Hati + Sköll- Angrboða
It is a rare day in a year that Hati and Sköll can spend together.
The twins are hardly ever together now that they spend their lives chasing opposite ends of the day. When they were pups, every minute was shared, but no longer. Hati cannot stand the sunlight anymore than Sköll can stand the moon, so they only come together in the twilight, passing an hour in the grey light where Sol is too weak to harm, and Mani has not yet risen.
In the Iron Wood, it is always twilight.
They walk together, shoulder to shoulder, down paths worn only by wolf feet. A wealth of wolf children live in these woods, but they are princes, gold and silver shod, those rare days they can return.
An age of the Tree has passed since they were pups, but they remember the road home.
Angrboða waits for them in the deepwood, where the trollwives wove the trees together and grew a palace for themselves. The wolf halls cradle their occupants as Yggdrasil holds the worlds within its branches.
They turn the corner and home unfolds before them. Angrboða sees them from her seat at the door and smiles, waves. They are puppies again as they sprint the final stretch and into her open arms.
“Welcome home,” she whispers to them as they all scramble to be closer.
Little Nis- Llamrei
Nis lived her youngest years with her father in the ocean, but she was never a creature born for the open water. She pined for the flow of a river, the still depth of the lochs, in a way Jörmungandr could not understand.
So he let her go. She never loved him more.
Now she lives in the loch that was Hengroen’s before he outgrew it and fled to the northern sea. He gave guardianship of his beloved home willingly to his not-daughter.
She does not see him often. Her blood-father not at all.
Llamrei visits Nis every year, though it has been centuries since they lived together. Nis remembers Llamrei as a soft muzzle and the sweet taste of milk, but brief, barely a whisper of memory in the years of her life that have passed since those few early days.
They make up for it now, in small doses. They are strangers, so they take the days they share to know each other again. It is slow- Llamrei and Nis are very different creatures- but they work at it.
Today, something like a century after they met again, Nis is the one to travel the miles on hoof to her mother’s river. She watches the white mare raise herself from the water, bright as sunlight, and wonders if she might be as beautiful when she is grown.
“I heard today is a day for mothers,” Nis says as greeting, and laughs in delight when her mother smiles.
Leviathan- Aglaope
Leviathan thinks it’s a poor excuse for an idea, but he has never been able to say no to his tiny sister. Nis thinks it will help, visiting again after so long. It worked for her after all.
He never told her, but she knows his childhood was less than pleasant. She sees the scars that carve him up, nose to tail, stretched with age and growth. She sees the way he flinches away from the hunting boats, calls the storm in vindictive fury. She hears his silence, because he never learned to control the mesmer laced into his voice.
Nis tells him to try going home. Leviathan promises to try, nothing more.
It takes him centuries to find the courage.
The Siren’s Rock is still there, though it has been devoid of life for longer than the new world around it has existed. Leviathan hauls himself out of the water in his golden form as he had done ages past, now full grown and the grief of then now dull with age. From the highest point of the rock, where his mother sat long ago, he looks out over the water and wonders what he might say to her if she was here with him now.
He has no words. They were never his strong point.
Here though, he thinks he can catch the last whispers of her song where it clings to the rock. He listens, tries to recall how she sounded before the Argo stole them all away.
The Mediterranean rings with siren song for the first time in centuries.
Hel- children of Helheim
Hel was never meant to be a mother, her double nature had seen to that. She never wished to be a mother, despite her youth amongst the ásynjur who wished nothing more than to be wives and mothers. When she was still young enough to be naive, Hel aspired to be like Sif, strong and independent despite the nay saying æsir.
Queen of nine realms now, Hel is as strong as she ever wished to be, and doesn’t afford Sif a crumb of recognition. Hel did not learn to be the woman she is from Sif, the tag along who spat on her like every other ásynja. She learned from her mother, Angrboða.
Every day, every hour, Móðguðr guides the young spirits to her gates, and Hel welcomes the little ones to their final home. Some are so small they do not know how to be. They appear as ghost lights, wisps so small she can cup in her hands. Others are older, able to hold their forms, but they crowd together, weeping for parents who cannot hear them this side of the Gjallarbrú.
