the dark. It presses closer still about her, stealing her breath and whispering across her skin. Hel waits.

From somewhere far distant across a chasm of darkness, she hears the lowing of cattle.

And then the shadows flame with starlight and the sparks of the corpse-lights, and finally Hel laughs, not in defiance, but in simple relief. Her mama is back, hurrying her way across the fenland, and leading behind her a herd of cattle and goats. The torch-star blazes bright with her coming.

"Mama!" Hel calls, leaping up and away from her rooted position in the earth. The mud sucks at her feet as she goes, releasing her with a quiet squelch. Behind, her footprints slowly fill with water and dissolve back into the marsh.

Loki greets her with a laugh. The sound skitters from pool to pool and fills the empty places in the silence. She reaches out and scoops Hel up in her arms, kissing each of her cheeks before swinging her up onto her shoulders. Hel perches there, tangling her fingers in her mama's hair and breathing deep of her warmth.

"What are the cows for, Mama?" she demands.

"Oh," says Loki brightly, striding along with the cows following in her wake, "you will want milk and butter and meat, if you're to have visitors. And besides, every home needs a few cattle. They're not much for conversation, but they're wonderfully good for listening."

Hel hums in acceptance of this logic. "What else did you get?" she blurts, only partly because she wants to know. Her mama will start asking questions soon. But Hel's not ready to talk about the voice just yet.

"You'll see," Loki says pointedly, and Hel sighs. She never has been able to distract her mama when it really matters. "What happened while I was gone?" Loki's voice is stern, but not ungentle.

Hel doesn't bother to pretend ignorance. She lays her head atop her mama's and closes her eyes. "There's a voice," she mumbles into Loki's hair. "In the dark. It doesn't have a name."

"Hmm," says Loki. It's a short, distracted sound. Hel's mama is troubled.

They continue in silence for some while, but Hel knows her mama is pondering. The lights go ahead of them, glimmering in the pools and showing up deep shadows and sudden flashes of green moss and rich brown lichen.

"This place is ancient," Loki says at last. "More ancient than the nine worlds, maybe. Its spirit must be strong." She comes to a stop, swinging Hel down off her shoulders and crouching in the rich, sweet-smelling earth so their faces are level. Loki's eyes are as black as the earth, and her smile is sharp as she says, "You should give it a name. Named things have stories, and stories can be shaped."

Hel thinks about this. She has been thinking of the voice as the dark, and so it has been. But another name might be more suitable. And, though it is a name of dread and power, there is only one name she can think of that will tell this story true.

"Nidhogg," she whispers, giving voice and life to the darkness. "Its name is Nidhogg."

Numberless weeks pass, but Hel's mama does not leave again. The house now is more truly a hall, wide and full of windows, and ever growing. The root of Yggdrasil passes through the midst of it, the central pillar of a great hall fit for many guests, though only two ever share it.

Hel's days, such as they are, settle into a pattern. They work the land around the hall, slowly building up a garden, planted with the many seeds Hel's mama brought back from Midgard. In the mornings, Hel helps her mama milk the cows, and in the evenings, they make butter and cheese and candles.

And there are mornings and evenings now. The light of her world is not sunlight; it is a misty glow, thin and diffuse, shining from no direction and unchanging in intensity during the day-hours. It shines because she has named it so, and here more than anywhere else Hel is learning that stories have real power.

The night too is lit, though by no shine of moon. The torch-star gleams bright enough to cast shadows of deeper black against the night-greys of the marsh, and it's joined now by other stars, glimmering like jewels in the crown of ancient night.

Hel has come to love her little world, constrained as it is to the Root and the Well and the Hall surrounding them. But outside this little space, she knows, the darkness waits. This place is older and stronger than her mama. And they are alone here, apart from the darkness. The world beneath the worlds is immense, worlds buried within worlds, and in all that vastness only the two of them, and Nidhogg.

"Mama," Hel asks one day, as they sit beside the well at the root of Yggdrasil. "Where are all the people?"

Loki looks up from the new dress she is stitching. Hel would be thirteen winters old now, in the world of time, and she is growing fast.

"Ah," Loki says, smiling with a shine of teeth. "You mean the dead. They are here." She waves a hand broadly, encompassing all the wide view through the many long windows of the hall. Hel follows the gesture, her eyes skipping quickly over the mounds and piles of rock and bog-markers that scatter the landscape, the places where the corpse-lights rest.

"The dead sleep," Loki says, distance and sadness lending weight to her voice. "This is no home of draugar."

"But you could talk to them," Hel whispers, watching her mama's face carefully. "You know the words."

Loki turns sharply and arches a brow at her. "I do," she says. "Do you want to consult with the dead, my clever child? Whatever would you ask?"

Hel shrugs, drawing her knees up to her chest. It's something she's been thinking about for longer than she'd like to admit.

"Well," she says slowly. "It's— My mother's here, isn't she?"

Her mama draws a sudden breath, so quick that someone who knew her less might not have noticed. Hel reaches out and takes Loki's hand, squeezing in apology. But she can't take back her words.

"I want to meet her," she breathes. It's a confession.

Loki's breath escapes her in a long, ragged sigh. She pulls Hel close against her, tucking her chin against her daughter's hair and brushing her fingers softly through its strands.

"I don't know where she is," Loki admits, so quiet that Hel feels more than hears the words.

They sit a long time in silence.

Hel makes her mama teach her the words. They are simple runes, sounds that echo in the blood. The power comes more easily to Hel than to Loki, but neither of them is really surprised. Hel's ability comes by way of kinship as well as magic.

She is in her fifteenth year the first time she speaks the words over one of the many mounds scattered across the landscape of her home. She chooses the mound mostly at random; it is one she sees every day, looking out the window from her sleeping room beside the root of the great Tree. She has seen the little lights lingering there often, and the air that blows there is a soothing one.

