Hel had two faces. One was alive. Skin like skin, cheek like cheek, an eye that blinked. The other was dead. Blue and stiff and cold, like flesh left too long in snow, and the eye on that side stared without seeing and the mouth never smiled, and that side smelled faintly of earth and of what happens to a body when the blood stops moving.
She had got used to it. It took time, but she got used to it, because Hel was the sort of creature who gets used to everything. That is either a strength or a curse. She had stopped trying to decide which.
The gods had given her a realm. Or rather: the gods had seen her face, decided she was too ugly for Asgard, and thrown her into the darkness with the words "you can have the dead." Exile dressed as a gift. Hel knew it. The gods knew she knew it. No one said anything about it.
Loki was her father. It was rarely said aloud. Loki. The shapeshifter, the liar, the one the gods called argr behind his back and sometimes to his face. He had lain with the giantess Angrboða and fathered three children, and the gods had taken all three: Fenrir got a chain, Jörmungandr got the sea, and Hel got the dead. Three children. Three dumping grounds. The gods' way of dealing with what frightens them is to hide it and call it order.
Helheim was adequate. Not warm, not cold, not bright, not dark. Adequate. The sort of temperature you do not notice. And that was the point, because Helheim was the place for the dead that no one noticed. Those who did not die in battle. Those who did not die with a sword in hand and shit in their trousers and Odin's name on their lips. Those who died in their beds. Of fever. Of age. Of the slow ending that no one writes sagas about.
They came every day. A steady stream of confused old and silent young and everything between, and they asked where they were, and Hel said "home," and it was true, and it was the saddest word she knew.
Módguðr guarded the bridge. She asked everyone the same thing: "What is your name and how did you die?" And the answers were always the same. Fever. Frost. A fall. No one said "I died with a sword in my hand." Those went to Valhalla. To Odin's hall, with its endless mead and eternal combat and fucking boastful einherjar who told the stories of their deaths as if dying were an achievement.
Hel sometimes wondered if they knew what they had been given. Eternal combat. Every day fight to the death, every evening eat pork and drink mead, every morning do it again. Same wounds. Same screams. Same fucking pig. It sounded like hell. It was her realm that had been given the name, but it was Odin's hall that deserved it.
Her dead had it better. They got to rest. They got to be still. They did not need to prove a damn thing to anyone, and that was more than the gods themselves got.
She ruled quietly. Without feasting, without drama, without the sort of grand drunkenness that Odin cultivated as a lifestyle. Her servants were called Ganglati and Ganglöt, both names meaning 'lazy-walker'. Her dish was called Hungr and her knife Sultr. The food was sufficient and never good. Everything was sufficient. Hel had learned that sufficient is enough, and that the one who demands more than enough is usually the one who has too much.
Baldr came one day. Brightest god. Most beloved. The one everyone wanted back. He walked across the bridge with the same tired steps as everyone else, and Hel received him the way she received everyone. "Welcome," she said. "You are staying."
The gods tried to fetch him. Sent messengers, pleaded, threatened. Hel said: if everything in the world weeps for him, I will let him go. Everything wept. The stones wept. The trees wept. The serpents wept. Everything except a giantess in a cave who said "Hel can keep what she has."
Hel knew who the giantess was. And she said nothing about it, because Hel had learned a thing the gods never learned: that there are decisions that cannot be undone, and that the one who tries to undo them only makes it worse.
Helheim filled. Day after day. The dead came and stayed and were not happy and not unhappy. They simply were. And Hel ruled them with the sort of patience that only one can have who knows that everyone ends up with her eventually. Everyone. Even the gods. Even the eagle. Even Ratatoskr.
She waited. She was good at it.