The edges of the room turn dark, and suddenly Hel is standing before a roaring hearth. The human side of her face is beautiful in the firelight but the deathly side is full of shadows; they flicker in her hollow eye socket and curl around her empty jaw. She stares into the flames as she speaks: ‘The gods found me so loathsome to look upon, they cast me down here.’

‘But I thought … So who made you queen?’

My eyes jolt open and I’m back in the hole, my knees to my chest. Alone. I was dreaming or having some kind of vision … Something crawls over my leg and I flick away a beetle. The ground is writhing with insects. Panting hard, I grip my valknut charm to stop my panic. I have to get back there.

Drumming pounds in my ears. I listen to the steady beat, close my eyes and let myself be taken.

This time I see Hel wearing a glorious gown of shining dark feathers, a gleaming black crown on her head. At last I understand: Hel wrote her own story.

‘No one made you queen. You made yourself queen.’

She smiles and pulls an axe from the folds of her cloak. ‘To kill the draugr, you must sever its head from its body with a single, clean blow.’

I crane my neck upward, my legs weak beneath me. How am I meant to kill that thing? Everyone who’s taken a stand against it has died – it killed Yrsa and Olav, and they had a gun. I only escaped before because my ancestors protected me.

Hel holds the axe out to me, and a deep sound – ‘Nau-dizzz’ – reverberates in my head as a rune symbol draws itself onto the blade: a vertical line, crossed by a diagonal one. Hel runs the edge of the weapon across her fleshy palm, and I wince at the ooze of red. She makes a fist above the blade, and blood drips onto the markings. The symbol absorbs the blood and glows white, pulsating with energy. I want to ask what the rune means, but I push the question away, afraid to ask in case I wake to find myself back in the hole.

Hel notices me staring at the axe and smiles knowingly. ‘Day and night, life and death, joy and pain … there cannot be one without the other. Where there is thread, there is a blade. The knife cuts the umbilical cord; without it there is no life. At the end, the Norn’s shears cut the silver cord.’