In the heart of Eliudnir, the palace of mists, Queen Hel never slept. Sleep was a luxury of the living, and in her kingdom, everything was permanent and frozen.
Hel stood before a huge table of black frost where ice runes floated. On one side, her face was moon-pale, beautiful and regal; on the other, the flesh was nothing but a rotten shred revealing the bare jaw and empty eye socket of death.
"They have pierced the veil," she whispered. Her voice did not echo in the air, but directly in the spinal cord of her subordinates.
Before her, her generals—forgotten kings whose crowns were welded to their skulls by frost—waited, motionless.
"Laplace promised me an anomaly," continued the Queen, touching a rune representing Tartarus. "He did not warn me that Styx and Chronos had spawned a bastard of stone and gold. Much less that the Chained Wolf walked beside him."
She turned to the large bone window overlooking the plains of Gjöll. Below, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were lining up in perfect phalanxes. This was no army shouting or singing; it was a war machine made of elite corpses, Draugar whose every wound had been sealed with black ice.
"Prepare the Frost Blades," Hel commanded. "I don't want them killed. We don't kill those who are already sons of death. I want them frozen. I want time to stop for the heir of time."
A huge iron gong sounded throughout the valley, a sound that shook the foundations of Helheim. At this signal, the dead soldiers raised their spears. Frost began to creep up the palace walls, spreading toward the point of impact where Jormund had appeared.
"Does Laplace want to see the show?" Hel asked the shadow floating in the corner of the room, an ethereal projection of the calculator. "Very well. He will see how my kingdom digests those who believe that fate can be broken by brute force."
She grasped her scepter, a column of ice containing the soul of a minor god whose cry was frozen for eternity.
"Soldiers of Oblivion!" she thundered. "A source of heat walks your lands. Extinguish it. Leave only absolute zero."
As the army set off with a clatter of frozen armor, Hel stared at the horizon. She knew that Jormund was not alone. She could smell the blood of giants and the fury of the wolf. The war for Helheim had begun, and for the first time in a millennium, the Queen of Death felt an emotion she had forgotten.
Anticipation.