Chapter 132:
– Haru –
I watched the death goddess stare at us with those luminous green eyes, her expression cycling through disbelief, hope, and crushing doubt in the span of seconds. Her hands trembled slightly where they gripped the empty bowl, and I caught the way her throat worked as she swallowed hard.
"The both of you are actually—real...?"
The question came out barely above a whisper, fragile as spun glass.
Something clicked in my mind then. Fuck. If I'd known this goddess was battling mental trauma, I would've prepared something specifically crafted to heal her psyche instead of just standard comfort food.
Too late now. She didn't seem as far gone as Rennala had been though. If anything, it looked like this woman was recovering by the second as she glanced between myself and Frigga.
I leaned closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from my body, close enough that my presence became undeniable and solid. I let my tails fan out slightly behind me.
"Of course we're real," I said, keeping my voice steady and warm. "I promise you, this isn't a hallucination. We're here. You're not alone anymore."
Frigga shifted beside me, and I felt her hand settle gently on the goddess's bare shoulder. "Everything happening right now is real, dear," Frigga assured her, giving that shoulder a gentle squeeze. She tilted her head slightly, concern evident in the furrow of her brow. "But why would you think it wasn't? What made you believe we were just another fantasy?"
The goddess bit her lower lip, and I watched the way her teeth pressed into that full bottom curve before she released it. Her eyes dropped to the empty bowl in her lap, fingers tightening around its edges until her knuckles went even paler than her already porcelain skin. "I've been trapped in Helheim for over a thousand years," she said quietly, each word seeming to cost her something. "Maybe longer. I stopped counting after the first millennium became the second." Her voice cracked slightly, and she paused to draw a shuddering breath. "The isolation... it does things to your mind. I've had so many hallucinations over the centuries—conversations with people who weren't there, phantom sensations of warmth and touch that dissolved the moment I reached for them." Her glowing green eyes lifted to meet mine, and the raw vulnerability in them made my chest tighten. "But I have to admit," she continued, a bitter smile tugging at her lips, "this has been the nicest hallucination I've ever experienced. The kindness, the bath, the food..." She gestured vaguely at both of us. "The company of two impossibly attractive strangers who don't immediately try to kill me or remind me what a monster I am. It seemed too good to be real."
Impossibly attractive. My ears twitched despite myself, heat creeping up the back of my neck.
Frigga seemed to sense my momentary distraction and smoothly took over, her voice taking on a warmer, more formal quality as she straightened slightly.
"Then allow me to properly introduce us both, so you know exactly who has stumbled into your realm." She placed one elegant hand over her heart in what looked like an old gesture of formal greeting. "I am Frigga of Vanaheim, daughter of the Vanir, Goddess of the Hunt and keeper of the wild magics." She mentioned nothing about Asgard. Clearly she was very mad at Odin still. She turned and gestured toward me with her free hand, a small smile playing at her lips. "And this is Prince Haru of the Yokai people, though I confess I don't know much about his kind. They weren't among the beings I studied before my... imprisonment."
I scratched at my cheek, feeling suddenly awkward under both women's attention. "That's because I'm technically from Midgard," I explained with a shrug that made my tails sway. "But not this Midgard—I'm from another universe entirely. A parallel reality, I guess you'd call it. I don't even know if your version of Earth has Yokai at all, or if we're exclusive to my dimension."
Frigga's eyes widened for just a fraction of a second before she let out a surprised chuckle, shaking her head with apparent amusement. "Well. That's certainly not the strangest thing I've heard in my long life, but I'll admit—until this very moment, I believed travel between universes was nothing more than myth and philosophical speculation. Impossible, even for the gods."
"Depends on the Gods," I said, unable to keep the amused note out of my voice at the thought of her expression whenever she finally sees my restaurant for the first time.
The death goddess had been watching our exchange with rapt attention, her expression cycling through various stages of processing this information.
"Is the Odin in your universe still an asshole?" She blurted out a question that made both Frigga and I turn to stare at her in confusion. The words hung in the dead air of Helheim for a beat.
I felt my tails droop slightly as I considered how to answer that. "Honestly? The Odin from my world is known to be a pretty chill and fair god overall. He takes his duties seriously, dispenses wisdom, the whole wise All-Father thing." I paused, then added with a grimace, "But he's also a notorious womanizer. Visits titty bars quite frequently from what I've heard. Apparently losing his wife Frigga in my timeline made him... cope poorly."
"Titty bars?" Frigga repeated, her tone one of innocent curiosity as she tilted her head. "What manner of establishment is that?"
The death goddess leaned forward as well, clearly just as interested in the answer.
Of course they don't have strip clubs in medieval fantasy Norse realms. I felt heat flooding my face, my ears flattening slightly in embarrassment as I tried to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a complete pervert.
"It's, uh... it's a place where men go to get drunk and ogle dancing naked women," I managed, the words coming out more strangled than I'd intended. I fully expected shock, disgust, maybe some righteous indignation about the objectification of women.
Instead, the death goddess's eyes lit up with genuine excitement. "Such a place actually exists?!" She sounded absolutely delighted, leaning forward with an enthusiasm that made the neckline of her borrowed dress dip dangerously low. "That sounds amazing! Do they have male dancers too, or is it only women? What about—"
SMACK!
Frigga's hand connected with the taller woman's shoulder in a polite but firm correction, the sound echoing off the obsidian rocks around us.
