The Hel Experience

-Ragnarok- Asgard-

Welcome to the Hel Experience! Take a seat, don't be afraid... First, watch the dead parade into your nightmares, in which you can watch a child in a woman's body take lives, destroy histories and realms, and all to her liking... Don't fear her, though, because you will never see her face again. Just the flames and the fire she set alight... Oh, my dear, you won't survive the night. Please, sit back. Don't fight Ragnarok's might.

Balder was waiting right inside the gates of Asgard. His form was half-smoke, half-human; mist swirling inside the shape of a person. On his neck, I spotted the shape of a burning sword engraved on his supernatural skin. Though I should have expected the sign of murder as soon as he'd set out to find Thor, it still came as some what of a surprise.

I felt so guilty of what I'd created of his innocent soul.

He had his arm crossed over his chest, his eyes scanning the crowd on dead that flowed into the realm of light. I forced a smile on my face for him, almost managing to look delighted and fulfilled as I strode forward. The footsteps of the dead behind me echoed through the city's thin streets, and I could swear I heard the cracking of fire right before the Bifrost closed and a silence followed.

So that was it. Though I still had vague memories of Asgard, a lot of them were just me- either sitting outside, under the shade of one of the trees around the palace, or lying curled up in my bed with my legs pressed up against my chest until the yelling outside my room became no more than a buzz in the background that I could manage to ignore. But there was more to the realm than just my experience of it. There were other people, woman dressed in gold and bordeaux red, silk dresses, which draped around their bodies, and men in more simple, but expensive looking, clothing. The buildings were mostly wooden huts, decorated with beautiful flowers in the most vibrant of colors. The most remarkable, though, was the large palace towering out above the rest of Asgard's capital city. It's walls were gold and red, and looked like metal from afar, but I knew that- whatever the material was- that it was far more extravagant than that.

"It's beautiful," I sighed.

Balder watched me carefully and reached out for my hand. I took it and smiled at him, my best and only friend. "That's not what you're supposed to say before burning it to the ground."

"I'm sure it will look a lot better as a pile of ashes," I then added, watching people nervously swarm in the distance and point at the gigantic crowd of gray figures. I could only imagine how I would have reacted if I were who I would have been, had Odin never banished me.

Balder smiled, but I noticed it was just as fake as mine. Not until he told me that he had seen Odin's body in the forest on his way back did I suddenly feel something. Was it pride? Because I had already gotten that far and done so much? Perhaps excitement?

It poured through my veins. Filled my heart with adrenaline. The end was coming- raging like a wildfire. Odin was dead. Loki was dead. Surt would be dead, burned in his own fire. It felt like an achievement: going from the banished, the mistreated, the poor and sick, to the powerful. I was winning and going from having nothing to having everything.

By then, Asgard was mine.

And I couldn't wait to show Odin and his people exactly what I could do with it. Within no time, they would be no more than a memory, or even a soul I could use however I wanted. Their future, I thought, was mine.

In reality, though, things were just escalating to get worse. As I accepted that there was no way back, so I might as well just go completely for the destruction and the power and stop worrying about a monster inside or crap like that, back in the palace, Frigga's perfect intuition was telling her more.