#morrighan

But you can feel- how wrong things are, the holes in her mind and memory, and there is blood everywhere, and the first thing- the only thing- you say is: you can always come back.

i know you didnt want to do this. i know you dont want to. i know you didnt meant it. this is bigger than all of us. you can always come back, no matter what you do. she will not have you, not completely. not forever.

I just. Fuck. There is blood everywhere and your friend is dead, and your other friend's mind is crumbling, dissolving, corrupting, warping, and you plead and you say. you can always come back. you can always come back. i love you. i love you. i love you. this was bigger than us. no matter what you do. you can always come back.

Morrighan already lost one friend. She will lose another. She's already lost. They're losing Opal. Opal is losing herself.

Hel definitely has a broader domain, but in the few myths that describe her realm, she isn't described as a tyrant or as controlling the dead at her command. That's fascinating because in Ragnarok, the Norse apocalypse, she leads an army of the dead to overthrow the Aesir and Vanir. Why might these non-warrior dead follow her to an age-ending war?

Odin and Freyja were the chief warrior deities of the Aesir and Vanir respectively, and each had their own afterlife where they gathered their dead. I forget Freyja's, but Odin's is the famous Valhalla. But let's think about that for a minute: for a good few centuries, the greatest Norse warriors... were slaughtering, enslaving, and brutalizing unarmed civilians all across Europe (and further). They especially, famously, terrorized England. The funny thing about the English, the Anglo-Saxons, is that they're Germanic. Their chief god of their pre-Christian pantheon? Woden, their language's word for Odin. The Norse knew that they were even killing their own people. That may sound racist or xenophobic in modern times, but in antiquity, it was an extra level of cold and cruel. On that note, the Norse raiders *were* worse to civilians than their Christian and Muslim counterparts (who were also awful, but like, with codes).

So why might a mighty horde of non-violent souls rise up to overthrow the gods? Maybe because those gods had rewarded and cherished their abusers, and now they had a chance to destroy the afterlife rewards bestowed on the ones who destroyed everything they had in life.