"Behave yourself," Frigga scolded, though there was warmth beneath the reprimand. Then her expression shifted into something more pointed as she fixed the death goddess with an expectant look. "And you still haven't introduced yourself properly, dear. We've shared our names and our rather unusual circumstances. Don't you think it's time you returned the courtesy?"
The death goddess blinked, then had the grace to look slightly sheepish—an expression that sat oddly on someone who radiated such dangerous power.
"You're right," she admitted. "I'm sorry. It's been so long since I've had to observe social niceties that I've apparently forgotten my manners entirely."
She straightened in her seat, and despite the borrowed dress and her still-damp hair, there was suddenly something regal about her bearing. Something that spoke of battlefields and thrones and power that could shake worlds.
When she spoke again, her voice carried weight. "My name is Hela. The Goddess of Death. I am also Odin's firstborn daughter…"
Frigga and I had completely different reactions to that.
"WHAAAAAAT!?"
"Huh? I thought Loki was supposed to be your dad?"
Frigga turned to look at me after I asked that question. I shrugged at her and said,
"Hela is Loki's daughter in the mythology of my world—and a couple others I've visited so far. This one is the weird one…"
Frigga's expression shifted abruptly. She opened her mouth, paused, then seemed to force the words out with visible effort. "Loki has never even approached another woman after Sif broke his heart," she said, her voice taking on that particular quality mothers get when discussing their children's romantic failures.
My brain screeched to a halt like tires on wet pavement.
"Wait—Sif?" I repeated, one of my ears flicking forward in disbelief. Loki. The trickster god I'd just met, the one with the ridiculous reindeer helmet and the theatrical speeches, had apparently been pining after Sif of all people. I guess she was objectively attractive—tall, strong, that whole warrior goddess aesthetic that some guys went crazy for. But she was also, from what little I'd witnessed, kind of crazy.
But was I one to talk—considering my own collection of women had more than one very crazy girl?
Eh, probably not…
Although...
Oh crap!
We'd left Sif's unconscious body lying in the middle of Odin's palace, hadn't we?
Whoops.
Well…. She'd be fine. Depending on if Odin tries to interrogate her or not…
I shook my head slightly, refocusing on the conversation at hand.
Frigga had already moved past the Loki comment, her attention snapping back to Hela with visible shock written across her mature and beautiful face. "You're saying you're Odin's daughter? His firstborn child?"
Hela nodded slowly, her green eyes watching Frigga with an intensity that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up slightly. There was wariness there, I realized. The kind of defensive tension that came from expecting every conversation to turn into an attack.
"I was," Hela confirmed, her voice carefully neutral. "His favorite, once upon a time. His perfect weapon. Until I became an embarrassment he needed to erase!"
Frigga's shock was giving way to something else now—hurt, maybe, or betrayal. Her voice rose slightly, cracking around the edges with emotion. "I was married to Odin for over a thousand years," she said, and each word seemed to cost her something. "A thousand years, and he never once mentioned having any previous children. He never spoke of you. There were no portraits, no records, nothing." She pressed a hand to her chest, right over her heart. "How could he hide something like that from me? How could he just—"
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU WERE MARRIED TO ODIN?!" Hela's voice cut through Frigga's mounting distress like a blade, sharp and sudden and completely shocked. The death goddess had gone rigid beside me, her entire body tensing as though preparing for a fight. Those glowing green eyes were wide, almost wild, and I watched her lean away from us slightly—putting distance between herself and Frigga as though the older woman had suddenly become a threat. "You said you were a Vanir goddess!" Hela continued, her tone climbing toward something that wasn't quite accusatory but was definitely defensive as hell. "You said you were from Vanaheim! So why are you claiming you married that bastard? Were you working with him this entire time? Is this some kind of—"
"I AM A VANIR GODDESS!" Frigga shouted back suddenly! Every inch of her posture screamed outrage, righteous and burning and completely justified. When she spoke again, the words came faster, louder, each one hitting the dead air of Helheim like a physical blow. "Odin kidnapped me during the war between our peoples! He reached into my mind with his foul magic and rewrote everything that made me me!" Her hands were shaking now, curled into fists in her lap. "He made me think I loved him—that I had chosen him willingly, that serving at his side was my greatest joy. He forced me to marry him so that my people wouldn't dare rebel, wouldn't dare fight back, because their princess was smiling and content in his bed!"
I felt my stomach twist into a knot so tight it physically hurt. HE DID WHAT!?
"He reshaped my very memories," Frigga continued, and her voice was breaking now, fragmenting around the edges as centuries of suppressed trauma came flooding out. "He made me forget my home, my family, my true nature. For a thousand years, I believed I was Asgardian. I believed his lies were my truth. I raised his children, I smiled at his court, I played the role of dutiful wife while my real self was locked away screaming inside a cage I didn't even know existed!"
In my world, certain types of memory modification were sometimes considered necessary—keeping humans from discovering the supernatural, protecting the masquerade that kept both sides safe.
What Odin had done to Frigga?
That was something else entirely! That was taking a person—a powerful goddess, a warrior, a being with her own thoughts and dreams and desires—and just... rewriting her. Turning her into a puppet. A doll that smiled and loved and obeyed because she literally couldn't remember she'd ever been anything else.
It made me think back to the early days of my restaurant—of Ron Weasley and his mother dosing Hermione with love potions. Of Dumbledore carving loyalty charms into Harry's skull.
