> Spoiler warning: This article describes major events through The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook, including Hekla's death, and later consequences through The Eye of the Bedlam Bride.
Katia Grim and Hekla were fellow Icelandic crawlers whose relationship began as one of rescue, protection, and group belonging before becoming coercive and ultimately lethal. Hekla brought Katia into Brynhild's Daughters during the early dungeon, and Katia sincerely credited her with saving her life. After the Third Floor separated the Daughters, Hekla arranged for Carl and Princess Donut to protect and train Katia. That intervention helped Katia survive and develop into a capable crawler, but it also allowed Hekla to retain influence over her from a distance.
Their bond collapsed during the Fourth Floor rescue at Station 101. Hekla welcomed Katia back as one of her “lost” followers, then secretly shot her with ammunition designed to hide both the attack and the shooter's responsibility for a possible death. When the deception was exposed, Hekla treated it as a tactical mistake rather than a betrayal. Katia subsequently used Rush against Eva, missed her intended target, and killed Hekla by accident. The sequence permanently separated Katia from the Daughters and transformed a relationship Katia had understood as protective into one of the central betrayals of her dungeon experience.
Protection within Brynhild's Daughters
Katia's connection to Hekla was mediated by both Brynhild's Daughters and Katia's pre-collapse friend Eva. Katia and Eva had known one another through the university in Reykjavík, while Hekla had known Eva longer and had been her psychiatrist. The novels do not establish a similarly close pre-collapse relationship between Katia and Hekla. Their meaningful bond formed after the collapse, when Katia and Eva joined Hekla's growing all-female crawler group.
A later dungeon broadcast shows the vulnerable position from which Katia entered that organization. She initially clung to Eva and hid behind her during fights. When a male crawler grabbed Katia after Hekla ordered him to leave the group, Eva stabbed him and unexpectedly killed him. The incident gave Eva a player-killer skull and helped establish the Daughters as Katia's source of protection. Katia later summarized the result more simply: she told Donut that Hekla was amazing and had saved her life. The books never identify one definitive event as the rescue Katia meant, so her statement is best understood as her judgment of Hekla's protection during the early floors rather than proof of a particular unseen scene.
Hekla's party offered real advantages. Its size gave isolated women allies, pooled skills, and access to a highly ranked leader. It also reinforced Hekla's personal combat power. Her repeating crossbow gained damage and firing speed for every woman in her party, up to thirty members. Nothing establishes that Hekla recruited Katia solely to strengthen the weapon, but the mechanic made the group's protective mission and Hekla's power materially inseparable: every additional Daughter expanded the community while making its leader more formidable.
Separation on the Third Floor
The transition to the Third Floor scattered the Daughters because they had entered the dungeon separately and returned to different game guides for race and class selection. Katia and Eva reached character creation together, but Eva completed the process first and left while Katia was still transforming into a Doppelganger. Eva later rejoined Hekla. Katia, left behind and poorly prepared to use her new body, reached Carl and Donut at only level nine.
Hekla learned Katia's approximate location and used a joint appearance on Danger Zone with Ripper Wonton to ask Carl and Donut for help. She described Katia as one of the Daughters, asked them to assist her leveling, and said she would regard it as a personal favor. When Katia reached the One-Eyed Narwhal, she already knew about Carl and Donut's interview from Hekla and expected Hekla to contact them. Hekla therefore remained the organizer of Katia's safety even though the two could not reunite directly.
The arrangement changed Katia's prospects. Carl, Donut, and Mordecai helped her understand the mass and transformation mechanics of her Doppelganger race. She rose from level nine to level twenty-one before the floor ended and became a full member of the Royal Court of Princess Donut. Hekla's request was thus genuinely beneficial, but it also placed Katia between two groups. Katia liked her new companions while continuing to regard the Daughters as her original home, and Carl initially expected that she would leave as soon as she had a chance to rejoin Hekla.
