Chapter 308: Prodigal Daughter

13th May 2013, Helheim

(Hela Odinsdottir POV)

Her name was Hela Odinsdottir. She was the proud daughter of Odin, the Crown Princess of Asgard, the Heiress to the throne, and the Goddess of Death. She was born during a time of war and death and grew to revel in it.

She understood when she was a child that the strong survived and thrived, while the weak perished to make way for their betters. This was why Hela’s mother died giving birth to her. She was weak and could not handle the power of the daughter of Odin. At least, it was what she told herself when she was younger to fill the void her mother left behind.

That was the core of the Asgardian philosophy, the reason for their existence. They were strong, which means that it was their right to rule over their lessers.

Her father embodied such an ideology. He was a master of weaponry, unrivaled with a spear, and had a mastery of the Asgardian magics that no one had ever seen before. No one in Asgard had ever even come close to Odin in strength as a warrior, and Hela tried to emulate him as much as possible.

She did not have a mother, and with the realms being at war, she was constantly surrounded by generals and warriors. She never had the luxury of a mother’s love and care. She has never been hugged goodnight, like the rest of the girls were. Instead, she was ignored in favor of her father’s war.

At first, she hated it, then she had grown apathetic to it, and finally she ended up looking down on it. After all, she was strong like her father, why would she need a cowardly woman fussing over her? Instead, Hela devoted her entire life to becoming the best warrior in existence, to surpassing her father and helping him conquer the realms that were rightfully his.

Hela ignored the jeers from the court, the dismissive glances of the soldiers that she had forced her father to tutor her in the art of war and instead focused on what mattered, becoming Asgard’s greatest warrior. Day and night, she trained. She mastered every weapon she had access to. She was peerless with a sword, but still adequate with a lance. She could beat men centuries older than her who had actual battle experience. She was a prodigy in warfare. And yet Odin did not even blink once at the mention. He simply did not care, considering her to be barely more than a child, a lady, not a warrior.

Angry, she had joined the Valkyries, a force of female warriors of Asgard, who were not looked down on as warriors. She entered with a fake name, but she was taught much regarding the art of battle. She had snuck into a battle with the Fire Giants, but her father found her out, and stopped her membership of the Valkyries, and bound her to the palace. Even after she was a bloodied warrior, a part of Asgard’s most prestigious force, he still didn’t acknowledge her.

It took unlocking her power, her domain for her father to finally see her potential. For she was the Goddess of Death, and with it, she brought destruction upon her enemies. Hela’s presence meant the complete massacre of her enemies, but her power was too vast, too much for her untrained mind, and so Odin gave her a training tool, a hammer called Mjolnir, forged by the Dwarves of Nidavellir themselves.

With Mjolnir in hand, Hela's power was harnessed and her control over her abilities grew. She became a formidable force on the battlefield, feared by her enemies and respected by her allies. Despite her father's initial reluctance to acknowledge her as a warrior, she proved herself to be one of the strongest and most skilled fighters in all of Asgard. Hela's determination and hard work had paid off, and she had finally earned the recognition she deserved. With her power and skills, she was ready to help her father conquer the realms and fulfill their destiny as the ruling force of the Nine Realms.

Her enemies feared her even more than her father because when she walked into the battlefield, Death followed. Asgard showered her with praise, and Odin finally acknowledged her when he named her to be his executioner, an Asgardian position that was essentially the King's right hand, their personal weapon.

She had been elated and everything had gone well for centuries. Asgard had almost conquered the nine realms, and Hela was practically over the moon. That was until her father decided to do that cursed ritual.

He sacrificed his right eye, and hung himself from a tree, for knowledge and power. And he had certainly gotten those. But ever since that fateful ritual, he became different. Hela remembers seeing him return from the ritual. She had been acting as Asgard’s regent in the meantime, but when she greeted him for the first time, she didn’t see the carefully hidden pride that he tried his best to repress, only disgust and pity.

She had ignored it at first, waiting for him to recover fully, but that look haunted her and while he did his best to hide it, he didn’t trust her the way he used to, the small gestures of affection towards her were gone. Her father had disappeared, leaving this judgmental stranger in his place.

The worst was when he decided to send out peace treaties to the rest of the realms. She had thought that it was just formalizing his conquest, but he was far too tolerant, far too merciful. This wasn’t her father anymore; this wasn’t the warrior that she had fought next to.

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But what did it matter? The war was over, Asgard had won, and with this, Hela realized how empty she was feeling. She was born during a war, she had grown during a war, and she had lived on the battlefield, where her domain truly expressed itself.

She could not stand the palace anymore. Odin’s judgmental eyes followed her everywhere, and when he agreed to marry that bitch Frigga, that was the last straw. She felt like Asgard wasn’t her home anymore. It hurt to admit this, but home was where she felt comfortable. Her home was on the battlefield, in the war, surrounded by death.