Loki is there with her as she traces the runes in the black earth, sinking her fingers deep into the soil. The thrum of life tingles over her skin, and she follows its threads, touching with her mind the seeds of a thousand different plants, the crawling small animals that thrive in dirt, the thirsty roots of great trees, the snuffling noses of burrowing beasts and the slumber of foxes and bears and rabbits in the den. All these things beneath the fallow earth, and somewhere, too, the woman who dwells in this mound.

She traces the final rune and draws her hands back. Loki is beside her, silent, waiting.

Hel is not expecting anything dramatic, but she's still surprised by how very simple it all is. A moment passes, another, and then the mound opens, slowly, as though someone were opening the door of a house, with caution but no real mistrust.

The woman who emerges from the mound is nondescript in almost every way. She is of an age that is nearly impossible to determine, and her clothes and hair and deeply freckled pale skin all point to a woman who is used to work under the sun. She steps out and away from the mound and stands blinking slowly in the wispy light, like someone who has been asleep for a very long time.

"Who called me?" she says at last. Her voice is the first unexpected thing about her: deep and cold as earth beneath a glacier that has never known thaw, but not cruel or harsh.

Hel steps forward eagerly. It has been years now since she's spoken with anyone but her mama.

"I did," she says, holding herself almost uncomfortably straight. "My name is Hel, daughter of Loki and Angrboda, and I—well, I live here."

She finishes weakly, even to her own ears, but the mound-dweller is peering at her very strangely with wide, unblinking eyes. She doesn't look dead, exactly; in fact, Hel thinks, most of the Aesir would probably say she looks more alive than Hel herself. But she's distant, somehow. Oddly still, and too perfectly expressionless. There's no spark in her.

"Who are you?" Hel ventures, when the silence stretches like a fog across the marsh.

The mound-dweller blinks at her. "I have no name," she says tonelessly. "I have slept for a very long time."

Her voice is even and not at all human. Hel shudders, but can find nothing to say. Is everything here nameless?

"What do you know, then, of this land where you have slept?" Loki says when Hel fails to reply. Hel is grateful. The blankness of the nameless woman's face is terrible, and she's glad of her mama's hand clasped gently on her shoulder.

The mound-dweller stares fixedly ahead, her eyes solely on Hel. But it's clear she has heard Loki's question.

"Is that your question as well, Hel Loki's daughter?" the dead woman asks.

"Yes," Hel says, but her eagerness is gone.

"The roots of Yggdrasil are deep," the nameless woman intones, "and a dragon gnaws their bones. Would you know more?"

Hel looks at her mama, but Loki is watching her, and Hel knows she must make her own choice.

"Yes," she says. "I seek my mother. Tell me, where does Angrboda lie?"

The woman is already beginning to fade, shrinking back toward the open door of her mound. "The nameless dead are all about," she breathes onto the sighing wind. "I will answer no more." And then she is gone, and the door of the mound slips closed with the soft grinding of stone on stone.

Hel stands still a moment, leaning into the warmth of her mama's hand at her back, looking out over the vast, unchanging world. She thinks of the cows in their pasture away behind her hall, and her mama's laughter and quick hands at work in the milking.

"I'm sorry, Mama," she whispers, turning her back on the grave mound. "Let's go and milk the cows."

Loki smiles down at her, taking her hand as they turn their steps toward the milking shed. They do not mention Angrboda.

Months pass, though there are no real seasons here, and the ancient woman is far from the last of the mound-dwellers Hel speaks with. She journeys in ever widening rings from her hall, opening mounds and barrows and burial places everywhere she goes and speaking with those who dwell there. Often her mama goes with her, but more often now, Hel goes alone.

"This is my story, Mama," she insists one evening by the fire, and Loki's answering smile is sharp and toothy, like her brother Fenrir's grin.

"And how will you tell it?" he asks, brown eyes twinkling in a brown face, leaning eagerly forward as though he were the child and she the mother who had promised a bedtime story.

"I don't know yet," Hel admits, staring into the flames. "But—I do not think I will be an exile."

Loki nods, and she's warmed by the pride in his eyes.

"For now, I will be a wanderer," she says, and the difference is more than just semantic.

And so she is. She passes over marsh and fen, over wide plains and tumbled rocky ground, and even, far from her hall, through trackless vast forests and along the jagged, pebbled beaches of some immense sea, so deep that its waters echo the subterranean blues of the infinite night.

Everywhere, she speaks the words and calls the dead, and they come: Jotuns, and humans, and dwarves, and elves, and even one or two who must once have been of the Vanir, but all nameless now, and forgotten. Nowhere does she find her mother.

On the farthest journeys and the longest, she knows that the voice of the darkness, the voice she names Nidhogg, waits for her. It laughs at her sometimes, and at others she can feel the presence of the dark just at the edges of her sight, pulling at her mind.

The dead here are forgotten, the voice whispers. And you are one of them. This is your tomb, little ghost-girl.

Hel wishes she could simply ignore the voice, but it rumbles with the earth and speaks in her very bones, and on her long journeys through the dark, as the nameless dead sink again into their mounds and none will speak beyond the formality of question and answer, she fears that Nidhogg may be the only truth here.

But still her mama remains. She wonders about that, and has even asked once or twice, but Loki has never been one for giving straight answers. Yet she has never known her mama to be one for extended domesticity, either, and certainly not one for staying in one place.

Hel has nearly seventeen winters now, and that means they have been here for almost eight years, at least, by the reckoning of years in other worlds. Time here is a strange and fickle thing. At first, Hel had taken to carving lines in the many scattered stones near her hall to mark the periods of light and dark that pass for days. But she soon ceased. Time clearly does not matter here, and she is wise enough to know she will never leave.

