Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight. Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!
Oh my god, this is beautiful.
A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.” Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup and refrains from doing it again. He hears the child’s pain; no glorious battle this, but one of fear and wretched survival.
He invites the child to sit with him, offers the choicest mead and instructs his men to bring a sword and shield, a bow and arrow, of the very best materials and appropriate size. “Here,” he says, “you will find no man who dares to harm you. But so you will know your own strength, and be happy all your days in Valhalla, I will teach you to use these weapons.”
The sad day comes when another child enters the hall. Odin does not slam his cup; he simply beams with pride as the first child approaches the newcomer, and holds out her bow and quiver, and says “nobody here will hurt you. Everyone will be so proud you did your best, and I’ll teach you to use these, so you always know how strong you are.”
————
A young man enters the hall. He hesitates when Odin asks his story, but at long last, it ekes out: skinheads after the Pride parade. His partner got into a building and called for help. The police took a little longer than perhaps they really needed to, and two of those selfsame skinheads are in the hospital now with broken bones that need setting, but six against one is no fair match. The fear in his face is obvious: here, among men large enough to break him in two, will he face an eternity of torment for the man he left behind?
Odin rumbles with anger. Curses the low worms who brought this man to his table, and regales him with tales of Loki so to show him his own welcome. “A day will come, my friend, when you seek to be reunited, and so you shall,” Odin tells him. “To request the aid of your comrades in battle is no shameful thing.”
———-
A woman in pink sits near the head of the table. She’s very nearly skin and bones, and has no hair. This will not last; health returns in Valhalla, and joy, and light, and merrymaking. But now her soul remembers the battle of her life, and it must heal.
Odin asks.
And asks again.
And the words pour out like poisoned water, things she couldn’t tell her husband or children. The pain of chemotherapy. The agony of a mastectomy, the pain still deeper of “we found a tumor in your lymph nodes. I’m so sorry.” And at last, the tortured question: what is left of her?
Odin raises his flagon high. “What is left of you, fair warrior queen, is a spirit bright as fire; a will as strong as any forged iron; a life as great as any sea. Your battle was hard-fought, and lost in the glory only such furor can bring, and now the pain and fight are behind you.“
In the months to come, she becomes a scop of the hall–no demotion, but simple choice. She tells the stories of the great healers, Agnes and Tanya, who fought alongside her and thousands of others, who turn from no battle in the belief that one day, one day, the war may be won; the warriors Jessie and Mabel and Jeri and Monique, still battling on; the queens and soldiers and great women of yore.
The day comes when she calls a familiar name, and another small, scarred woman, eyes sunken and dark, limbs frail, curly black hair shaved close to her head, looks up and sees her across the hall. Odin descends from his throne, a tall and foaming goblet in his hands, and stuns the hall entire into silence as he kneels before the newcomer and holds up the goblet between her small dark hands and bids her to drink.
“All-Father!” the feasting multitudes cry. “What brings great Odin, Spear-Shaker, Ancient One, Wand-Bearer, Teacher of Gods, to his knees for this lone waif?”
He waves them off with a hand.
“This woman, LaTeesha, Destroyer of Cancer, from whom the great tumors fly in fear, has fought that greatest battle,” he says, his voice rolling across the hall. “She has fought not another body, but her own; traded blows not with other limbs but with her own flesh; has allowed herself to be pierced with needles and scored with knives, taken poison into her very veins to defeat this enemy, and at long last it is time for her to put her weapons down. Do you think for a moment this fight is less glorious for being in silence, her deeds the less for having been aided by others who provided her weapons? She has a place in this great hall; indeed, the highest place.”
And the children perform feats of archery for the entertainment of all, and the women sing as the young man who still awaits his beloved plays a lute–which, after all, is not so different from the guitar he once used to break a man’s face in that great final fight.
Valhalla is a place of joy, of glory, of great feasting and merrymaking.
And it is a place for the soul and mind to heal.
THIS! This is the Hanged God who owns my loyalty, Old One-Eye who’s call I answer above all.
He is not one to turn the brave aside, asks no more than what one can give (Even if, at times, it doesn’t look that way.)
I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING.
Girda moves amongst the warriors, as she has ten thousand times. This battlefield smells of antiseptic and floor cleaner rather than blood and mud, but she can taste death in the air here too.
She adjusts her nametag, fixes her ponytail, and continues her rounds.
Many of the other nurses don’t understand why she likes working the terminal cancer ward. Nurses and doctors learn not to get too attached, to maintain a professional detachment, but it still hurts. It’s human nature for it to hurt, when you see a fellow human succumb to the inevitable.
(Many of the nurses favor working in obstetrics. There’s something magical about watching new life fight its way, blinking and new, into the world. This particular hospital has the best reputation in the country; Doctor Vanger is famous worldwide for her skill, for how she’ll fight tooth and nail to bring every mother and child through safely, no matter how small or sick or early. Girda inclines her head in respect whenever she passes Dr. Vanger; she has known Freyja for a thousand years and more, and the goddess is due her respect.)
Mr. Yu passed away an hour ago. It is likely a relief, Girda thinks. The old man fought to the bitter end, but in the end there was so much pain, and he’d been so tired.
He would have been a fine addition to the Allfather’s hall, but he wasn’t hers. As the orderlies prepared to wheel the body down to the morgue, one breifly reaches his hand over the body. There’s a flicker of something that might be a mirror, and Girda watches the soul of Mr. Yu rise.
Nurse Jiang smiles briefly, his eyes warm. The soul bows, and is gone. Girda inclines her head to Jiang, the greeting of one judge of souls to another. He smiles back at her, nods in response.
The night continues.
Near midnight, Girda’s feet take her to a certain bedside. She doesn’t need the machines to tell her that the woman here is about to die; she feels it in her bones.
Mrs. Lesten was beautiful, once. Now she’s shriveled, wasted. That once beautiful teak-dark skin seems tissue-thin, aged far beyond the woman’s forty years. Once-bright eyes are sunken, and once-lovely hair is gone.
Girda sits. She takes a frail, wrinkled hand, and waits.
She does not wait long. She never does. She always knows.
A sigh. An ending.
Girda reaches out, smiling, as the soul lifts free from mortal flesh. No other gods have a claim on this soul; the Allfather’s only criteria is those who died bravely. And this woman, oh, this woman did, this woman fought and there is no shame in losing to so great a foe.
“Hail, warrior.” She says. “Come. Valhalla is open to you. Come sit and dine with us.”
Mrs. Lesten is frail still, but already her soul is beginning to remember the shape of healthy flesh. The touch of Valhalla is already on her.
In the dog world, humans are elves that routinely live to be 500+ years old.
“They live so long…but the good ones still bond with us for our entire lives.”
“These immortals are so kind we must be good friends to them”
My heart wtf
Not gonna lie, this fucked me up a bit.
POV Fantasy slice of life book when?
“Now I am old. The fur around my muzzle is grey and my joints ache when we walk together. Yet she remains unchanged, her hair still glossy, her skin still fresh, her step still sprightly. Time doesn’t touch her and yet I love her still.”
Planetary nebulae are brief (~10,000 years) phases in the lives of stars below 8 solar masses that mark the transition from being an AGB star to being a white dwarf.
that “brief” is longer than the entirety of recorded history. holy moly.
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