Hekla's interest in the arrangement extended beyond Katia's welfare. Odette warned Carl that Hekla had become preoccupied with recruiting Donut. According to conversations Odette had monitored between Hekla and her former game guide, Hekla considered Carl unstable but wanted Donut and the access to Mordecai that came with her. Odette explicitly said she did not believe Katia was knowingly involved. This distinction is important: Katia was both a beneficiary of Hekla's help and an unwitting channel through which Hekla learned about the Royal Court.
Influence at a distance
Katia maintained frequent contact with Hekla during the Iron Tangle. The connection provided useful intelligence about the railway, including how monsters moved through stations and where other groups had found similar rooms or possible system exploits. Katia passed information in both directions, allowing separated teams to compare observations about a floor designed to prevent crawlers from understanding its full structure.
Hekla also shaped Katia's perception of her new party. She repeatedly warned Katia that Carl was reckless and likely to get her killed. When Katia discovered that Donut had discarded a player-killer coupon bearing Carl's name, Hekla explained that Donut should have received one coupon for every party member. That information caused Katia to fear that Donut might still possess a coupon with Katia's name on it. The concern had a legitimate mechanical basis, but it placed suspicion inside the Royal Court while Hekla was trying to draw Donut away from Carl.
At the same time, Hekla cultivated Donut's admiration. When Donut asked through Katia about one of Hekla's combat moves, Hekla named it the “Donut Kick.” The gesture cost Hekla nothing and strengthened Donut's image of her as a heroic shieldmaiden. Katia therefore served as more than a messenger: her trust connected Hekla to Donut while giving Hekla a credible route for warnings and flattering attention.
Reunion and the Station 101 mission
Hekla finally arrived at the Royal Court's personal space with roughly thirty Daughters. She thanked Carl for doing more than merely keeping Katia alive, acknowledging that he had taught her how to use her abilities. She nevertheless spoke of Katia as “my girl” and a “lost little lamb” whom the group had come to collect. Katia was visibly uncertain. Her attachment to the Daughters had not disappeared, but leaving the Royal Court would also dismantle shared personal-space upgrades and end the partnership through which she had grown stronger.
The reunion was tied to a genuine emergency. More than a thousand crawlers, including Li Jun's group, were trapped near Station 101 while ghoul hordes approached. Hekla's people had captured a Vermillion Line train and attached a second engine so it could reverse after collecting the survivors, but its front could not safely clear the mass of bodies on the track. Katia proposed using her own transformed body as a reinforced plow.
Carl initially believed Hekla was treating Katia as disposable, but Katia corrected him: the idea was hers. She had already widened her storage apparatus, added more metal and rubber to her available mass, and considered how to insulate herself from the third rail. Her reason was personal as well as tactical. Hekla had brought the entire group to recover her, which Katia described as more than anyone had ever done for her. The moment demonstrates both Katia's agency and the emotional leverage Hekla's return created. Katia freely designed the plan, yet her willingness to accept extraordinary danger was bound to her need to believe that the Daughters had come back because she mattered to them.
Katia remained in the Royal Court's party for the operation. Hekla accepted the arrangement with visible irritation, while Carl and Donut joined her and Eva in the lead engine. Hekla contributed the train, route knowledge, and leadership; Katia formed the plow; Carl helped refine and insulate it; and Hekla and Donut fired on ghouls caught by Katia's spikes. The plan broke through the horde and reached the stranded crawlers. Hekla's later betrayal does not erase her role in that rescue, nor does the rescue make the concealed attack less deliberate.
Concealed attack and exposed manipulation
During the run, Katia's health began dropping much faster than collisions and electrical shocks could explain. Silfa, the Daughters' healer, initially waited for Hekla's permission to heal her and later withdrew after Eva told her to stop. Donut's enhanced vision revealed that Hekla had mixed two invisible Dirty Little Phased Bolts into her ordinary fire and shot Katia while Katia's transformed body covered the train.
The bolts were designed for covert crawler attacks. They hid themselves and their entry wounds, caused temporary amnesia, and inflicted a bleed effect that could reduce the victim to the edge of death while disguising the shooter's responsibility. Carl found and removed both bolts, and Donut attacked Hekla when she understood what had happened. Hekla halted the broader fight, called her decision a mistake, and argued that the groups should reset and continue cooperating. She did not give Katia an honest account of the plan.