My tails lashed once, cracking the black stone behind me. I didn't say anything. Couldn't, really—what the hell were you supposed to say to something like that? Sorry your husband was a cosmic-level piece of shit who committed the magical equivalent of lobotomizing you for a millennium?
Instead, I did the only thing that felt right. I shifted closer to Frigga on the rough obsidian log we were using as a bench, closing the distance between us until our bodies were pressed together from shoulder to hip. Then I reached out with one arm and pulled her against me properly, wrapping her in what I hoped was a comforting embrace.
She came willingly, almost desperately, turning into my chest and pressing her face against my shoulder. I could feel the softness of her curves against my side—the generous swell of her breasts, the warmth of her body, the way she seemed to melt into my touch like she'd been starving for gentle contact. My hand came up automatically to stroke through her golden hair, and I felt her shudder against me.
"I'm sorry," I murmured into her hair, keeping my voice low and steady. "I'm so fucking sorry that happened to you. You didn't deserve any of it."
For a moment, that was all there was—just the two of us, wrapped together in the gray wasteland of Helheim, and the quiet sound of Frigga's breathing slowly evening out against my chest.
And then I felt the log shift slightly as Hela moved.
I glanced over, one ear swiveling to track the death goddess's movement, and watched with mild surprise as she shamelessly scooted closer along the log's rough surface. She didn't ask permission. She just slid right up against my other side and pressed herself there as well.
Hela's breasts weren't as large as Frigga's—that much was immediately obvious as she pressed herself against my other side. But they were firm and perky beneath the borrowed silk dress, the fabric doing absolutely nothing to hide the shape of her body as she leaned into me with zero hesitation. I could feel the heat of her skin through the thin material, the way her shoulder fit naturally against my ribs, how her breathing had already started to sync with mine and Frigga's.
I hesitated for maybe half a second before wrapping my free arm around her as well.
She'd been alone for over a thousand years. Tortured by hallucinations and isolation, thrown away by her own father like garbage, erased from existence itself. If anyone deserved comfort right now, it was Hela. And honestly? What Odin had done to her might have been even worse than what he'd done to Frigga—at least Frigga had been allowed to exist amongst other people, even if it was as a puppet.
The moment my arm settled around her waist, pulling her more securely against me, I caught it—just for a fraction of a second, the tiniest curl at the corner of her lips. A smirk, maybe? Or just satisfaction at getting what she wanted? It vanished so quickly I couldn't be sure I'd actually seen it.
"I'm not remotely surprised that bastard would pull something like this," Hela said, her voice carrying an edge of bitter amusement as she settled more comfortably into my side. She tilted her head slightly, glancing past me to look at Frigga. "So, stepmother dearest—do I at least have any siblings who aren't complete cunts? Or should I assume the worst about Odin's entire bloodline?"
Frigga made a soft noise that was half-laugh, half-sigh, and I felt her shift against my chest. "I have two wonderful sons," she said, and there was genuine warmth in her voice despite everything. "They're both a bit prideful and more than a little stupid, but I'll do my best to correct that before long." She paused, and I felt her fingers curl slightly against my shirt. "Though I suspect my second son Loki might have been using mind control magic on my firstborn Thor and his friends. Making them even more reckless and idiotic than they would be naturally. I'm going to have my hands full, it seems."
My ears flattened slightly against my skull as the pieces clicked together in my head.
"Wait—is that why Thor and his idiot friends were so quick to attack my sister?" The words came out sharper than I'd intended, my tails lashing once behind me. "Because someone was magically making them dumber and more aggressive?"
Even if that was true, it didn't excuse shit. Kunou was a child. A literal child who'd been minding her own business, and those armored assholes had come at her with weapons drawn and threats on their lips. Mind control or not, they'd made the choice to follow through. They'd raised their weapons. They'd called her a thief and a demon.
"They're still not forgiven," I added flatly, my grip tightening slightly on both goddesses. "I don't care if Loki was messing with their heads. They'll have to work damn hard to earn my forgiveness." I paused, then let out a huff of annoyance. "And knowing Kunou, she'll forgive them immediately the second they apologize because she's too nice for her own good..."
– Hela –
Hela had absolutely no intention of moving from her current position.
A couple of minutes had passed since Haru finished explaining how he and Frigga had ended up crashing into Helheim through Odin's corrupted Bifrost portal, and Hela was still shamelessly pressed against his side. The solid warmth of his body against hers felt impossibly good after millennia of nothing but cold stone and colder silence. She could feel the defined muscle of his torso through his shirt, the steady rise and fall of his breathing, the occasional shift of his weight that made her hyper-aware of every point where their bodies touched.
Her hand had migrated at some point, sneaking behind his back with what she told herself was subtle grace, and now her fingers were buried in the impossibly soft fur of his golden tails.
Gods above and below, they were magnificent.
She stroked slowly along the length of one tail, marveling at how the fur seemed to shimmer even in Helheim's dull gray light. The texture was unlike anything she'd ever felt, silky and dense all at once, warm to the touch, almost alive in the way it responded to her fingers. She traced closer to where the tails emerged from his lower back, her touch feather-light and exploratory, and she didn't miss the way his entire body went subtly rigid.
A shiver.
Small, barely perceptible, but definitely there. His breath hitched just slightly, his spine straightening almost imperceptibly beneath her roaming hand.
Interesting.
