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Start of Act 2. Lots of OCs in this chapter as we jump ahead and meet the souls residing in Helheim.

Chapter 12: Helsfolk

Excerpt -

One werewolf youth, Landulf, pokes his way through the market. He looks like a man, but he’s known by the locals, certainly by those who have long been dead and have put up with his intrusive swagger and sticky fingers, or sticky teeth. He can’t rule by fear; if he did, he’d have someone else to be afraid of, and no one wants that in Hel. Instead, he smiles and relishes the scowls from the folk who are protective of their goods. There are a few men and women of different races who either sympathize with his incorrigible attitude or are attracted to it. This number is small.

When he sees a human named Romilda setting up her stall of finely woven fabric, he sidles right over to her. She sees him, and a smile breaks over her lips. It’s shortly smothered by consternation. He doesn’t let it deter him.

“There’s the fairest lady in the nine worlds.” He presses on the table, dips forward, and takes a sniff, as if he wants to sample the fabric’s fragrance as he would flowers or cutlets. Or maybe he’s sampling Romilda’s aroma. “Got anything for me today?”

Romilda raises an eyebrow. “Not unless you’re interested in damask.”

“Hmm.” He studies her face. “All right, what’s gotten in your nethers this time?”

She scoffs. “I can tell you what won’t get into my nethers today.”

“Aww. You know I love the chase.”

Romilda squints and leans toward him. “Do you like having your hide skinned?”

Landulf grins. “Ooh, frisky.”

“I’m being serious.” 

“I know. It’s one of your finer faults.” 

“And it’s the only thing saving you from getting into worse trouble than you already are.”

Landulf presses his lips together. For a moment, he can be serious, too. “Are you pregnant?”

Romilda gasps and bursts into laughter. He laughs, too.

“I almost wish I could be,” she says, “just to scare some sense into you!”

His eyes soften. “You know what? I wish you could be, too.”

Romilda gives him a firm look. He’s nearly worse when he’s sentimental than when rakish. She shakes her head and plucks up a blanket to fold, which was already perfectly folded.

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do you ever get emotional about how the writer of Psalm 88 almost certainly meant these verses as rhetorical questions:

“Will You work wonders for the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise You? Shall Your lovingkindness be declared in the grave? Or Your faithfulness in the place of destruction? Shall Your wonders be known in the dark? And Your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?”

and Jesus said yes.

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You know the Harrowing brain rot is bad when I look at any piece of media and think "how can I make this about Yeshua and Hel?"

Like watching The Sound of Music yesterday, I literally spent minutes of my life creating a scenario where Yeshua is told by God to minister to a family, and it's Hel, her daughter Hulda (based on Frau Holle) and 6 other kids who Hel adopted bc they're quasi-canonical children/relatives of Fenrir (Garmr, Sköll, Hati) and made-up children of Jormungandr based on sea beasts of Norse myth (Hafgufa, Lyngbakr, Kraken) who are at least partly anthropomorphized but strongly come across as werewolves and Lovecraftian abominations.

And Yeshua teaches them God's love and becomes their surrogate dad while He and Hel figure out their feelings for each other.

And maybe there are Nazis???

Anyway.

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A little study in ectoplasm in the interestingly eerie style of ‘verdaccio’, or the terre verte + white ‘dead layer’ some like to use as underpainting. I thought it might be a nice gentle chill for this diabolical heat.

Oh and there’s some very subtle gore that I enjoyed painting a lot :D

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Hagalaz

The thunder howls, The hail falls down, All the earth cries out. Flesh and heart are split apart, Bone and sinew unbound. Howl, howl, the hail comes down And wrecks this wretched land. Thunder, ground, they shake around Beneath your mighty hand. Yet in the stillness In the quiet In the land of death Something stirs with just a word, By just your saving breath. Raise up our eyes to brand new skies So the dead might rise again. The dead will rise again.

We expend so much time deciphering the signs Begging for more to appease our doubts. Will we finally lie upon the line When all that time runs out? You open wide the way, And all I long to say Instead I hide away, Keep buried just another day. But the gate is standing there Broken beyond repair. Why should I wait? How can I stay? You walked through death to come and say, “Beloved, don’t be afraid.”

