Gods of the Ragnarok Era 008: The Gates of Hel by Matt Larkin

Author:Matt Larkin [Larkin, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, Myths & Legends, Mythology, Norse & Viking
Amazon: B07H8Q5TXS
Publisher: Incandescent Phoenix Books
Published: 2018-09-27T06:00:00+00:00

A rage had taken him and, despite all Keuthos’s imploring that he control himself, he had barely managed to bring it down to a simmer in the long walk back to Hel’s throne room. It boiled in his gut, fresh, as if Sif had died this very day rather than hundreds of years ago.

No, not died. Had been murdered.

For centuries, he’d believed his daughter taken from him in war. Murdered, yes, but murdered by enemies intent to eliminate a military threat. Not by … by Hermod’s own sister.

Foster sister.

Fuck. His parents had taken her in, made her part of their family. Raised her, sheltered her, loved her.

And this … this atrocity was the repayment for their kindness?

Sigyn had betrayed him in the worst possible way. And then she’d continued to converse with him, as if naught had happened, as if she was still his closest kin.

His feet threatened to give out beneath him on the threshold to Hel’s audience chamber. He slumped against the bone arch, forcing down a sudden clenching of his heart.

Sif.

She had endured torment the living could not imagine. Felt the pain of death in every moment for three centuries and more … much more, perhaps, depending on the flow of time so far from the Mortal Realm. Hel’s minions had tormented his daughter further, transformed her into that mockery of existence.

Melinöe paused in front of him, looking back in his direction, unspeaking, though Hermod could have sworn he felt mirth wafting off her, filling the cloud of mist she emanated with her joy at his despair.

Yes … Gaze unto infinity … and know you are a speck of dust … caught on the wind and swirled for the fleeting merriment of fathomless horrors …

No. No, Hermod might have seemed insignificant compared to the timeless entities that lurked beyond the Veil. He might have seemed thus, but he was a Man. A husband. A father. And, unlike an animal, a Man might be driven to motives beyond base instincts.

He pushed off the bone arch and strode toward Hel’s throne, forcing down his pain and his momentary despondency.

Few vaettir seemed to enjoy any reminder that they too had once been mere men and women. And yet, from all Hermod and Odin had learned, most were. Hel was. Loki’s daughter. She clawed her way from the abyss of death up, unto a throne from which she might terrorize all the worlds for eons.

But, in the end, her wretched soul had come from much the same stuff as his own.

“I want them back,” he said, when he at last came to rest before the steps leading to Hel’s perverse throne. “I want them both back.”

Hel drummed the rotting fingers of her left hand upon the exposed bone of her knee. “And yet, the trinkets you brought me would not buy release for even one soul.” She snickered, a hateful, wheezing sound, like the raspy voice of a draug. Like Sif’s voice. “What is it you think I would do with

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