Hela filed that reaction away for later consideration, her lips curving into the faintest smirk against his shoulder. Maybe his tails were more than just aesthetically pleasing appendages. Maybe touching them—especially near the base, near his spine—was genuinely arousing for his species. The way his ears had flicked back when her fingers brushed too close to where fur met skin certainly suggested sensitivity of the intimate variety.
Something to explore later, she decided. But not too much later…
Still, there were more pressing matters occupying Hela's mind than the promising sensitivity of fox-demon anatomy.
They were still trapped.
The thought kept circling back, persistent and unwelcome, no matter how much she tried to focus on the simple pleasure of physical contact and the miracle of not being alone anymore.
Yes, Haru and Frigga were real.
Yes, they were kind and attractive and apparently had zero intention of abandoning her to her isolation.
Yes, Haru was a chef whose food had very nearly made her weep with pleasure, and Frigga had bathed her with gentle hands and given her a clean dress and treated her like a person instead of a monster.
But they were still in Helheim. She fucking HATED this place!
Odin had sealed this realm from the rest of Yggdrasil centuries ago. Did he end up damning two more people to this lifeless hell?
"Hela." Haru's voice pulled her from her spiraling thoughts, and she blinked up at him to find those striking golden eyes focused on her face with an intensity that made heat pool low in her belly. "Are you ready to get out of here?" he asked simply.
Hela's brain stuttered to a complete halt. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again as she tried to form words around the sudden crushing weight of hope that slammed into her chest. "You—" Her voice came out hoarse, raw with an emotion she couldn't quite name. She swallowed hard and tried again. "You have a way to escape from this place?" The question pitched higher at the end, disbelief bleeding through every syllable. "That's actually possible?"
"Kind of," Haru said with an infuriating casualness, as though discussing the weather rather than the impossible. He tilted his head slightly, one fox ear flicking forward in apparent curiosity. "I do have a way, yeah. But I wanted to know if you had any methods first—something native to this realm, maybe? Before I try my solution—Which is begging Ranni for help again…"
He mumbled that last part, barely audible.
Hela's heart was hammering against her ribs now, beating so hard she was certain both he and Frigga could hear it. Her mind raced through possibilities, discarding dozens of failed experiments and dead-end rituals before landing on the one thing that had come closest to working.
She bit her lower lip as she organized her thoughts.
"I do know one way," she admitted slowly, cautiously, as though speaking the words too loudly might somehow jinx the possibility. "There's an old portal spell circle I created. Had to carve it into the bedrock about... gods, maybe four or five hundred years ago?" The timeline was fuzzy. Everything blurred together after the first thousand years. "It's not far from here—maybe a fifteen-minute walk through the rock formations to the north."
Haru's expression shifted into something more interested, his tails swaying slightly behind him in what she was starting to recognize as a sign of engaged attention. "A portal spell? To where?"
"Asgard, theoretically." Hela gestured vaguely with her free hand, the other still shamelessly buried in his tails because she had priorities and touching him was currently at the top of that list. "I designed it to punch through the barriers Odin erected around Helheim. The theory was sound. The execution..." She trailed off, grimacing. "The problem is power. Raw magical energy. I don't have anywhere close to the amount necessary to activate something that ambitious!" She paused, then added with a bitter laugh, "Even three of me couldn't do it. I'd need at least ten times my current reserves, maybe more, and I'm not exactly weak." The admission tasted like ash on her tongue.
A thousand years ago, she would have commanded armies with a gesture, reshaped battlefields with her will, made lesser gods kneel with her presence alone. But isolation had a cost. Without worship, without conflict, without anything to draw upon or anyone to fear her... her power had stagnated. She was still the Goddess of Death, still dangerous, but diminished.
Frigga shifted against Haru's other side, lifting her head slightly from where it had been resting on his shoulder. "How much power does she have?" the Vanir goddess asked, directing the question at Haru rather than Hela herself.
Hela bristled slightly at being discussed like she wasn't there, but her irritation faded when she realized something odd.
She couldn't sense Haru's power.
At all.
The thought struck her so suddenly that she actually pulled back slightly, her hand stilling in his tails as she focused her divine senses on the fox prince sitting between her and Frigga. She reached out with the same metaphysical awareness that let her taste death on the air, that allowed her to sense the divine spark in other gods, that made her hyper-aware of magical energy in all its forms.
And she found... nothing.
Not nothing as in "he has no power." Nothing as in "there's a complete absence where power should be detectable." Like staring at a blank wall where a window should exist. He registered to her senses the same way a particularly handsome rock might—physical presence, yes, but no magical signature whatsoever.
That shouldn't be possible. Everything with a soul had some kind of energy signature, some flicker of life-force or ambient magic. Even mortals registered as faint, dim sparks. But Haru? It was like her divine senses just... slid right off him. Refused to acknowledge he existed on that level.
Frigga, by contrast, was easy to read. The Vanir goddess blazed in Hela's awareness like a bonfire—powerful, controlled, deeply rooted in nature magic and seidr. Weaker than Hela herself, certainly, but still formidable.
Still dangerous if provoked.
But Haru was a void. An anomaly. A complete unknown.
What in the Nine Realms is he?
Before Hela could voice her confusion, Haru stood up.
Both she and Frigga made identical noises of disappointment—small, involuntary sounds of loss as all that lovely warmth and contact suddenly vanished. Hela's hand fell away from his tails, and she had to physically resist the urge to grab his shirt and yank him back down between them.
