Sacrifice - Hela Odinson

Epilogue

Hela hummed some soft Midgardian melody as she slowly and gracefully strode on a pathway lined with black roses, pulling her long green cape behind her like a bride's veil, though she was heading towards a different altar this time.

The song she sang to herself was one Melinoe specifically asked Bragi to play on their wedding ceremony not too long ago -- well, at least in Hela's eyes. To her wife, it had been an awful lot of time.

Time, she thought to herself with a faint, bittersweet smile on her pale face that looked the exact same as it did the day she first met Mel. Maybe I was foolish to think we had more of it.

Hela ran her free hand over a rose bush, the light touch of her finger making an army of leaves and petals fall helplessly on the dry grass. It was autumn, after all. Nature was dying.

She held her other hand close to her chest, with something hidden in her palm. Once she reached the end of the path, she stopped.

Thin pillars towered over her, which belonged to a remote pavilion in a hidden corner of a garden Mel herself had designed with the help of Freyja. Everything had the mortal woman's soul in it, every bench, flower and tree, every dry, fallen leaf, every turn the pathway took; it all belonged to her.

Hela had never felt at home until Mel and her left Asgard for good and quite literally built their own life in a realm they named Etheria. Sure, the never before seen plants and animals of this world took some time to get used to, but with her wife by her side, she didn't mind a second of it.

She witnessed her wife learn new skills from the native inhabitants, and teach them some of their own. For the first time, Hela didn't need to conquer kingdoms but hearts, as they built an entirely new society on mutual respect on this hidden and forgotten land. There was no throne to take, they were chosen to be leaders and they made their own.

Mel turned this garden and Etheria into heaven, and gave Hela everything she wouldn't even dare dream of. Though the goddess never forgot that they still had time, their one last enemy, she thought they had several decades to pass together. But fate was cruel.

Melinoe was thirty-six, in her prime, absolutely blossoming in the light of this new, magical etherian sun, when she turned out to have inherited a deadly illness from her mortal ancestors. Etherian and Asgardian healers were absolutely clueless, and by the time a Midgardian doctor examined her and gave a proper diagnosis, it was too late.

Hela did everything in her power to make her wife's last months as beautiful as she could, but when Mel passed three weeks before her thirty-seventh birthday, the goddess was left with the feeling that she couldn't give her enough.

It would've never been enough, not for an immortal being, even if Melinoe lived a hundred years it would not have been enough. Hela knew that when she married her mortal love, but didn't want to face the fact, not until it was too late, and the burden was even harder to bear than she would have thought.

Whenever she looked at the pavilion that became a mausoleum after the tragedy, she could not believe it was real and happening to her. The words "my wife died" and "I am a widow" sounded harsh and strange to her, and she couldn't bring herself to utter them. This cannot be happening to her, it is simply too tragic to be her reality.

Hela shook her negative feelings off and stepped into the mausoleum. She kneeled by the grave in the middle, a simple, minimalistic marble grave with no carvings except for the inscription.

Melinoe Danubis
(2006-2043)
queen, mother and wife
your name and memory shall live on

The goddess would have wanted something great and extravagant, perhaps a life-size statue of her wife in her full glory, laying right above her buried body. However, designing and executing her wishes would have meant accepting her wife's fate, which she wasn't ready to do.

Hela Danubis, Goddess of Death, Queen of Etheria has never been the accepting kind. She placed a palm on the marble, feeling her lover's presence right beneath, recalling their happy memories. Before her tears could have rolled down her prominent cheekbones, she wiped them off. From her belt she retrieved the lamp she travelled all the way to Asgard for: a delicate piece of art made of the finest silver, with green fire dancing in it.

Her deep, assertive voice cut through the grief-heavy silence.

"With the eternal flame, you are reborn."