Teagan’s Reviews > The Witch's Heart > Status Update

“There are no gods anymore, Hel. We’re all only men.”

-Baldur to Hel when she awakes after Ragnarok

When Hel squeezed her eyes shut, several tears leaked out, and Angrboda wiped them with her sleeve. Hel was too weak to bat her away and said, anguished, “It’s not fair. My entire life was wasted down there, and when we finally could’ve seen each other I kept you away… and now we’re all doomed…”

-Hel to Angrboda

“Why did you do it, then?” Angrboda whispered. “Why did you kill your brother’s son?”

“The gods took everything from us, Boda,” he whispered back. “I thought it was high time I took something from them.”

[….]
And then another thought struck her.
Let Hel hold what she has.
“Took something—someone—from them,” she said slowly, “and gave it to our daughter.”

“A part to play,” Loki echoed, looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Boda, I told you the very first time we met that I want nothing to do with your depressing prophecies. I make my own way—I choose my own fate. You can’t take that away from me.” His tone turned pleading. “You mustn’t.”

“You have the power, don’t you? To protect me?”

“Perhaps I could, but I won’t.” She held his gaze. “You were right. I married you and mothered your children. That’s all there is for me. That’s all anyone will ever know. The worlds go on, and you have a part to play in what’s to come.”

-Loki and Angrboda

Hel whipped aside the bottom of her dress to show her legs merely bone now, with blue-gray flesh still clinging in some places, held together by only a few tendons and a lot of magic.

Angrboda stared. That was all she could do.
(2/2)

…choose to be nothing more.” (3)
-Loki to Angrboda

“It beats hiding in a cave at the edge of the world, being scared of everything,” Loki shouted in her face now, his scarred lips twisting in scorn. “You don’t understand. You’ll never understand, because all they will remember of you is the name you chose for yourself, Angrboda. Not that you were Gullveig, not anything else. They will know you as my wife and the mother of monsters (2/3)

“Why am I not worshipped like the test? What are gods if they’re not worshipped? What does that make me? Reckoned among them, but not one of them. Never one of them.”

“Is that all that matters to you?” Angrboda demanded. “Worship and being well know? Is that really why you make mischief, just for attention? Just so people will remember you in some far-distant future?” (1/2)

“But I don’t think the gods consider me to be capable of such a feeling as love. It’s as you said: They mistrust me. Maybe it’s because I never talk to any of them as I talk to you now, as I’ve always talked to you. My existence feels like an act. It is an act.”
-Loki to Angrboda