Haru seemed oblivious to their distress, or perhaps he was just being polite and pretending not to notice. He stretched slightly, his spine popping in a way that made Hela's eyes track the movement of muscle beneath his clothing with entirely too much interest.
"Well," he said brightly, brushing some of Helheim's ever-present dust off his pants, "if there's something I have plenty of, it's magicules."
Hela blinked.
"Magicules?" She turned the unfamiliar word over in her mouth, testing the syllables. It sounded vaguely scientific, maybe? Or was it some kind of eastern mysticism she wasn't familiar with? She glanced at Frigga for clarification, but the older goddess looked equally confused.
"What are magicules?" Frigga asked, tilting her head with genuine curiosity. Her golden hair spilled over one shoulder, and Hela noted absently how even disheveled and emotionally raw, the Vanir goddess was stunningly beautiful.
No wonder Odin had wanted to keep her. The thought made Hela's lip curl with disgust. Fucking bastard. She hoped someone drove a sword through his remaining eye!
Haru's expression shifted into something thoughtful, his fox ears tilting at different angles as he clearly tried to figure out how to explain an unfamiliar concept. "Magicules are... hmm. How do I put this?" He scratched at his cheek with one clawed finger, the gesture almost boyishly endearing. "Think of them as the fundamental building blocks of magical energy in certain universes. Raw power in its most basic, versatile form. Where I evolved into my current state—a Demon Lord—everything runs on magicules. Spells, skills, even physical existence for certain beings."
Hela stared at him.
Frigga stared at him.
"Demon Lord?" Hela repeated slowly. "That's quite the title… It sounds evil," she chuckled.
Frigga pouted at Haru as well saying, "You strike me as anything but evil, Haru."
"I can be pretty mean when someone threatens my friends or family, but Demon Lord is essentially just a title for non-humans that evolved to a certain level of power," he explained and then the stale air started to vibrate. Haru was releasing a fraction of his power and Hela could suddenly sense it!
Frigga and Hela both gasped at the same time! Hela was shocked and humbled and aroused and hopeful all at the same time!
– Ranni –
Ranni the Witch watched her beloved eternal consort embark upon yet another adventure, as she always did.
She observed from the sanctuary of her private study within Raya Lucaria, surrounded by the gentle luminescence of floating tomes and crystalline instruments that hummed with arcane resonance.
Four arms moved with independent purpose—two manipulating the threads of a scrying spell that shimmered like liquid starlight between her azure fingers, one absently turning the pages of an ancient grimoire she had long since memorized, the fourth cradling a cup of moon-tea that had gone cold hours ago without her notice.
Her attention was fixed entirely upon the vision suspended before her. Upon him.
Haru sat between two goddesses in that desolate wasteland of Helheim, one arm wrapped around each woman, his magnificent golden tails fanned out behind him like a sunburst against the grey monotony of that dead realm.
The death goddess—Hela, apparently—had her fingers buried shamelessly in his fur, stroking with an intimacy that made something territorial stir in Ranni's chest. The other woman, Frigga, pressed against his opposite side with the desperate hunger of someone who had been starved of genuine affection for far too long.
He was collecting more women.
Again.
Ranni released a soft sigh that misted in the cool air of her study.
Yes, she was watching him. She was always watching him. Through the connection she maintained to every door the Fox Hole had ever spawned, through the threads of fate she had painstakingly woven into the very fabric of his existence, through sheer divine will and perhaps an unhealthy amount of obsessive devotion—she could feel him. Always. A warm presence at the edge of her consciousness, like sunlight through a window she simultaneously yearned to throw open and feared to fully embrace.
Was it stalkerish behavior? Absolutely. Borderline pathological, even, by mortal standards.
Did she care? Not in the slightest.
He was hers. Her chosen consort. Her beloved. The one soul across infinite realities that had captured her attention so completely that she had reshaped the very laws of dimensional travel just to keep him close. If that meant watching over him like a particularly devoted (and phenomenally powerful) guardian goddess, then so be it. She had been alone for eons before finding his soul again. She had earned the right to be a little possessive.
Her lips curved beneath the shadow of her oversized white witch's hat—that floppy, ridiculous thing she refused to part with despite its impracticality—as she watched Haru release a fraction of his Demon Lord aura. Even through the scrying spell, even across dimensional barriers and the void between universes, she felt the echo of his power like a caress against her own divine essence.
Both goddesses gasped. Ranni understood the reaction intimately. Two more immortals for his collection, she mused, one delicate blue hand rising to rest against her cheek in a gesture that was almost wistful. Two more eternal hearts that would orbit his warmth for ages to come.
The thought should have bothered her more than it did.
Once, perhaps, it might have, before she had learned the hard truths about love and loss and the terrible weight of eternity after her consort originally died claiming that blasted Elden Ring—she might have raged at the idea of sharing her chosen partner with so many others.
But Ranni had lived too long and seen too much to cling to such mortal jealousies.
Haru's heart was vast. Impossibly, beautifully vast. He loved with an intensity that defied the constraints most beings placed upon such emotions, pouring genuine affection and devotion into each connection he forged without diminishing what he gave to any other. Watching him with Hela and Frigga now—the gentle way he held them, the soft words of comfort she could not hear but could read upon his lips, the protective curl of his tails around their huddled forms—Ranni felt no envy.
Only a quiet, aching gratitude that such a soul existed at all.