Hel is mother to them all until she can bring their families together again. With many, it will never happen. Valhöll and Fólkvangr will steal away a few, but Hel’s divided families have darker origins. Unwanted, unloved, unneeded children will find no respite from that title even in Hel, if Hel herself will not be the one to do it.
So Hel is queen, and Hel is mother, though she never really meant to be either. They are equal titles in her mind.
Fenrir/Jörmungandr/Hel- Angrboða
None of Angrboða’s children visit her.
Her sons are lost to her, one cast down to Midgard, where she cannot go, the other bound in Asgard, where even a mother’s right and rage would not protect her. Her daughter, a queen of nine realms all her own, is just as out of reach.
Hel won’t leave her halls for less than a death. She escorts her family to the gates personally. Angrboða saw her last when Járnviðja, Fenrir’s erstwhile partner, passed on in the quiet of the Ironwood. Angrboða’s only daughter had barely a word to spare for her mother as she gathered the released spirit to her: a word, a greeting, an acknowledgement.
“Mother.”
Hel spares her words like her father sews them. Angrboða knows the importance of a title on her daughter’s lips.
Jörmungandr is the one to take after his father, a creature of mischief and magic, and a spirit so vibrant he needs a form large enough to contain it. He sends her messages when he can, little tales of Midgard, his travels, the quirky little mortals there. Sometimes she hears of his children, and wonders wistfully if she will ever meet them.
There are no such notes from Fenrir. They have not spoken in so long, since he was barely out of being a pup, still stringy with growth, and eager with the knowledge of his own impending fatherhood. He never got to raise his pups. Angrboða did that for him, for her chained son and his lost Járnviðja. Hati and Sköll have grown well. Fenrir would have been proud.
Sleipnir- Loki
Sleipnir has been the pride of Odin’s stables for as long as he has lived there. They call him the king of horses, now he has reached his full growth, the immortal father of generations of his kind. Intelligent, perfectly behaved... most days.
Today he kicks down the door of his stall and lets himself free.
Mother isn’t here. Mother hasn’t been here for a while now, but Sleipnir runs the fields where he learned to manage his legs under her watchful eye, where they played, just the two of them. Swift as thunder across the plains he runs, remembering the first time he outpaced Mother, so fast, so far ahead he could barely hear her calling him to return to her when he finally stopped.
His hooves hit the fractured light of the Bifrost. Sleipnir doesn’t stop until he reaches the shattered end where Heimdall stands. The AllSeer doesn’t question his presence, merely steps aside.
Mother doesn’t wait for him anymore. She fell, but she landed on her feet worlds away from him. Now, she runs ahead, farther than Sleipnir has been, from world to world out to the very leaf tips of Yggdrasil’s highest branches.
Standing on the edge, peering out into the void that took his mother, Sleipnir calls as loudly as he ever has. Asgard echoes with the horse lord’s voice.
He calls for Mother to come home, and he waits.
Loki- Frigg
There is no day for mothers in Asgard, but that does not mean Æsir children do not honour their mothers. They simply do not restrict it to one day.
Frigg saves every gift her children give her, be they trinkets displayed around her chambers or a gift of words she tucks close to her heart. She is rich in both, and loves her children dearly for it.
When he was young, Loki was not as much a one for words as he grew to be. He was sharp as they came in his lessons, but private words always tripped on his tongue, and embarrassed him when they emerged garbled. Instead, Loki left his mother little gifts where he knew she would find them.
Frigg has a collection of tiny wooden animals, their inexpert edges rubbed smooth with age; sea glass etched with runes that are half faded now; little bouquets of herbs long dry but still sweetly scented. They all sit around the mirror of her dressing table where she can see them every day. Ninety three in total: she counts them every day. The number hasn’t changed in an age.
After Loki falls, she forgets to count, lost in memorising the shape of every one with her fingertips because her eyes swim with tears until the whole world is a blur.
In the stretching weeks of Loki’s absence, number ninety four appears.
Frigg never notices.