But Loki could, and someday, Hel thinks, Loki must. She is grateful for her mama's presence, but she knows it can't last.

And when the shape-changer goes, who will be left to remember you, little corpse? the voice of Nidhogg whispers in her heart.

"I suppose you will," Hel says, laughing at the dark, and continues on her way, speaking with all the nameless dead.

Hel's journeys grow ever longer, but still Loki does not leave. The hall now is truly a thing of beauty, a place fit for a queen, with benches for many guests. The cattle and goats prosper, and now Loki has taken up bee-keeping and the brewing of mead. Hel's garden is rich with all the fruits of the earth, and her larders are bursting.

But she has no guests.

"It never hurts to be prepared," Loki says cheerfully, churning butter in a massive urn and huffing every so often with the effort. Hel's kitchen is bright with candles and a fire blazing in the hearth. There's a lamb roasting over it, and Hel turns the spit every now and then, but her mind is not really on the food.

"There must be some way to wake them," she murmurs, mostly to herself. "How do I make them remember?"

Loki hums, giving the butter paddle another ferocious turn. "Perhaps that's not the right question," she says.

Hel peers at her mama curiously. "What is, then?"

"Hmm." Loki sighs, setting the butter aside, but she seems satisfied. "Well. It is a right question, I suppose. But have you asked yourself why they forget in the first place?"

Hel blinks. She hasn't. She's assumed, probably, that forgetting is simply what death is. But perhaps—

"I don't know," she says slowly. "But somehow, I don't think they could tell me."

Loki laughs. "You may be right." She reclaims the butter churn with a grunt, her motions with the paddle even fiercer than before.

"Mama," Hel says, hesitating only a little. "Why are you still here?"

Loki doesn't look up from the butter churn, but the twist she gives to the paddle this time is vicious.

"And why shouldn't I be?" she asks easily.

Hel sighs. She knows she will never get a real answer. "But they must miss you in Asgard," she tries again. "And your blood brother must be wondering where you've gone to. I suppose it must be very boring there without you."

Now Loki does look up, and her grin is quick and edged like a fine blade. "Oh, I'm quite sure it is," she says, turning back to her butter with an air of distinct satisfaction.

Hel waits a moment longer, just watching, and then with a sad smile she rises and places her hand over her mama's on the butter paddle.

"I'm glad you're here, Mama," she whispers.

The underworld seems to be without end. Hel has made many hundreds of journeys now, each farther than the last, but no matter how far she goes, she finds nothing that might be a border or a marker of boundary. Nothing but the wide sky-black sea, stretching away over one unfathomable horizon, vast and perfectly still, untouched by any wind. When the misty false day of her world ends and her mama's torch-star leads the other gems of night in a dance through the air, she looks down into the mirror-still waters and sees the stars shining back at her, impossibly high above, unreachably deep below. Further still, in the distant ageless depths, there are strange swirling clouds of light, and everywhere the crisp, cold smell of starlight.

Hel remembers the words of Odin, that she would be queen of nine worlds below the worlds. Once, she had thought those worlds just as much a mockery as the promise of her queenship, but now she knows that nine was too small a number. In the fathomless black waters, light swirls and comes together in infinite stars, spiraling apart and being swallowed by darkness, until the dark too explodes in whirling clouds of endless colored light, and the dance begins again.

By the sea the voice of the shadows is silent. This place is older even than Nidhogg.

On a whim, Hel crouches and dips her hand in the black water. It disappears without a ripple, and even so close to the surface, she can see nothing of her own arm. Stillness fills her. In the depths, another whirling cloud separates and spins apart, forming new, burning points of starlight. She laughs, and the sound disappears into the stillness.

"This is no devouring tomb," she breathes aloud to the dark, or perhaps only to herself. "It is a birth-place."

All around her, the waters roll in unbreaking music.

She stays a long time by the sea of starlight, watching the death and birth of worlds until she feels herself filled with it. When at last she goes, in silence and reverence, her hair is agleam with light, and the stars shine now in the depths of her black eyes.

She doesn't return immediately to her mama. Instead, she walks slowly between the mounds and howes and trails her feet through the moss and marsh water. The thought that comes to her now is new and terrible.

Uncle Odin, they say, hung himself for nine days and nine nights on the tree Yggdrasil, an offering to himself, in order to gain the runes. Hel does not seek wisdom of that kind. What she seeks is something more vital still.

But she is not her mama's blood-brother. She must take a different way.

She goes to the well that bubbles up from the root of Yggdrasil and fills all her hall with the noise of waters. The stream that flows out of the root is cool and clear and glimmers in the light of false day, but the well itself is black and fathomless. Hel stands over it, looking down into the waters and seeing nothing at all looking back at her.

Yet she knows the darkness is there. The darkness is always there.

Through the open window behind her, she can hear the distant sounds of her mama at work in the garden, tending to the riotous herbs and humming tunelessly under her breath. Hel smiles fondly, but she doesn't delay.

She looks down at the black water and the gnarled immense root, draws her shoulders up squarely, and breathes deep of the loam-rich air.

"I am Hel, Loki's daughter and Angrboda's," she whispers to the waters. "No more will I be beholden to anyone. I give myself to myself." It is not an offering, but a declaration and a breaking of chains.

She steps forward into the wild water, and drops down into blackness.

This time, Hel cannot say how long she falls. At first there is only darkness, but she is not afraid. She laughs, and the dark curls about her in welcome.

Eventually she stops. Still she can see nothing, but now there is rich cool earth beneath her feet and the trickle of water. The air is crisp with the cold scent of stars, but the dark is impenetrable.

Hel waits, and the dark breathes.

Nidhogg's laughter comes first, rumbling in the earth and the air and filling all the vast emptiness around her. It comes from nowhere and everywhere at once, as though she were standing inside the laughing mouth of the void.

