▸ Column · Mythic Asgard — a longhouse warrior writing to Hela, Queen of Hel, in the age of Odin's conquests
HELA replies.
The letter
Four winters past, when Brynja and I joined hands, we each said we might one day raise a child "once the realm was quieter," and left the matter there. Last month, over mead, she gave me the truth she has carried since she was a girl of nineteen: she never wants a child to raise, not ever, and "someday" was only the word she offered so I would not flee. I am four-and-thirty, and when I hold my sister's newborn in the longhouse I feel the wanting in my very bones — I would raise a child above any glory a king could grant me. Brynja wants the unburdened, wandering life we already share. We do not even quarrel; that is the cruelty of it. We only lie down each night grieving, both certain we are not the monster. How do two people who truly love survive wanting opposite futures — and how will I know when honoring my own longing means I must let her go?
Hela replies
Rise, supplicant — and cease calling either of you the monster. There is no villain in this tale, which is precisely why you cannot find the door: you keep hunting the thief, and there is none. Brynja stole nothing from you. She did the rarer thing — she stopped guarding a lie and laid the truth in your hand, four years late but whole. Honor her for it. Few are that brave.
Now hear the lie that remains, the one no one handed you. You told it to yourself: that love is a debt requiring you to bury your own longing in its garden and name the grave devotion. It is not. The want you feel in your bones is your inheritance — the future you mean to author, the small life you would raise into a story that outlives you. I was Odin's firstborn, his executioner, and he painted gold over everything I was and called it peace. I know to the marrow what it costs to let another hand write you out of your own chronicle.
Two sovereigns may want different realms and part without either one kneeling. That is not discarding a love. That is refusing to chain it. You will know the hour has come when staying means lying down each night beside your own funeral. Do not.
— Hela
Thanos weighs in
Hela offers you a crown and a chronicle. I offer arithmetic, which you will find harder to argue with. There is no surviving two opposite futures beneath one roof, little one — there is only the slow version: the nightly grief you have mistaken for tenderness, suffering rationed in small doses so you need not swallow it whole. You already know which dream the household cannot hold. You simply prefer the erosion, because it spares your hands the blade. Titan chose that same comfort and perished with spotless consciences. Make the cut. Make it cleanly, mourn it honestly. The reckoning arrives regardless of whether you watch.
— Thanos
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