The being greeting him (St. Brendan) at first appears to be Jesus ("You’ve got to be kidding," says Jake) and then an angel, and tells him every deceased person experiences the afterlife according to the expectations formed while alive.

At first finding it interesting, he eventually realizes its inhabitants are locked in an endless series of revels as they wearily await a Ragnarok that never comes.

On their way back from the underworld, Jake and Freya inadvertently trigger Ragnarok when they encounter Sigyn and disrupt her age-old mission to relieve the suffering of her husband, the god Loki.

In the aftermath, Brendan and Mala, who had teamed up to monitor the situation, find themselves tapped to become the first human couple on the renewed Midgard, while Jake and Freya become deities.

The mission of Sigyn disrupted by the protagonists is explored by Parks in his earlier short story "The Trickster's Wife" (2001), in which it is revealed that Loki's spouse is actively thwarting the sequence of events leading to Ragnarok as an act of vengeance against both her husband and the other Norse deities.