Have you come at last to be devoured, little corpse? the voice says. Here, in this place, it reverberates and returns, doubling on itself and ever growing, until the sound is all there is.

Hel shudders, squaring her toes in the earth and wrapping her arms about herself, shrinking into her own skin. But she stands.

"No," she whispers, her voice weak but growing. "I have not come to be devoured. I have come to claim my own."

Your own? Nidhogg laughs again, the sound like knives against her flesh. By what right do you claim it, witch-child? By Odin's decree?

"No," Hel says again, her voice stronger now. "Not by anyone's decree, but by right of kinship." And though it is wholly dark, she raises her head proudly and stares into the shadow, imagining her mama's torch-star there, glinting off of starlight hair and earth-dark skin and the white shine of bone.

The laughter around her comes to a hissing end. I do not recognize your right, Nidhogg says, the voice rumbling up from the depths and shaking her almost to her knees.

But Hel stands, and now it is she who laughs.

"You call me a corpse," she says. "You name me corpse-child and ghost-child, and yet I walk abroad, and I do not forget, and I am not forgotten. It is you who name me corpse-kin, but that name I will take, and the right that goes with it."

The dark does not answer, but the shadows around her constrict with a sudden terrible power, crushing the breath from her lungs and flaying the skin from her bones. Hel gasps and staggers, and the dark is on her with a thousand rending teeth. With a grinding snap it closes over her entirely, and she is devoured.

Even darkness has no meaning where she now finds herself. This is void. Hel drifts in nothingness, and knows herself for the only thing that exists.

Without a mouth she smiles. She has seen this before.

"The dead sleep, forgotten," she whispers to the void, and knows that nothing hears her. "But I shall wake them. I shall be their Queen, and they shall be my people."

In the depths of the void, a pinprick of light flickers suddenly into existence, stutters for a moment, and then explodes outward in consuming radiance. And there is life.

She returns to herself out of deep water.

Hel laughs as she rises up out of the black well, feeling new and strange and for the first time wholly herself. The air of her world swirls about her, greeting her with joy, and she tastes it, taking in the smell of the wild water, the ancient wood-musk of Yggdrasil, the leaves and roots of grass and herbs and more distant apple trees, the high clear smell of the burning stars.

The Tree itself has changed. Root of the world though it is, it is vast as any trunk, and Hel looks and sees that it has put forth branches and limbs, and all are now rich with new green leaves.

Loki is waiting for her there, beneath one of the great boughs, her hands still thick with the soil of the garden. A flicker of something strange crosses her face, and then she smiles and bows deeply.

"My Queen," Loki says, quirking laughter on her lips despite the formality of her homage.

Hel blinks at her mama and cannot think what to say. But then the moment passes and she hurries forward to raise Loki out of her bow, clasping her arms and drawing her up and babbling, "No, no, Mama, you mustn't bow to me!"

Loki laughs with delight. "But I'm not wrong," she says with twinkling eyes. "Or will you still say you are not a queen?"

"Not your queen, anyway," Hel says, laughing in turn. But then her smile falls away and she says with a voice like iron, "I am going to wake my people."

Loki's own smile turns sharp. "Good," she says, and hugs Hel fiercely.

She has no need of runes now. All the earth calls to her, and she can feel each life beneath the soil. The dead lie resting, not like corpses, but like seeds. The voice of the darkness is present still, whispering of rot and forgetfulness. But Hel is shadow and adamant, and there this nothing in all the nine worlds that can touch her now.

She breathes deep and digs her toes into the rich black earth beside the well. The life of the earth sings to her, and she arms herself with water and wood and wild moss, drawing herself up like a tree, roots reaching through all the vast underground, limbs stretching out to embrace the wide air.

Wake. Her thought travels through all the runnels and the seeping waters and roots of the earth. Wake, and remember. Her thought reaches the very foundations of stone, and they tremble.

The earth groans, and wakes.

Everywhere across the moss-covered marshlands, trees spring up, unfolding from the rich loam and passing from saplings to many-limbed trunks green with leaves. Flowers and sweet herbs grow in the bogs and between the trees: flag iris and wild rose, rue and nettle and mugwort, saxifrage and yarrow and many others. The creatures of marsh and wood come forth, and the air is filled with the song of many birds.

And the dead rise.

They come forth from their howes and mounds, people of every tribe and age, and many children. They stand blinking in the new light of Hel's domain, breathing the fresh new air, and wonder is in all their faces.

It's the freckled woman, the first of all those Hel spoke with, who comes to Hel first now and bows at her feet.

"My Queen," the woman says. Her voice is deep still, but full of the warm changes of tone that speak of life.

Hel smiles and raises her up, just as she did her mama. "What is your name?" she asks.

The woman's eyes meet hers, and Hel sees the spark in them. They are a brown so deep it is nearly black, wide and somewhat unsteady, and filled with awe and some other emotion Hel is unfamiliar with.

"I am called Modgud, my Queen," she says. Her smile utterly transforms her face, making her look years younger and oddly girlish. "And I will pledge my service to you, if you will have it."

Hel blinks in surprise. She looks about her for some kind of inspiration, and everywhere the world is greening. She catches sight of her mama, standing only a few yards away, pretending interest in flowers, but Hel can see Loki's amused smirk from here. She huffs in annoyance, and Loki looks up and waggles her eyebrows at her.

Laughing softly, Hel turns back to Modgud and on an impulse takes each of the woman's hands in her own. "I do not need a servant," she says. "But I would welcome a friend."

"You honor me," Modgud says, and her smile quirks. She presses Hel's hands between her own and bows over them, but her eyes remain on Hel's.

Hel flushes without quite knowing why. "Well," she says. "Maybe you can tell me something more about this place now that you remember." She laughs. "All you wanted to talk about before was the dragon, and I already know the voice in the dark."

