{-Eir-}
It was finally time to get answers. She was done hoping that she might find answers if she only listened. This will be her only time to ask in one way or another; she knew that either she will walk out of the throne room or Hel will. There was no taking back this moment, and she hoped that she could make every bit of it count.
Eir pushed open the doors, slowly entering with her head bowed. "I have returned, Mother," she announced solemnly.
"I feel no addition to the dead," Hel remarked. "Why are you here?"
"I have killed him," she said carefully, creeping ever closer to the sovereign of death. "I have brought his sword as proof that the prince of peace is now dead."
"I don't care for a sword. I want his head."
"Acquiring it would have been… unnecessarily bloody. Let me suffice to say that there was not much left afterward."
"That still doesn't answer the question of why I haven't felt him," Hel pointed out. She was already suspicious. Had she heard something beforehand? "No matter what state he died in he would at least walk up with you as proof if I somehow missed his arrival."
Eir got as close as she dared, setting the sword on the ground and carefully walking closer. "Perhaps…" She changed to a much quicker pace, pulling out her dagger and thrusting it in Hel's chest before she could tell what was happening. "It is because he still lives."
"What do you think you're doing, you wretch?" Hel didn't move. She had to have realized that it was in her best favor not to; one wrong move and she would be dead. Then it hit her. "You… you like them, don't you? You've grown attached to those mortals! Don't you know what's going to happen to them? You know what she said."
"Through them I have experienced things I thought were long gone." Nothing will be left unsaid. "They trusted me even after I showed them that I was not really supposed to be loyal to them. They have shown me love in a way that I thought I had only dreamed of… the love I could have sworn you once possessed, all those years ago in my youth…"
Hel grinned devilishly. "Did you really think that was me? That I was ever the one to care for you?" She barked at Eir's surprised reaction. "A living being cannot come out of the dead. I might have had a father but I am just as much alive as he was; by the means that I exist, but not that I ever really possessed 'life.' That woman you must remember seeing was your real mother—the one I killed when I came to your world. I took you and raised you as my own because I knew that I could get power off of you. Unfortunately you didn't last nearly as long as I wanted you to, but at least I got a bit of amusement out of the whole thing."
"That is it, then? You do not even want to try to defend yourself?"
"Why defend myself against something I fully know I didn't do? Why claim to be someone I'm not? There's no point in it anyway, aside from how you seem so surprised. I suppose I've seen how even my fellow gods fall to mortal ideals. It's only natural that you, as a mortal by nature, would follow them… despite understanding these concepts almost as much as I do, you still cling to emotion instead of logic. Pride won't keep you from getting hurt. Justice does not save you from death. Love holds no power over me." Hel raised a hand and stroked Eir's cheek, continuing in a mockingly sympathetic tone. "Don't you realize you're only setting yourself up to be hurt? You know his death by my hands would be much more merciful than one by Loki. Do you even intend to gain anything besides that silly sense of love?"
"I want to help them. I will never have a purpose here, but I can at least try my best to guide them… perhaps their fate is not as unavoidable as it seems, if they have the right person to show them the way."
"You intend to bring them there? Are you a fool?"
"There is no escaping the fact that they were made for something. But I do not think they need to die in vain."
"She's going to kill all three of you!"
"Then at least I would have died being useful, rather than live with the burden of knowing I could have done something as I waste away with the dead…" Eir took a deep breath. "Now, Mother… it is time that you experience the same fate as each of your subjects."
With one last ear-piercing cry, Hel was dead.
((A/N: For some weird reason, I decided that Hel eldritch screeches from time to time. There's probably urban legends in their world that, if they hear a similar hair-raising noise, she will magically appear and kill them. That's one way to scare your kids!))