The Bounds of Hel

I hit the water and I sank like a rock. I didn’t float. I was surprised. I was a good swimmer, I could surf, but no matter how I thrashed I sank and sank and sank and sank. I looked down to the blackness below me, and then up towards the receding light.

“Alex...” I thought, my lungs pushing and pulling against themselves, involuntarily telling me to breath. I fought to keep my mouth clamped shut. “This is what Alex felt like.”



As I fell downward, I looked up at the bottom of the boats in their cruel formation, Loki’s graceful longboat surrounded by the angular shapes of the boats that had pursued us. Even in my distressed I noticed them edging closer and closer to his boat, and dark bodies move across gaps in the water as they jumped into the long boat.

And down I sank, further and further, fighting not to breath, fighting for breath, thrashing to find the surface. The pressure of the water and the depth crushed my chest, and finally, after an eternal struggle, in one great sigh all the air I had been fighting to keep bubbled out of my lungs taunting me as they floated to the surface in a way that I had wanted to so badly. I stretched out a hand to catch one, like it would do me some good.

And then suddenly, instead of sinking through water I was falling through nothingness. There was air in that nothingness, my lungs knew it and I took a deep breath, inhaling and exhaling, catching my breath, recovering as if I had just finished a long, hard run.

And then there was a sharp thud as I hit the sandy, gravelly floor of the tunnel Loki had whispered to me about.

“Run.”

I blinked in the dark.

“Run!” his voice echoed in my head.

I picked myself up off the floor. I was bruised and scraped from the fall, but there was no permanent, long healing damage. The light in the tunnel was dim, barely enough to see, but speaking hope to me. If there was no exit, I reasoned, there would be no light. Light meant an end. The escape. The bounds of Hel.

“Ready, set, go” I whispered to myself harshly.

And then with everything inside of me, I took off running towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

“Run, Run, Run.” my heartbeat pounded out.

My legs matched the pace of it, occasionally stumbling over rocks and gravel, and I tore as fast as I could down the wide cavern, always watching carefully for the glow in the direction I was going, noticing that it was growing brighter and brighter.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark and my ears had adjusted to the thump of my heartbeat in them as I pounded out an unmanageable and unsustainable pace set purely by adrenaline.

I felt sick, my legs were heavy, and I wanted to throw up but everything in me knew I needed to keep running, to keep running or be caught. Surely someone was down there by now, in the caverns under Hel, the last escape out of it, known only to a few very old, and very secretive few, Loki included.

At first, I thought I imagined the flash of light behind me, but the second time I saw it I turned back and saw three headlamps bobbing after me in the dark, growing larger as they got closer and closer to me, tiny points of light rising like the stars in the evening.

For a half a second I thought I could outrun them, in my soaked clothes and wet shoes, dripping hair, but I saw them get closer and closer until they could shout at me.


“Stop right there.” they hollered at me breathlessly. 

The tunnel was getting brighter. I knew I was getting close. I kept running with everything I had in me, willing my body to go on.

“We will not hesitate to take you down!” they shouted in warning. “Stop right there.”

I was so close, I knew it. I could see the rocks and pebbles outlined in a shadow now, the dim light growing brighter. I wove around them instead of stumbling over them, speeding up my run.

Their headlights bobbed closer, casting my shadow out long and thin before me, black ribbons on the cavern walls. I could hear their breath behind me, and the crunch of gravel below mine. I sped up. They sped up.

And suddenly, surprisingly the thing I had anticipated happened. One of them lunged towards me, wrapping his arms around me and pushing me towards the ground.

All of our velocity and momentum tangled, and we both went flying onto the floor of the tunnel, my body landing, and my head snapping against a rock, the pain of the pavement coursing through my body again for the first time since I died.

I remembered.

Then, I convulsed, shook, and everything went black.