Modgud grins unrepentantly. "Things were different then," she says. "But now I will tell you all that I remember. And I have lain here a very long time."

Hel leans forward eagerly, hardly noticing Modgud's sudden intake of breath. "Please, can you tell me where my mother is?"

Modgud's eyes slip closed in concentration, and Hel can feel her thought tracing over the miles of the underworld and the long leagues of memory, searching. At last, her eyes open wide and dark, and she says in the trance-like voice of a seer, "Yes. I can find her."

Modgud leads Hel and her mama ever north and downwards, over rocky ground and through fens and rivers and dank bogland. The journey is long and slow, for everywhere the waking dead crowd about them, bowing at Hel's feet and offering their gratitude and their service. "Our goddess," they call her, "our great lady, our wise queen." Hel greets them one by one, raising them up and learning their names and stories. It will take an eternity to hear them all, but she has the time.

Countless times of light and dark pass, the torch-star rising and setting and rising again. At last Modgud leads them down to the blackest depths of the earth, as far below Hel's hall as the hall itself is below shining Asgard. The air here is stale and ruinous with age.

Here too the root of Yggdrasil passes through the cavernous earth and disappears into unplumbed depths. Whether it is the same root that blossoms now with leaves in Hel's hall, or another, she cannot guess. Its girth is narrower here, but still wider than many great trees in the forests of other worlds. Many smaller roots grow from its trunk, winding their tendrils through the rich earth and stretching away into the unguessed distance.

A great worm lies twined among the roots, sinuous and black as the dark before the void. Its many sword-edged teeth rend at the sapwood, and the ancient air is filled with the groaning of the Tree.

One massive coil of utter darkness shifts, scales scraping against tender bark, and the worm turns its head and fixes balefire eyes on Hel.

She stares back at it, remembering the devouring darkness and the void, and star fire flames in the depths of her eyes.

"Nidhogg," she names it, and it is the worm who bows its head away.

"My Queen," it says. The voice is subterranean still, but a true voice now, and Hel knows that the others hear it, too. Beside her, she hears Modgud's sharp intake of breath, and to the other side Loki's quiet huff of amusement, but her eyes remain on the worm.

Head still bowed in deference, it twists its long black body in undulating coils, writhing about the roots until it might seem that hundreds of serpents are there, nesting in a venomous pit.

"Will you cast me out, Queen of the Dead That Live?" Nidhogg rumbles, its breath shaking the very air.

Hel smiles, a shine of teeth in the dark. "No," she says. "I will not send even you into exile. You have devoured me, as you promised, and as I promised I have consumed you from within, and now at last I think we understand one another."

Nidhogg nods its great head, but says no word. The roiling mass of its twining body twists aside, winding loop over loop, like a great black veil of scales being pulled away. With astonishing silence for such a massive creature, the worm withdraws, flowing water-like along one of the larger lateral roots until it is swallowed in its own shadow.

Hel breathes out, stretching out her senses and watching Nidhogg's progress long after it has disappeared from the sight of her eyes.

"Well," Loki says cheerfully. "That was exciting."

Hel lets out a helpless splutter of laughter, and it echoes from the roots and bounces back from the shadows, seeming to lighten the dank air of the deep places.

She looks again at the place where Nidhogg was. Amidst the gnawed ends of trailing roots, close by the taproot, she sees the barrow.

It lies in just exactly the place where the well springs up in Hel's hall high above. It's the simplest kind of grave mound, a mere raised hillock of earth with a grey stone standing at the head, butting hard against the root of Yggdrasil. The stone is unmarked, and the ground lies undisturbed.

"Your mother is there," Modgud whispers, breaking her long silence. She steps back in respect and maybe even fear.

Hel glances aside at her mama, but Loki is staring ahead at the stone, and her face is like granite itself, scored with lines of age and wear and a sadness Hel has never seen before.

She closes her eyes and breathes in the ancient air, letting the threads of her thought unfurl through the black earth, touching moss and stone and bone, and far away the worm Nidhogg, and finally the one who sleeps beneath the barrow.

Hel breathes out, and her thought calls, Wake!

The ground staggers beneath their feet. Hel opens her eyes and plants her toes sturdily in the roiling earth, while Loki takes a simpler approach, becoming a small, sure-footed grey cat. Modgud is entirely unmoved, and Hel is reminded that even now, there are differences between the dead and the living. In this, too, she rests somewhere in the in-between. She holds herself steady as a strong tree in a storm, and watches the barrow.

Angrboda has been dead only just longer than Hel has been alive, but the tomb that opens now is ancient, as ageless as the world's root. Hel is reminded of the sea of stars, and the timeless moment she spent drifting in the void, and she thinks that this riddle is not so strange.

The woman who emerges from the barrow is dark and rough as a tree, strong with age, and with a fierce light of wisdom in her black eyes. Her brown chin is marked with the white lines of ancient Aurgelmir's clan, but her clothing is like that of the wood-people, like Hel's first memories of her earliest days in Jarnvid. She moves with a warrior's stark grace, striding forward out of the tomb like a leader of armies emerging from her tent. Unlike the other dead Hel has woken, Angrboda does not blink or give any concession to the strangeness of her waking.

Her black eyes narrow on them, focusing first on Hel before falling to the grey cat at her feet.

"Loki," she says, almost pleasantly. "What are you doing here?"

Her voice is low and roiling, like the faint sound of small pebbles rolled along in a torrent. Hel is struck suddenly silent by it, by the reality of her mother's voice.

"Aren't I allowed to visit?" Loki asks with shockingly false cheer. He is an old man now, weathered and bent, but his eyes are shining and sharp.

Angrboda huffs, the thick muscle of her shoulders flexing with the movement. "You were always awful at necromancy," she says, smiling at Loki with resigned fondness. "Who was it who woke me?"

