"Sister."
Thor sat on Odin's throne, Gungnir in his hand.
It was Odin's divine weapon, and also a symbol of the throne of Asgard.
"I've done a pretty good job tidying the place up."
Thor even had the leisure to chat with Hela. He glanced at the new murals overhead. "I see you've redecorated."
"Those aren't new." Hela smiled. "Unlike Odin, I don't solve every problem by covering it up."
Thor nodded at that. "Or banishing it."
That remark darkened Hela's expression.
As Asgard's greatest contributor, Hela had been banished just when she should have received everything.
Thor had learned quite a few ways to get under people's skin from Tony. This was one of them.
"He said you were one of a kind," Thor said with a shrug. "He told me the same thing."
"You see, you don't know him at all, not even what he was like in his prime." Hela laughed in anger. "Odin and I drowned the entire world in blood and tears."
"How do you think all this splendor came to be?"
Hela had once been a little girl too. No one was born evil.
The father she had so admired had built her a brutal, merciless view of the world.
Yet just before everything was about to come to fruition, he had chosen a completely different path.
"He decided to become a benevolent emperor, to embrace virtue and bring comfort to his people." A fleeting sheen of tears crossed Hela's eyes, while mockery and disdain rose on her face. "And then he had you."
A sister he had never met, and a child raised in the warmth of his parents' love.
Listening to Hela, Thor understood where all that resentment had begun.
A warrior Odin had shaped with his own hands had been banished