Hail falls down, Splinters the ground, It tears my flesh and breaks my bones. The world has cracked upon itself From evils it’s done unto its own.

Why should it be reborn? Why should it find a home?

But the air is moving by your call— It dances across this valley of death— It laughs inside my gloomy hall. It steals and gives me breath.

The chaos comes, then peace, shalom, Sweeps in to bind the wounds. Why must this story wind this thread That any grace should follow doom? This cold world is all I’ve known, The only power I’ve held in hand. Faces and voices speak out in need. They cry and cajole, a child’s demand: “Where is my comfort? Where is my hope? Where is my head to rest and my sustenance found? There’s never enough, so give it to me, That’s all I care about!” I pour out strength until it’s dry and done And still, and still, what else am I to do? Bound to this desert of ice and snow, Let me dole out this duty I owe. Let me break and buckle and flow until my time is through.

The sky is dark. The air stands still. Until an answer tramples in for the kill.

The thunder howls, The hail falls down, The gate screams off its hinge. That blood that breaks the hardest chains And makes the darkness cringe, It calls to me, my time has come, And there’s nowhere to hide. I want to stand and stay as strong As I’ve always done to survive.

That will not do. I see now it’s true. The hail all melts away. The water refuses to stay. It runs from the hill to the welcoming sea. But surely that pathway is not for me.

Yet you proclaim forever and a day, “My Dearest, Beloved, don’t be afraid.”

In the quiet land of death, The soul is beckoned by your breath, And the dead shall rise again. The dead shall rise again.

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Wow ok I thought I had already posted this alternate cover idea, but apparently not?? Anyway, yeah, this is another version of Harrowing's nonexistent book cover. You can view the first one here.

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AH! There he is!!

Happy Holy Saturday

Uh oh. Look out, Hel.

Looks like someone is coming . . .

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Uh oh. Look out, Hel.

Looks like someone is coming . . .

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hel is so funny bc like she was just born half a corpse and odin saw her and was like 'yuuupppp youre a god of death. get in there' and then made (hel, who presumably, is still a child) queen of basically 90% of everyone who dies. also shes a horse girl.

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🕷️ Halloween Fashion: Robert Wun Fall 2024 Haute Couture Collection 🕷️

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The fallout ... and the end of Act 1.

Chapter 11: The Queen Returns

Excerpt -

This last part of the Hel-Road from the Gjallbru to the Gate seems almost as long as the entire journey from the mountain. It’s hopeless and irrational, but her fear does rise as the Gate grows and looms. A few times she stops, considering Modgud’s counsel to flee. She might go to Jotunheim and find her mother. Time and greater wisdom might guard them better. Can she live with herself, though, if she trades her safety for that of all the vættir she just saved? It’s dangerous to assume Odin will leave them be. And even if that’s not a concern, what about the Entity? She promised to watch over the vættir, tell them Its warnings. If she runs away and abandons the duty that she’s brought on herself, will It find her? Will It let those fiery creatures finish what they began on the mountain?

At last, her reluctant feet bring her to the Gate. She touches it, and the doors open without even a word. They reveal Odin standing on the other side. He sits upon Sleipnir, taller than before, and two wolves flank him. Sleipnir gives a little whinny. A tug on his mane quiets him. The wolves have no kindly attitude at all; their heads thrust forward, and their upper lips twitch, ready to growl. Are they dumb wolves, or are they kin to her? Her mother never spoke of it, but her father told tales of Angrboda giving birth to wolves back when the worlds were freshly new. The wolves’ suspicious glares remind her of the boys Narfi and Vali back in Asgard. Ironies upon ironies. Hel stands tall with the help of her staff. She hides her fatigue as best she can.

“Hail, All-Father.”

“Hail, Lokisdottir. You have been busy, but not as the Queen of Hel, as I tasked you to be.”

“I had a request from my subjects to aid the living.” 

“What business are the living to you?” 

“They are my business when they concern the dead.”