Hel steps forward, blinking away the chains of silence. "I did," she says.

Her mother's dark eyes look her up and down, apparently seeking flaws or failings, but at last meeting Hel's gaze and looking reluctantly impressed. But she does not bow. She is the first of all the awakened dead who has not.

"Who are you?" Angrboda demands, the words slicing through Hel. She understands now why Odin feared this woman.

"I am Hel," she says. "Daughter of Loki and – and daughter of Angrboda."

Her mother's eyes widen in her first real show of emotion, and then a slow, terrible smile grows across her face.

"Well, Loki," she says, "perhaps there's some talent for necromancy, after all. Is this the child of my vengeance?"

Hel looks sharply at her mama, but he only shrugs easily. "If she likes," he says. "Hel is her own." And then he adds, with distinct pride, "And all this world is hers, now."

At last Angrboda turns fully to speak with Hel. "My daughter," she says, her voice warm with a welcome that never entirely loses its note of danger. "So you are the Queen the worm wished to keep me from."

This is new information, but Hel gives no sign of her surprise. "Its name is Nidhogg," she says. "I sent it away."

"So I see," her mother says. Her smile is proud, and sword-edged, but somehow gentler now, too. "And what will you do now, with the rule of the great lands below, and all your vast armies of the grateful dead?"

This time, Hel does not succeed in hiding her surprise, and she sees laughter in her mother's eyes. But she has never considered that the dead, the dead who were so long forgotten, and wake now only at her will, might be a force for fury and destruction. Her people, she had called them, and meant it, but does that also mean her army?

"No," she says aloud. "At least not yet." She's aware of Angrboda looking at her strangely, and Loki's growing smirk, and further away the shifting sound of Modgud's movement. She pulls herself back from these new and strange thoughts and smiles at all of them.

"The dead are their own," she says, and feels the words roll out from her like a declaration, flooding through all the roots of the underground. "They are my people, but I will not command them. Let this land be a place of peace for those who have sorrowed long, and growth for those too soon cut off."

She looks back and sees faint disappointment mingled with a strange fierce pride on Angrboda's face. But Modgud is staring at her with wonder and something close to worship. Hel flushes and looks away.

"But for now," she says, speaking much more plainly, "I think we'll have a feast."

Loki laughs. "It's about time," he grumbles. "All that mead has been aging quite long enough."

The feast lasts a full nine days, by the rising and setting of the torch-star. The numberless dead come and go throughout, meeting old comrades and kin, laughing and weeping and, on more than one occasion, fighting. Hel's hall, which before had seemed so vast and empty, is now quite obviously too small, and she is already making plans for how to expand it.

She gives her mother the seat of honor beside her, with her mama on her other side, and Modgud, to her own surprise, seated beside Angrboda. Modgud is a woman used to work, and she had clearly expected to offer mead to Hel and her guests, but Hel will hear nothing of it. Instead, with Angrboda's help, Hel has worked out a charm to make the mead and the many choice foods that line her table serve themselves, so that no one need act the servant in her halls.

Her mother is amused by this, but she seems pleased, and she smiles more easily now as Hel asks her endless questions about her life and her days in Jarnvid and about Hel's brothers, Fenrir and Jormungand, who were banished long ago and whom Hel has never met.

But more often than not, Hel herself is not in the high seat. She spends much of the feast moving from table to table and from group to group, greeting her people by name and hearing their stories. It will be a long time before she knows them all, but she's made a beginning.

And there are new arrivals each day. At first, Hel had not really thought about this possibility, but as the days of the feast past, she begins to sense, as she lets her thought run in tendrils through the earth, the presence of the sleeping dead. So each day she goes out again, calling out Wake! and greeting the new dead as they emerge from the howes and mounds, inviting them to feast with her in her hall.

Sometimes, she watches her mother and her mama as they dance around each other, never quite speaking the words they mean and never quite touching. There is something vicious in Angrboda, and something deeply sad in Loki, but they meet each other with smiles that only cut some of the time, and eyes that laugh as often as accuse.

Once, she tries to ask her mama about it, but Loki only smirks at her and says, "Why don't you ask Modgud? I'm sure she'd be more than happy to answer you."

Hel scowls. "Because I don't understand that either, and you won't tell me!" she says petulantly. It's perhaps the first time she's ever really felt like a child.

Loki hums and taps her freckled nose with her finger. "I can't tell you," she says gleefully. "But I can give you a hint."

"Well," Hel demands. "What is it?"

"I already gave it," Loki laughs, ducking beneath her playful swat and skipping merrily away. Hel scowls after her, but she takes the hint.

She still doesn't know quite what to say to Modgud when the other woman looks at her with such open appreciation, but she's decided to let herself learn. So she smiles at Modgud sometimes, enjoying the way her eyes light up and her cheeks darken. And she takes her hands when they talk, and once, under the light of her mama's torch-star, looking off into the shadows and faint lights of her world, Hel confesses that she has never really known how things are with people.

"It was only me and Mama, for the longest time," she whispers. "Just us, and the voice of Nidhogg in the dark."

Modgud looks at her softly, and there's sadness in her eyes. "But who were you before you came here?" she murmurs. "Before you were our Queen?" She says it still with reverence, but it is a closer and more intimate kind now.

Hel laughs. "I was myself, I suppose. Just as I am now. But I was younger, when Odin banished me here."

Modgud eyes her slyly. "Not quite as you are now, I think," she says. "You don't see yourself, my Queen, not like we do. You're all starlight and shadows and mysteries and—" she flushes "—and I think you're beautiful."

"Oh," says Hel, breathlessly, and then she kisses her.

Modgud is still for a moment, more surprised than Hel thinks she ought to be, but then she brings her cool fingers to rest against Hel's cheek and kisses back.

