When I was in grade school, I became obsessed with Norse Mythology and Hela - the goddess of death - in particular. The old story of the unwanted and deformed daughter of the Trickster-God Loki resonated with my own sad young heart. When I was ten, I wrote a book about Hela and the other Norse gods and submitted it to Random House Publishers in New York. Needless to say, it was rejected and it hasn't seen the light of day since, but it occurred to me recently that the story still needed to be told.
So, here it be…..
HELA HALF-ROTTED
By Atana
Chapter 1 – Abducted
It had been two months to that very day that twelve-year-old Hela Lokisdottir and her two brothers had been summoned before Allfather Odin for judgment.
Despite the conviction of those who illustrate comic books, Hela was not eight feet tall, nor was she five hundred pounds of solid muscle, nor was she a supernaturally-charged warrior in an elaborately decorated whip mistress outfit. In truth, she was small and slight in person, and some say her mother had been cursed while Hela had still been in her womb. For it was sure that Hela Lokisdottir had been born with a most shocking condition which would plague her for the rest of her long life.
She appeared to be a young human female who was half-dead and half-alive.
Hela's right side displayed the comeliness that came with being the handsome mischief-god Loki's child. Her vibrant coloring and black hair encouraged onlookers to believe that she was a pretty young girl, that is; until their eyes drifted to view her left side.
Starting at the midline of her forehead and running down her face and body Hela was a livid bluish-gray, the color of spoiled meat. Pewter-colored hair straggled from her scalp. Her muscles were wasted so that her left side was nearly skeletal in appearance. She walked with a pronounced limp as her left foot lacked the pads of fat and muscle necessary for efficient movement. Her locomotion was accompanied by the steady clack-clack of a black cane which was embellished with a pair of ravens. She became fatigued quickly and breathed with difficulty. However, as a resident of Jotunheim and the daughter of one of the valiant gods of Asgard, she had been raised to be tough and such infirmities did not defeat her.
Her two brothers had been raised with her in Jotunheim, the land of the giants. Her mother – Angurboda, the witch of the Iron-Wood – had done her best to shield her children from the all-seeing eye of Odin, king of the gods. After all, Loki the Trickster was married to the goddess Sigyn and not to her.
Her eldest son with Loki had been named Jormungand. He was a tall and slender shape-shifter with eerie green eyes who favored the form of a snake. Angurboda's middle child was Fenrir, a robust brown-haired boy who similarly favored transforming himself into a wolf. As Jotunheim was full of what ordinary humans (and indeed the gods of Asgard) would consider monsters, this sort of thing was not out of the ordinary.
Angurboda had gravely instructed her daughter that there was no one in the Nine Worlds like her; that she was born the way she was for a reason; and that she would bring great credit someday to the Jotun race. Hela had loved her mother and had believed her.
Things might have gone on this way indefinitely had it not been for this odd trio's father, Loki the Trickster. Blessed with a quick wit and good looks, Loki's character was flawed by a wide streak of envy flavored with outright malevolence. Time after time he had gotten his fellow gods and goddesses into scrapes that required a good deal of effort to rectify. In other words, he had an unfortunate way of calling unwanted attention to himself. When Allfather Odin's eye fell upon his children and their giantess mother, their fate became locked and bound forever.
Odin had fetched his sons Thor and Tyr to Jotunheim to kidnap the three. There had been the expected curses, spells, and scuffling designed to stop them, but the two burly gods had prevailed and had taken the struggling and shrieking children from the land of their birth. In an attempt to intimidate their captors, Jormungand and Fenrir had immediately changed into their snake and wolf forms in self-defense and had stayed that way.
Hela, on the other hand, hadn't needed shape-shifting to make the two big men recoil from her. They had looped a rope around her right wrist and had more or less dragged her along until her desultory shuffling became more annoying than what it was worth. At that point, she had been placed in the back of Thor's chariot and spent the journey crying out her sorrow into the sleeve of her dress. And thus had the children of Loki crossed the rainbow bridge Bifrost and entered Asgard, home of the Norse gods.