Eva supplied the clearest admission. She told Katia that the Daughters had used her to provoke Carl's famous temper and claimed they had not intended to let her die. Hekla tried to stop Eva from saying more. Silfa later revealed that Hekla had stationed Silfa's biological daughters outside the engine cab with orders to kill Carl first if anything went wrong. Combined with Odette's earlier warning that Hekla wanted Donut and Mordecai but not Carl, the evidence supports Carl's conclusion that Katia's apparent death was meant to trigger a violent response that could be used against him.
The complete intended sequence is never confessed. It is therefore not established that every detail of Carl's reconstruction was correct, or that Hekla personally planned to kill Katia rather than bring her close enough to death to manipulate Carl. What is explicit is sufficient: Hekla deliberately shot Katia with concealed, potentially fatal ammunition; the bolts were intended to hide culpability; Katia was being used as bait; and armed Daughters had contingency orders against Carl.
Hekla's death
Katia awakened with little memory of the attack and at first defended Hekla, assuming that any shot must have been accidental. As the truth emerged, Hekla remained detached while Eva ordered Katia to return to the Daughters and mocked the most painful parts of her pre-collapse life. Eva also revealed that she had deliberately abandoned Katia during Third Floor character creation.
Katia activated Rush against Eva. The ability did not always move in a perfectly straight line, and this use veered off target. Katia missed Eva by inches and struck Hekla instead, driving the second-ranked crawler into the train wall and killing her. The killing was accidental: Katia had aimed at Eva, and the narrative explicitly attributes the collision to Rush's unpredictable angle. Katia nevertheless received Hekla's bounty, rose from level twenty-four to level thirty-seven after the mission, and acquired a distinctive golden player-killer skull.
The immediate aftermath made Katia the legal beneficiary and public culprit of Hekla's death. She looted Hekla's unique crossbow and later wielded it at reduced strength because her party lacked the Daughters' numbers. Eva automatically became leader, but members who distrusted her began leaving. Katia had killed the person who had once protected her, inherited the weapon around which Hekla had organized the Daughters, and helped precipitate the group's collapse without intending any of those outcomes.
Aftermath for Katia
Dungeon programming recast the confrontation as a simpler revenge story. A recap special juxtaposed Katia's early dependence with Hekla's rise, then edited Katia's final Rush as a deliberate killing after she learned she had been used. Katia immediately objected that the program had made her appear bloodthirsty. The broadcast removed the accident at the center of the event while preserving the emotionally convenient image of a follower turning on her leader.
Katia did not recover from the relationship by merely recognizing Hekla's deception. On the Fifth Floor, she compared another forceful crawler to Hekla and observed that Hekla had at least pretended to be supportive. In the same conversation, Katia said she had resolved not to accept mistreatment any longer. Her judgment shows that she had reinterpreted Hekla's encouragement as conditional, but also that the experience helped her recognize similar power dynamics elsewhere.
The unresolved parts of the betrayal continued through Eva. Near the end of the Sixth Floor, Katia blamed herself for the later people Eva had killed, thinking that Eva would not have had the opportunity if Katia had struck her rather than Hekla on the train. That guilt depended on the accident: Katia had not chosen to spare Eva or kill Hekla, but she treated the unintended result as a moral failure. By the Eighth Floor, Carl read Katia's squad flag as depicting Hekla and Eva side by side with marks across their faces, showing that both women remained linked in the identity Katia projected in combat.
Katia and Hekla's relationship consequently cannot be reduced to either rescue or abuse alone. Hekla's intervention helped Katia survive, and their final shared operation saved a large population of crawlers. Hekla also exploited the trust created by that protection, using Katia's gratitude, insecurity, and loyalty as tactical assets. Katia's development after Hekla's death rests in part on learning to distinguish being needed from being valued—a distinction Hekla's leadership had deliberately blurred.