"Well," Modgud says when they pull away. "You have some learning to do, my Queen." And she laughs again. "That's all right. I'm glad there's one thing at least that I can teach you!"

And Hel laughs too and shoves her shoulder, and together they walk back to the feast.

The days that follow are full with building and making and tending to new growth. The dead are awake now, and so they need homes, and settlements, and reassurance in their new lives. And, to Hel's surprise, they have need of a watch.

The first time one of the living comes into her realm, Hel is more surprised than anything. Her mama is alive, of course, but Loki is the only one, and she's grown used to the company of the dead. She's startled by the man's appearance, by the loudness of his voice and movements and the heaviness of his presence.

Three of her people bring him before her, their faces grim with annoyance. Hel is tending the apple orchard, which is hardly the usual place for a queen to receive guests, but it will have to do. She sets aside her pruning shears and turns the full weight of her gaze on him.

The living man himself does not struggle, but Hel can see the dismay in his eyes. He's an ageless and weather-beaten sort of man, pale skin browned by long travel and grime, with hair and beard like old ashes. But she senses something hidden in him, and she wonders.

"Queen," says Bjorgfinn, nodding his head in respect, "we found this man wandering among the houses of the dead and carving the runes of necromancy." He looks at the wanderer with deep distaste, but adds with great satisfaction, "None spoke with him, but we brought him to you to be judged."

"That was wisely done," Hel says, briefly amused by the look of pride that lights his face. "I will question him."

Bjorgfinn and his friends are clearly unhappy about leaving the man with her, but they go when asked, and Hel turns her deep gaze on the wanderer, searching within him down to the roots, burrowing swiftly through deception and half-truth and the glamours of a shape-shifter. Her thought touches his very heart, and she knows him, and smiles the smile of her mother Angrboda.

"Well, Uncle," she says. "Have you found the knowledge you seek from the howes of the dead?"

Odin does not flinch from her words, but he does her the courtesy of not denying them.

"The dead are not as I have found them before," he says, revealing nothing.

Hel's mouth twists. "I was not Queen, when you came before."

"And are you now?" her mama's sworn brother asks, but it is not really a question.

"So they name me," Hel says easily.

It's a contest of words that will tell nothing, but then the words are not truly important. Hel has plumbed the depths of his thought already and knows his heart. She can feel Odin's thought reaching out to her in turn, but the walls of her mind are unbreached. In his memory she reads Odin hung upon the great Tree, hung for nine nights in agony, a sacrifice for the gaining of wisdom. Yet Hel herself has passed through the jaws of the void and sprung again from its molten heart, and she is untouchable.

Odin watches her a long time without speaking, then at last he nods.

"They will call this world Helheim now," he says, in seeming concession, though Hel is wise enough to know that Odin is most dangerous when he claims defeat.

"I do not mind what they call it," she says. "So long as the dead are left in peace."

This at last seems to surprise him, for he blinks once and spends a long time in answering. Finally he says, "Is that all you ask?"

Hel narrows her eyes and watches him closely. "The living must not wander in the homes of the dead without leave," she says, looking for change in his face and finding none.

Their gazes lock for many lengthening moments before Odin nods again. "The river Gjoll shall mark the border with the living lands," he says, and this also sounds like a concession, like a king making offerings of peace to an equal. Hel holds herself stern and straight, and offers nothing in return. His words are twisting and wisely wrought, but she knows he has made no true sacrifices. Not in this.

Yet she receives his offer graciously. "We shall build a bridge," she says, "and I shall receive any guests with honor, if they come with leave."

Odin accepts this easily enough, and she thinks he might go now himself. But dusk has fallen in the orchard as they talked, and the torch-star, the one her people have named Lokabrenna, shines with new radiance among the first stars of night. Odin's brows knit as he watches it, and he turns back to her with crafty thought in his one bright eye.

"Loki has been here," he says.

Hel smiles slowly, turning her face to fix him with her left eye alone. She is beginning to understand that her people see her somehow differently than do the gods of Asgard, but Odin, for all his close dealings with the dead, is still living himself. Even he cannot fully hide the revulsion that fills him as he is pierced by the dreadful glower of her baleful eye, shining out of its nest of rotting flesh and sickly pale bone.

"Loki goes where Loki wishes," she says, low and dark. "Do not ask news of me. I will not involve myself in the affairs of brothers."

Now Odin's face falls in a black frown, but he says only, "Very well. I leave you to your kingdom." And he does go, watched by many suspicious eyes. Hel waits until he is gone from sight, then sends her thought after him, slipping along through earth and shadow and following in all his steps. At last he comes indeed to the river Gjoll, and passes over, and is gone from the reach of her mind.

She gives him a few more moments to be certain. Then, gathering her thoughts, she rises up through the earth like a black mist to form upon the ground beside the water. Everywhere is stillness and silence, and no sign of Odin. The water at her feet is a mighty torrent, white with foam, but black beneath, and she knows that it flows to the star-filled sea. Beside her is a standing stone, hoary with lichen and age, but still offering a faded glimpse of ancient carvings. Here at last is the boundary marker she has sought. Hel laughs quietly to herself, though there is little mirth in her heart.

"Mama," she breathes, and a magpie comes flying out from the woods behind and perches beside her on the stone, looking down into the tumbling waters.

"You'll have to go, won't you?" Hel asks.

With a deep sigh, the bird becomes a shriveled old woman, worn with cares and wracked with age, all but disappearing into the stone she leans against. "So it seems," she rasps. "But not just yet. Not just yet."

They build a bridge. It spans the Gjoll at the narrowest point and the only likely fording-place, so that none may pass into the underworld without Hel knowing. All other points she wards with strong walls of thought and runes of power.

It's Modgud who offers to take charge of the watch on the bridge.

