"There are many beautiful places in heaven and everywhere there has divine protection round it."

Given the number of stories, the past couple years, with Hades and/or Persephone as protagonist plus the increased mining of Norse mythology for inspiration, I can only hope that soon we'll get Hel as the heroine of her own tale. Maybe not the fluffy romance she deserves, but anything would be good. After all, with a childhood spent as the little sister of Fenris and Jormungand, she deserves to star in a nice wacky comedy.

Though there's other possibilities. From the Glyfaginning section of Snorri's Edda (translated by Anthony Faulkes):

"There stands there one beautiful hall under the ash [Yggdrasil] by the well [in Asgard], and out of this hall come three maidens whose names are Weird [Urd], Verdandi, Skuld. These maidens shape men's lives. We call them norns. There are also other norns who visit everyone when they are born to shape their lives, and these are of divine origin, though others are of the race of elves, and a third group are of the race of dwarves, as it says here:

Of very diverse parentage I think the norns are, they do not have a common ancestry. Some are descended from Æsir, some are descended from elves, some are daughters of Dvalin."

Then spoke Gangleri: "If norns determine the fates of men, they allot terribly unfairly, when some have a good and prosperous life, and some have little success or glory, some a long life, some short."

High said: "Good norns, ones of noble parentage, shape good lives, but as for those people that become the victims of misfortune, it is evil norns who are responsible."

I note that while valkyries are not yet overused in urban fantasy, if you start writing one now, they likely will be by the time it's published -- but no one (outside of Japan) has been using norns. (Not that the distinction is hard-and-fast: the youngest norn, Skuld, rides with two valkyries to help choose who will be slain in battles.)

Just in case anyone was needing inspiration.

---L.