Besides, she thought with a flicker of dark amusement, I am his first. His goddess. The one who gave him the Fox Hole and all its impossible connections. Let the others warm his bed and fill his days—I am woven into his very destiny. None of them can claim that.
Her expression softened as her thoughts drifted toward a truth that sat heavy in her ancient heart.
The harem was growing large. Too large, perhaps, by conventional standards—though nothing about Haru's life had ever been conventional. But Ranni had done the calculations. She had traced the threads of fate for each woman who had claimed a piece of his heart, and she knew what awaited them all.
Around half of Haru's lovers were mortal.
Of course, Haru would offer them immortality. Ranni knew this with absolute certainty because she knew him. He would beg them to stay. He would lay his heart bare and ask them to remain by his side forever.
And most of them would refuse.
This, too, Ranni knew. Not through any prophetic vision or manipulation of fate, but because the mortal women in Haru's life had discussed it amongst themselves. Privately. In hushed conversations they believed no one else could hear.
But Ranni heard everything that happened within or near the Fox Hole.
The mortal girls had made their peace with mortality. They would love Haru with everything they possessed—every fiber of their beings, every beat of their finite hearts, every precious second of their mayfly lives—and when their time came, they would let go. Not because they loved him any less than his immortal companions, but because they understood something profound about the nature of such love.
A mortal life lived fully in his light was worth more than an eternity spent chasing a feeling that might fade.
It was beautiful, in its way. Heartbreaking and beautiful, like a flower that bloomed brightest in the moment before it wilted.
Ranni's four hands stilled in their various tasks as she contemplated the centuries to come. The millennia. The eons stretching out before her beloved like an endless road through the cosmos.
Haru—her sweet, devoted, impossibly loving Haru—would grieve. Each loss would carve new wounds into his soul, would add new weight to the burden he carried, would teach him the cruel arithmetic of immortality that she herself had learned so long ago.
That was why she was glad to see Hela and Frigga pressed against his sides. Two more immortals—or at the least, very long lived beings. Two more eternal hearts that would remain when the mortal flames guttered out. Two more shoulders for him to lean upon when the grief became too heavy, two more voices to remind him that he was not alone, two more lovers who would understand the particular ache of watching millennia pass while the worlds changed around them.
They would be there for him. For as long as he needed. For as long as forever lasted. Alongside herself and the others of course.
But that was all far off into the future!
Ranni reminded herself, forcibly pulling her thoughts back from the melancholy depths they had begun to sink toward. Haru was young yet, by immortal standards. His mortal loves were young. There would be time—decades, perhaps even centuries for some—before those partings came to pass!
For now, there were more immediate concerns.
Ranni's celestial eyes narrowed as she shifted her attention away from the intimate scene in Helheim, expanding her awareness outward across the vast tapestry of this newest universe her beloved had stumbled into. The dimensional fabric here was... different. Structured in ways that diverged significantly from the realms she was most familiar with. Multiple planes of existence layered atop one another, pocket dimensions folded into impossible geometries, and threading through it all like veins of corruption—
Ah.
There they were.
She sensed them watching. Vast, ancient intelligences that had noticed the ripples her interference was causing across their carefully ordered cosmos. Her tampering with destiny, space, fate, and time had not gone unobserved.
Celestials came first to her awareness—towering cosmic arbiters who fancied themselves gardeners of evolution, cultivating civilizations according to their own inscrutable designs.
Ranni dismissed them with a thought. The Celestials were powerful, yes, but they were also slow. Deliberate. They would observe and calculate and debate amongst themselves for centuries before taking any direct action. By then, Haru's presence would be so thoroughly woven into the fabric of this universe that removing him would cause more damage than leaving him be.
Let them watch. Let them fret. They were no threat.
Dormammu was another matter.
The dark entity's attention slithered across her awareness like oil across water—hungry, malevolent, endlessly patient. He ruled a dimension of pure entropy, a realm where time and space had been consumed by his endless appetite, and he had noticed the tears in reality that the Fox Hole's doors represented. Doorways to other universes. Doorways that might, if exploited properly, allow him to spread his corruption beyond the boundaries that currently constrained him.
Ranni allowed herself a small smile beneath her hat's shadow. Dormammu was dangerous, certainly. A genuine threat to most beings in this cosmos. But he was also bound by rules and bargains and the cosmic checks that prevented any single entity from growing too powerful. And more importantly—he was a coward at heart. A bully who preyed upon those weaker than himself and retreated the moment he encountered something that might actually challenge his supremacy.
She would deal with him if he became troublesome. For now, his hungry gaze was merely... noted.
But the third group of observers—these ones made her genuinely angry.
The Time Variance Authority.
Ranni's upper left hand curled into a fist as she examined the threads of fate surrounding that particular organization.
Mortals…
They were mortals, playing at cosmic significance with their stolen technology and their bureaucratic pretensions. They had declared themselves arbiters of the "Sacred Timeline," pruning away any deviation from their prescribed narrative, erasing entire realities that failed to conform to their vision of how things should be.
And now they had turned their attention toward Midgard. Toward the anomalies gathering there.
Toward Haru.
Toward Kunou.
The scrying spell before Ranni flickered as her power surged involuntarily. She watched through threads of fate as the TVA mobilized their forces, watched their analysts flag her beloved fox prince and his precious little sister as "variants" to be "pruned," watched them prepare their reset charges and ready their troops for attack!
They wanted to erase him. To erase Kunou.
How dare they.
HOW DARE THEY!