"I'm your right hand woman," she tells Hel, mischief dancing in her eyes. "Surely you wouldn't entrust it to anyone else?"

Hel laughs and accepts. The bridge is far from her hall, it's true, but distance is a small matter to Hel now. Her thought travels all the endless paths of the underworld and stretches below to the deepest roots of Yggdrasil and above to the highest branches. She can be wherever she wishes.

"The bridge is yours," she says, smiling. "But I hope you won't spend all your time on the watch."

She watches Modgud flush with pleased surprise. It's a strange and novel thing, how such simple words can astonish her.

"Of course not," Modgud says, and, hesitating only briefly, she leans in to kiss Hel's cheek. It's her left cheek, but Hel sees no revulsion or horror on her face, and she feels the kiss just as she would on her right side. Once, she had asked Modgud about this, but Modgud said only, "You are our Queen and our deliverer. Why should we see anything to fear in you?"

Now Hel just laughs as she turns Modgud's face to kiss her mouth. "Well," she says, smiling widely. "That's all right, then."

Hel watches her mama closely now. Loki spends most of her time milking the cows and tending the bees, making herself well loved by the guests in Hel's hall. But sometimes, too, Hel finds her with Angrboda, caught still in a careful dance between longing and impassible distance. They never touch, but their gazes cut like swords.

"You cannot stay here, Odin's brother," Hel hears her mother snap once, and it is half disgust and half anger, and all bitter resignation.

"No one tells me where I can and cannot go," Loki calls back cheerfully. He's up a ladder in the orchard, picking apples with slow precision and polishing them, one by one, to a red-gold sheen. Hel hangs back, shrouded in her own mist, and waits for her mother's reply.

When it comes, the weariness of it surprises her. "I am dead, Loki," Angrboda says with quiet venom. "And you are not. That's a wall even you can't ignore."

"I don't see why not," Loki quips, but to Hel he sounds more stubborn than convinced. "I've tried nearly everything else. Necrophilia doesn't sound so bad."

Angrboda huffs a laugh that's more bitterness than mirth.

"That's over, Loki," she says, so quietly that no one else should be able to hear. But Hel hears everything now. "Not even you, shape-changer, can change that. All that remains is vengeance."

Hel glides forward, an intangible mist over the ground, until she can see the sharp grin of teeth in her mother's face.

"And you gave me a daughter," Angrboda breathes, triumph and despair thickening her voice. Her eyes flash. "My daughter, the Queen. My vengeance."

Loki's eyes flash no less, but there's a curve to his lip even now. "The Queen will do as she wills," he says with an easy shrug, and Angrboda scoffs, but her smile is no less fierce.

In the deep places, the dragon moves.

Hel is ever aware of Nidhogg, twining its coils about the lowest root of Yggdrasil, a black emptiness that still sometimes speaks in the corners of her mind. She had told the worm she would not banish it, and she doesn't mean to.

But now she drifts, quick and insubstantial, down through earth and stone and deep water and fire, until she stands once more before the worm.

"You should have killed me," it says, hissing in laughter that rasps against her bones. "You should still, my Queen."

Hel smiles with star fire in her eyes. "Why?" she says.

"I hunger," the worm breathes, even as it gnaws Yggdrasil at the root. "Always, always I hunger. I will devour all the worlds."

Hel steps forward, and Nidhogg falls back, hiding its eyes from her face, the scrape of its coils loud in the deep earth. She watches the worm for a while as it writhes against itself, consumed with engulfing hunger. Then she bends and, her eyes never leaving Nidhogg's great dark form, she pours the black water of her well from a silver pitcher down over the roots of the tree, and health and life return to them.

"As you devoured me, you mean?" she asks easily.

"Exactly so," Nidhogg rumbles. It breathes out, a loud rush of terrible cold and deep darkness. Hel stands, rooted and still, as vast emptiness swirls around her. And then she laughs, and stars bloom in the void.

"Exactly so," she breathes, while behind her the tree trembles with new leaves.

She finds Loki still in the apple orchard, though Angrboda is gone now. Hel coughs lightly, and her mama turns, balancing on a ladder and smiling down at her with wide brown eyes and a gap-toothed grin.

"Mama," Hel begins, and Loki tosses her an apple.

Hel catches it without looking, and it turns to dust in her hand. Her smile is sad, but not unhappy.

"Go home, Mama," she whispers. "They need you there. It must be dreadfully dull in Asgard without you."

Loki's smile fades, but he clambers down the ladder and stands before his daughter, the apple in his hands still glowing like fire.

"And leave my daughter?" Loki murmurs, something both sly and sad twisting his strangely innocent face.

"Not forever," Hel says. "Not even for long. But you know you can't stay here. Your brother must be missing you."

Loki watches her long and closely, his eyes wide and shifting like an owl's in the dark. At last he nods, sharp and strange, and hefting the golden apple in his hands he says, "I'll bring him greeting from the Queen of the Nine Worlds."

Hel laughs. "Go back, Mama," she says warmly, clasping her hands over Loki's around the apple. "Go back, and set the worlds on fire."

Loki's smile tilts, fire already lit in his eyes, wings spreading in the dark. "My clever child," he murmurs, lips warm on her brow. And then in a twist of shadow, he's gone.

Hel stays a moment longer in her orchard, plucking an apple for herself and biting into it, the juice dripping down her chin, her thought passing swiftly through all the roots of the world. Nearby, she feels the movements of her people preparing the feast in her hall, and further off the arrival of the new dead over Modgud's bridge, and further still the movements of the dragon in the deep. And beneath all, the slow wheeling of infinite stars.

Then she smiles. The apple core falls from her fingers, rot already setting in, and as it dissolves into the mould a new seedling springs up. Hel leaves it there to grow as it will, and turns back to her hall and her people.

There is much to prepare.