They told him that she'd never wake up again. They'd wrapped her in the wolf skins to warm her back up, and she hadn't responded. She didn't respond to anything. Touching her felt like touching frostbite and the tears wouldn't stop falling down her cheeks. She never ran out of tears. They turned to ice and joined the snow. Then she made new ones. Sometimes she moved a little here or there, but she didn't know she was moving. She wasn't really there anymore. His wife had buried herself inside a weeping ice sculpture to escape the cold and she couldn't get out. Bragi couldn't stand to see it, and he couldn't stand to look away. He just wanted to touch her and feel something warm. He couldn't.
Maybe if they'd gotten down there sooner she would have recovered, but the journey had taken so long. Niflheim was very far away, and Idun was much farther. She looked so sad. She'd seen things no one alive should see, and so she'd stopped being alive anymore. When she'd seen the dead, she'd joined them, and there was nothing that even Heimdall could do. Bragi hadn't known there was something Heimdall couldn't do.
They told him that she'd never wake up again. So Bragi had told them they could go. It had been seven days since then. He sometimes managed to get her to swallow water or tiny slivers of apple. Sometimes he tried to play her music, but he never managed to sound one note. She was too cold. He was too sad. They didn't want music. Mostly, Bragi just lay beside her. He didn't see any of the horrors she'd seen, because she was the only thing he saw. She was horrifying enough. He shivered and it was never due to the cold. But he couldn't imagine being anywhere else. Idun lay frozen in Niflheim. Niflheim was home.
The day that Idun gasped for air was the same day that “mostly” became “only.” Bragi had stopped doing anything else. If she was going to be that cold forever, he wanted to be as cold as she was. He could. For the first time, Bragi closed his eyes and kept them that way. He heard silence where the music should be. Idun heard more than that. She heard nothing. Bragi was starting to hear it too, when suddenly he heard the gasp. It was the sweetest sound he'd ever heard. He opened his eyes and saw hers again.
He reached forward and touched her cheek. It felt warmer than his hand. “There you are,” Bragi said with a smile. The grin grew and a few tears ran down his cheek, but they weren't sad ones. He removed his hand and used it to push the wolf skin she'd put on him away, and begin retucking it under her. He couldn't ever let her get that cold again.