Ranni rose from her seated position, all four arms spreading wide as her presence expanded beyond the confines of her physical form. The study around her trembled. The floating tomes scattered. The cold tea in her forgotten cup began to boil, then evaporated entirely as the ambient temperature spiked from the sheer pressure of her awakening might.
She was Ranni the Witch. Goddess of the Age of the Stars!
Ranni opened one of her dainty blue hands, palm facing upward, fingers slightly curled. In the space above her palm, she gathered her will. Not magic, not precisely—something older than magic. Something that predated the concepts of spellcraft and sorcery. The raw, fundamental authority of a being who had transcended the limitations of her original existence and claimed dominion over forces that lesser entities could not comprehend.
Space bent around her fingers. Time shuddered. The barriers between dimensions grew thin as paper.
She reached out across the universe—across the impossible distances between galaxies, across the manufactured barriers the TVA had erected around their headquarters, across the smug certainty of mortals who believed their position outside normal time made them untouchable.
And then she closed her hand.
The force she applied was surgical in its precision and apocalyptic in its scale. A pressure equivalent to a collapsing star, focused into a space no larger than her delicate fist, delivered instantaneously to every corner of the Time Variance Authority's existence.
The headquarters imploded.
The bases throughout their manufactured dimension followed.
The agents, the analysts, the judges and the hunters and the bureaucrats who had dared—dared—to threaten her beloved and his little sister—they simply ceased to exist. Not killed, not destroyed, not pruned. Erased so completely that even the memory of their existence began to fade from the cosmic record.
It happened in less than a heartbeat. Between one moment and the next, an organization that had terrorized countless timelines for eons simply... wasn't anymore.
Ranni lowered her hand, flexing her fingers slowly as the aftershocks of her intervention rippled outward through the dimensional fabric. She felt the other watchers react—felt the Celestials recoil in what might have been surprise or alarm, felt Dormammu's hungry attention sharpen for just an instant before wisdom won out over appetite and he withdrew into his dark dimension with unseemly haste.
Others, too. Lesser cosmic entities she hadn't bothered to identify. Beings who had been curious about the anomalies on Midgard, who had perhaps been considering their own interventions.
All of them fled. All of them vanished their gazes, retreating behind whatever protections they possessed, suddenly very interested in being anywhere except under the notice of whatever had just casually annihilated a temporally-anchored organization across all points in space-time simultaneously.
Good.
Ranni settled back into her seat, four arms folding with practiced grace as she resumed her observation of Haru and his newest companions. The scrying spell stabilized, the floating tomes drifted back into their orbits, and the ambient temperature in her study slowly returned to its usual comfortable chill.
Beneath the shadow of her large, floppy white hat, the Lunar Princess smiled with quiet pride.
Let that be a lesson to any who might consider threatening what was hers!
– Haru –
…A shiver ran down my spine without warning.
The feeling vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving nothing but the faintest echo of warmth in its wake.
What the hell was that?
"Haru?" Frigga's voice pulled me back to the present. Her eyes were fixed on my face with obvious concern, and I realized my expression must have betrayed my momentary confusion. "Are you alright? You went pale."
Hela shifted closer on my other side, her own gaze studying me with an intensity that made heat creep up the back of my neck. "Did you sense something?" she asked, her voice carrying an edge of wariness. "A threat?"
I shook my head, forcing the tension out of my shoulders as I offered them both a reassuring smile. "I'm fine," I said, and was mildly surprised to realize I meant it. Whatever that sensation had been, it hadn't felt malevolent. If anything, it had felt almost... protective? "Just one of those random shivers, you know?"
Neither goddess seemed familiar with the expression, but they accepted my reassurance with varying degrees of skepticism. Frigga's fingers tightened briefly around my arm before relaxing, while Hela continued to watch me with those sharp, calculating eyes for several seconds longer than strictly necessary.
Finally, the death goddess seemed to decide I wasn't about to keel over and die on her, because she straightened and gestured toward the jagged rock formations to our north. "The teleportation circle is this way," she said, her voice taking on a businesslike quality that couldn't quite mask the undercurrent of desperate hope beneath it. "Follow me. And watch your step—some of these obsidian formations are sharper than they look."
She led us through the wasteland with the confidence of someone who had walked these paths a thousand times over. Which, I supposed, she probably had. When you were trapped in the same dead realm for over a millennium, you learned every rock, every crevice, every shadow by heart. Not because you wanted to, but because mapping your prison was the only way to convince yourself you weren't completely powerless.
"Here," Hela announced, stopping abruptly as we emerged from the stone forest into a small clearing.
I let out a low whistle of appreciation.
The teleportation circle dominated the space—a massive construct easily thirty feet in diameter, carved directly into the bedrock with painstaking precision. Intricate runes spiraled outward from a central point in patterns I didn't recognize, each symbol etched deep into the black stone with edges so sharp they still gleamed even after centuries of existence.
"You carved all of this by hand?" I asked.
I caught the way her lips curved slightly at the corners. "I had time," Hela said. "Quite a lot of it, actually. The first few decades were mostly spent raging against my imprisonment and trying to claw my way through Odin's barriers with brute force. When that failed, I decided to try something a bit more... sophisticated."
I walked closer to the circle's edge, crouching down to examine the runic work more closely. Even without any formal training in whatever magical tradition Hela had drawn from, I could appreciate the sheer craftsmanship on display.