In the end, she decided to follow in her father’s footsteps. He had started a way to conquer the nine realms, she decided to do the same and conquer just one, but far larger than his could ever be. Midgard. Odin often dismissed the rock, and he was right, it had nothing more than mortal savages that barely lived for a few decades. But that was the planet, the realm was larger than the other realms put together. There were many civilizations, on many worlds and Hela wanted to explore them all, to conquer them all. She would start with the small planet and finish the rest later.

She gathered the men that served by her side, that were loyal to her, and went to Midgard to conquer the apes. She barely started when she met her, the Morrigan. She was a witch of immense power that no one knew about. She protected Midgard and must have been the reason her father chose to avoid this realm. Earth was the door to the realm of Midgard, and it was closed. A demon was protecting it denying anyone entrance.

Hela had almost died that day. Her dreams of conquest were crushed when her entire legion was massacred by a single woman. It was the first time in a very long time that Hela felt genuinely afraid. She had thought that she was the Goddess of Death, and yet she paled before the woman that had looked bored while killing off her fellow soldiers.

She was saved from that fate by her father who used the Bifrost to bring her home. And yet, she couldn’t be grateful for what happened. Because Death would have been better than what he did to her. Her father betrayed her, saying that she was a violent dangerous creature that would cause harm to Asgard and that her actions endangered their people. He bound her powers and sent her to a prison that he called Helheim, in the empty realm of Nifleheim.

It was so bad; she was constantly drained of her power. She was weak, she was always in pain, and she couldn’t reach out, or ask for help. Death would have been preferable to thousands of years of isolation and pain. Nifleheim was a void that always drained her powers, even her physical strength, and yet she could not die. Every day, she starved and could not move. All she had was her hatred of Odin. He wasn’t her father anymore, just a creature that looks like him. No father would condemn their daughter to this. That one eyed bastard, after everything she had done for him, betrayed her to a fate worse than death.

She had almost escaped once. After centuries of honing her control, she had gathered enough power to try to get out of Helheim. She didn’t know if she could leave the realm of Nifleheim, but it was better than her prison. A change of scenery would have been nice.

However, her father had seen it and sent the Valkyries after her. Hela stopped caring anymore. Her former sisters in battle did not protest her imprisonment, and now they were actively trying to send her back. She killed every single one of them, in bitterness and anger. And by the end, she was so drained that she was instantly pulled back to Helheim. She didn’t feel a sliver of guilt when she killed the Valkyries. She was the Goddess of Death, after all, and that was the first taste of death she had in centuries.

After that, she stopped caring. Odin would always know when she left the cursed realm and send fodder to exhaust herself against until she was pulled back to her prison. Instead, she wanted him to suffer. The prison was bound to Odin’s life force, and she was the Goddess of Death. She could manipulate life force on a very small scale. And so, she did her best to make him sacrifice as much as possible to keep her imprisoned. She had cost him thousands of years from his life expectancy. It was fitting in a way, to play the long game, to truly hurt him, to make him remember that she was still there, killing him from the inside, that she would have her revenge when he dies, that she would destroy everything he built and reconquer the nine realms in her name.

And it was coming soon, Odin’s death that is. He was getting weaker, and older. A few decades at most, and she would have been outside. That was until something happened. Someone had contacted her. They called themselves the Gods of the Gods, what a pretentious title. But she saw what they were, they were parasites, that Odin was rebelling against.

Hela could see past their pride and arrogance. They were desperate. Odin truly had a chance to destroy them, and they were terrified. These Gods of the Gods knew of the unfairness of her treatment and yet did nothing until they needed her. These were not saviors, but cowards and opportunists.

And yet, when they made her a deal to kill Odin, to destroy his heir and his empire in exchange for her freedom, how could she refuse it? After all, that was all she had ever wanted. Hela’s father was dead, and it was right that she killed the creature that took his place. That cursed man had taken everything from her. Death would have been preferable to what he had done, but he didn’t even give her the honor of death through combat. He had to be a coward and bind her. That was a mistake that he will pay for soon.

So, as these Shadows opened a portal to what was supposed to be the empty realm of Svartalfheim and she saw Asgard’s army, which paled in comparison to what it used to be in the past, fighting Dark Elves, who as far as she knew were supposed to be extinct, she didn’t care. Instead, she killed almost half of Odin’s army in seconds and looked for the supposed mighty king.

He looked nothing like the proud warrior he used to be, just an old man with a sword. Hela should have felt excited, ready to kill the man who failed her so, but all she felt was nothing. She wasn’t angry, she wasn’t afraid, she was just empty. But still, killing Odin was necessary. He would keep trying to bind her otherwise, to send her back to that hellhole. And Hela would rather die than return.

Perhaps if she killed Odin, she would feel something, anything. She was always going to kill him; she had made a deal after all. Instead, she gave the King of Asgard a look and forced a smirk onto her face, “Well, Odin. Long time no see.”

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