“The living will deal with the living. Your province is the dead, Hel, and it shall remain that way.”

“What is your will, All-Father? If you have a punishment in mind, please get on with it.”

Odin sits without moving, as cold and unreadable as the very ice his mount stands on. An apology for her veiled insolence rushes up Hel’s throat, but she swallows it. When he speaks, the even tone is a knife held to her jugular.

“You have plenty of new souls to tend to already. I brought them in; they're waiting at your hall. But, if you are so keen to have these vaettir for yourself, too, I shall make sure they remain your subjects.” 

He raises his hand. Suddenly, a veil of invisibility drops, and all the vættir are there in the clutches of valkyries, Odin’s warrior handmaidens. Their swords and axes touch throats or hover above bowed heads. The biggest and strongest vættir—giants, dragons, werewolves, and unicorns—are pinned beneath several women. They will bring down their weapons on the trapped vaettir as soon as Odin gives the word.

“No!” Hel yells. “No, leave them! Please!”

Odin’s good eye lowers the lid quizzically. “What did you hope to accomplish by saving them?”

“So that they might live!”

“To what end?”

“It is my wish! Because you have made it my responsibility to care for others!” 

“And for this, you defy my will by abandoning your post.” 

“If I meant to abandon it, I would never have returned! All-Father, don’t harm them. Don’t make me your enemy. I will do anything you ask if you spare them! That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Are you so devoted to them?”

“I … I wish for the worlds to remain in balance. If the vættir are destroyed, humans will rule all of Midgard unopposed.” 

Odin pets Sleipnir’s mane. He’s intrigued, not yet certain of the conversation’s outcome. Hel’s heart thunders.

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Imagine a version of the Harrowing of Hell where Jesus gets there and the whole time "Hotel California" plays on loop in the background

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“Now compared to these wanderers [Socrates, Buddha, etc.] the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. It was above all things dramatic; it did above all things consist in doing something that had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world for ever doing nothing except tell the truth. And even the external movement of it must not be described as a wandering in the sense of forgetting that it was a journey. This is where it was a fulfilment of the myths rather than of the philosophies; it is a journey with a goal and an object, like Jason going to find the Golden Fleece, or Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides. The gold that he was seeking was death. The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. He was going to do other things equally definite and objective; we might almost say equally external and material. But from first to last the most definite fact is that he is going to die. No two things could possibly be more different than the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. We are meant to feel that the death of Socrates was, from the point of view of his friends at least, a stupid muddle and miscarriage of justice interfering with the flow of a humane and lucid, I had almost said a light philosophy. We are meant to feel that Death was the bride of Christ as Poverty was the bride of St. Francis. We are meant to feel that his life was in that sense a sort of love-affair with death, a romance of the pursuit of the ultimate sacrifice. From the moment when the star goes up like a birthday rocket to the moment when the sun is extinguished like a funeral torch, the whole story moves on wings with the speed and direction of a drama, ending in an act beyond words.”

–G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, “The Strangest Story in the World”

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Harrowing Lore: Ganglati & Ganglöt

In this telling, not only are Ganglati and Ganglöt the slow servants of Hel (hence their names) but they're also

her grandparents (Angrboda's parents)

Bergelmir and his wife, the jotnar who survived the flood of Ymir's blood (when Odin & bros killed him), therefore the ancestors of the jotnar race

It's also in their lore (for this story) that they lived to be very old to the point that their great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren called them Ganglati and Ganglöt in a teasing way. And they OWNED it. Like, yeah, I'm old and slow as shit and I'm loving it. We popped a whole new race of giants and lived long enough to see four generations, we deserve to be lazy and slow. Yeah we'll serve our granddaughter and we'll do it at our own sweet pace, thank you

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Ok ... things are getting serious.

Chapter 10: The Entity

Excerpt -

Lightning flares across the sky. Thunder drums in accompaniment. The sky is iron. Water pours in heavy sheets. Hel stands on the terrace, alone, back against the door. A small overhang provides a little shield from the rain washing over everything. Cascades roll down the mountainside. Below, waves crash over the forests, flattening or ripping up trees. But on the slope, though the ground is slick and rocks are breaking free and tumbling into the flood, a group of vættir, no more than thirty, scrape desperately toward the terrace.