"This is remarkable," Frigga said softly, moving to stand beside me. The Vanir goddess's eyes traced the patterns with obvious fascination, her fingers twitching slightly as though she wanted to reach out and touch the carved stone. "The underlying theory is sound—more than sound, actually. The way you've layered the dimensional piercing array with the spatial anchoring runes... I've never seen anyone combine those schools of magic quite like this! It's elegant. Truly elegant work!"
The Goddess of Death blushed. Actually blushed, her pale cheeks flushing with color as she ducked her head to hide a smile that was equal parts pleased and embarrassed. Her hands fidgeted at her sides, fingers curling and uncurling like she didn't quite know what to do with herself under the weight of genuine praise.
Something in my chest tightened at the sight.
How long had it been since anyone had complimented her? Since anyone had looked at her work and seen something worth admiring rather than fearing? A thousand years alone in this wasteland, with nothing but her own thoughts and the occasional hallucination for company, and now here was Frigga—a goddess she had every reason to view as an enemy—telling her that her desperate bid for freedom was brilliant.
I made a mental note to compliment Hela more often once we got out of here. She clearly needed it.
"Alright," I said, clapping my hands together to dispel the emotional weight settling over the clearing. "So the circle's good to go? No maintenance required after a few centuries of sitting here?"
Hela shook her head, visibly pulling herself back together. "One of the few advantages of Helheim," she said, her voice steadier now. "Nothing degrades here. No wind, no weather, no erosion. The circle is exactly as I left it." She paused, then added with a ghost of her earlier smirk, "I've been waiting a very long time to use this. I wasn't about to let a misplaced line ruin my escape."
"The work is flawless," Frigga confirmed, finishing her own inspection of the outer ring. "I can see no errors or weaknesses in the construction. The only issue is—"
"Power!" I finished for her. I moved toward the center of the circle, stepping carefully over the carved runes until I stood at the exact focal point Hela indicated. "So I just... let it rip? Channel everything into the circle and let the spell do its thing?" I asked Hela.
"Essentially, yes." Hela nodded at me and stepped closer. "The circle will draw power from whatever source it can access. You simply need to provide that source." She hesitated, then added, "Fair warning—this may feel somewhat... invasive. The spell wasn't designed with comfort in mind."
Frigga took up position at my other side. "It should all work out though… I hope."
I rolled my shoulders, letting my tails fan out behind me as I centered myself. Then I paused, glancing around the desolate landscape one final time. "You know," I said conversationally, "normally when I leave a shitty place, I'd say something like 'fuck this realm' and never look back."
Hela's eyebrow arched. "But?"
"But I can't really do that here." I caught her gaze, holding it deliberately as warmth crept into my voice. "Because if Frigga and I hadn't crash-landed in this wasteland, we never would have met such a lovely woman."
The death goddess's pale skin flushed crimson for the second time in as many minutes. She opened her mouth—probably to deliver some cutting retort about flattery—but nothing came out. Instead, she just stood there, looking thoroughly flustered and absolutely beautiful in her embarrassment.
Frigga made a soft sound that might have been a laugh, her own cheeks slightly pink as she moved to my right side. "He does have a way with words, doesn't he?"
"Infuriatingly so," Hela muttered, but she was smiling as she claimed my left arm, her fingers wrapping around my bicep with a grip that was probably tighter than strictly necessary. Frigga mirrored the position on my other side, and suddenly I had two gorgeous goddesses pressed against me once again, their bodies warm and soft and very distracting.
Focus, Haru! Interdimensional teleportation first! Cuddling later.
I closed my eyes and reached inward.
My magicules responded immediately. I could feel them swirling through my being, eager to be released, to be shaped, to be used. I let myself sink into that sensation as I began to channel energy outward.
The circle ignited.
Blue-white light erupted from every carved line, racing along the runic patterns like fire through dry kindling. The symbols blazed with power—my power—and I felt the spell structure Hela had created begin to draw from me with a hunger that was almost physical. It wasn't painful, exactly, but Hela had been right about the invasive quality. It felt like something was reaching into my very core and pulling, demanding everything I had to give.
I gave it.
More power flowed out of me, and more, and more. The light intensified until I could see it even through my closed eyelids, until the entire clearing was bathed in brilliance that drove back Helheim's eternal grey for the first time in millennia. The ground beneath our feet began to vibrate, then to shake, then to rumble with the force of magic being channeled on a scale this dead realm had never witnessed.
I felt the moment the spell hit Odin's barriers.
It was like running headfirst into a wall made of pure spite—ancient magic layered upon ancient magic, reinforced over centuries by a god who had very much wanted to keep his shameful secret buried. The barriers pushed back against the teleportation spell, trying to contain it, trying to smother it, trying to keep us trapped in this prison forever.
I pushed harder. Fuck you, asshole! You're not even close to powerful enough to trap a Demon Lord!
The barriers cracked!
Hela gasped beside me—it was a disbelieving sound that was almost a sob. I could feel her grip on my arm tighten to the point of bruising, could feel Frigga doing the same on my other side, both of them clinging to me as reality itself began to buckle and tear around us.
And then we were moving.
The sensation was nothing like the Bifrost. This was rawer. Wilder. We weren't traveling through a prepared pathway—we were punching through the fabric of reality itself, tearing a hole between Helheim and Asgard through sheer overwhelming force!
I wondered where exactly in Asgard we were going to end up? Mostly because I couldn't wait to see Odin's face again so I could punch it in!
XXX