Preordain + BALDR
This was not an ordinary soul which tenderly passed into her domain. This was not the confusion of somebody surprised they no longer breathed. This was not the crippling sorrow that loved ones wouldn’t be seen for the days to come.
This was resolution.
This was the start of the finish.
This was the first time fright pumped a numb heart since she was a child thrown beneath Yggdrasil’s roots, charged with an obligation she couldn’t falter, regardless of youthful uncertainty. Soon everything Hel loved would be erased while she lived on, taunted by poisonous memories—
Because of him.
Deep growls alerted her that he had finally arrived. Garm stood colossal to prevent his entrance, only quieting after he sensed his mistress drawing near.
Slowly the house gates opened; an array of jagged icy beams twisted seventy feet high like wrought-iron, glistering under the natural pale light with each shift that gave berth for the Queen, naked as the day she was born. Her left half contained gaunt, nearly rotted, colorless flesh and long onyx spills of lank hair flattened against her emaciated side, but down the center her right portion had deteriorated, blackening pink sinews exposing most of her skeletal frame, while wiry white wisps wove from her skull throughout spaces in her bones. As Garm inched out of her way, she stopped a yard in front of the newly dead.
One umber eye fixed upon Baldr, dull despite its glass imitation. Silent, she had to cast her bias, she had to give him refuge, even though his passing meant her siblings, her father, would suffer. The hardest task Hel ever had to do, without nary a tremble, was offer her bone hand toward Baldr.
The pit.
Was that not what the whispered had colored this abyss? Was that not what the legends foretold? Was that not what the gods themselves had fashioned - a hole in which soles could fall to some measure of safe unconsciousness? Those cursed to a denial of golden halls, to the embrace of Valhalla, of Njord's table, they would pass to a dreamless slumber, guarded by the demon that stood gaunt before him.
Horror. In the annals of his mind he knew that should be the flavor of his blood. He knew that her rotting flesh should send his stomach to heaving, that her emaciated frame should reap shivers over his freshly dead form. He knew all of this, knew it with the cold precision of logic, and yet he could no more bring himself to trust it then he could to feel it. Was this girl not as damned as he? Was she not set to the mantle of death by fates as unfeeling as those that would see him die only to trigger the decimation of his world?
Pity.
No. Not pity. It was fuller than that. Understanding? No. No he could not understand, not now at the dawn of his imprisonment. Even as his limbs fell to a grey chill, even as the blood that had once raged sat sluggish in dead veins, he knew nothing of her pain. Nothing of her isolation. He was of the world above, she of the world below. He had a store of joy from which to nurture fresh wounds, she had naught but bitter recollections.
Sympathy.
As a deft hand rose to grasp the palm of death he knew, knew in the bones that shivered and quaked beneath the crushing contact, that it was some weak echo of compassion which caused a still heart to ache. Her's was the first misery his ending would reap. Soon, those of the world above would realize his passing, that the blood which seeped was fatal. They would scream, they would weep. They would blame and bind and murder in retribution of his killing.
They would sentence the world to death.