“Help!” cries a draconian flyer. “Please help!”

The wind is strong, but she hears the cry. She inhales and rushes into the torrent. She’s soaked in moments. On her knees, she sees the survivors: unicorns, goblins, nagas, gnomes, djinn, perytons, matagots, and even two broken tree trunks, one on the back of a satyr, the other on the shoulder of a leshy. Two more gray flyers and two gryphons travel with them, encouraging them up the slope. Hel recognizes the flyers as the parents of the little ones who came with her before.

Many times, someone slips, slides backward. When one does, another vættr pauses to help them. As soon as the first unicorn comes within reach, Hel lies flat on the ledge and reaches down. The unicorn flinches. The jolt sends it back, and others cry out as they are pushed.

“No!” Hel cries. “Lean forward! Trust me!” 

The unicorn snorts. It digs its hooves into the rocks and mud. The ground won’t hold for long. With a lunge, it pushes close enough for her to catch its horn. Shortly after, she grabs the mane. Some of the smaller vættir hop on its back or hold its tail, and more do the same to the second unicorn. Once the first ascends, it turns around and helps its mate alongside Hel. It’s a struggle that leaves everyone at least partially caked in mud, not to mention drenched. Breathless, Hel checks that there is no one left coming up the slope. She’s sprayed by a sudden wave colliding into the mountain.

“Come on, come on!” barks a satyr. “Let us in!”

She hurries to the wall, touches the door and begins the incantation. Someone screams.

“We’re dead!” It’s a goblin, shaking a terrified finger at the inky sky. “Oh, we’re dead! They’re coming!”

Many eyes and hands point to the sky, the rain, and the nine figures flying toward them. Despite the downpour, these pursuers burn with fire.

Hel hurries through the incantation. The door swings in. “Go, go, go! I’ll hold them off!”

No one objects. They rush into the doorway. The fiery figures swoop nearer. Hel sputters another spell to close the door. For some reason, it refuses to close all the way, regardless of repeated commands. She steps back and points her staff at it.

“Isa!”

There’s plenty of water to work with. It freezes in thick chunks from the base to the top of the door. Mere seconds remain before the fiery figures overtake her. She draws a circle around herself with her staff, then raises it.

“Isa!”

She brings it down hard. Stone shudders. The spell reaches the circle. Ice climbs and makes a sphere. Raindrops get caught in it, so the shielding globe has a jagged texture. It completes itself just as the fiery figures surround the terrace. They are so bright she can still see them through the semi-opaque ice. Although they radiate light, their appearances vary. Some are like humans or jotnar. Others have animal heads. Others are just wings and eyes. One of the humanoid figures carries a sword, which they plunge into the ice bubble. A violent hiss; steam wraps around the flaming sword as the weapon slices open her cocoon, as if it were just as papery and feeble.

She kneels and rests the end of her staff in a puddle of water. “Kenaz-laguz-nifl.”

Her hands glow with white fire. It moves down the staff. As soon as the light and heat meet the puddle, mist billows inside the sphere. All the water becomes vapor and fog. The fiery figure with the sword keeps cutting, only to release the fog into its face. When it withdraws its weapon, Hel points her staff at the slice it just carved.

“Isa.”

The cut closes with more ice. For a minute, she is safe again. The figures shift back and forth outside. Four of them fly above the dome while the remaining five encircle it near the ground.

Four weapons, swords and axes, swing down together. The dome shatters. Ice rains. Hel drops and covers her head. The fog is still cloaking her, but it won’t last. Their bright bodies ensnare her.

“Enough.”

The voice is everywhere at once. Hel hears it above, beside both ears, inside her head. It speaks with the force of a whisper, yet this alone makes all matter it touches vibrate. The moment it speaks, the fiery figures retreat, but they do not leave. They hover in a semi-circle beyond the edge of the terrace. In the rain, fog, and darkness, they’re more like lanterns than people.

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real

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"Angrboda" by R.N. Laing

artist website