Tap. Tap. Tap.

Kiera’s plated gauntlet taps the display of her tablet in between the various messengers and couriers coming in and out of the medical and office center, where Kiera has deployed her fellow sisters in a field operations camp. She’s exhausted, bruised, bloodied, still in her armor, and still unable to comprehend what she has witnessed in the last few days alone.

The Talons have become a formidable force. Not only are they fielding competent mercenaries, but some are ex-SAF. They are well trained and well armed, and they had been giving her a tough time in their field operations where she had explicitly taken ‘vacation’ from her cover job to take care of herself.

Then, while she had a breather in the field, she’d gotten a frantic call from James, who spilled the beans that not only had Julia ignored her–and Levine as well–but that they were in the fight of their lives in the Asqualia Research Center, and that the coordinated attacks at no less than five other teleportal platforms across the world had been a diversion to give cover to that one assault. That there is vital information stored in the archives that could change the world.

She had brought everyone she could spare, and probably a few she couldn’t, and beelined it home, tore through the closed library, and laid waste to every Talons mercenary who didn’t immediately surrender to the Valkyries on their ingress in. Many had chosen the hard way and joined their fellow mercenaries in the grave. That sight, of seeing her daughter bloodstained, out of breath, surrounded by her friends, holding off an army, proved too much for her.

Her daughter was never supposed to follow in her footsteps. She was never meant for this, but yet, she was so much like her, drawn to a higher calling beyond being a warrior. A defender of good. A Luminaire, as she’d called it.

“Kiera, keep tapping that tablet that hard, and you’ll put a hole right through it.” She grumbles audibly; emotion and fatigue have taken their toll on her mood, and she turns to look at Levine, also thoroughly beaten up and with numerous bandages on his cheek, nose, and both arms. He’s not exactly in a laughing mood, either. “I told you I’d look after her. I looked after all of them.”

“You shouldn’t have been there, Levine,” she says warily, all while scrolling through what little data they had on the attack. Even with the hit to the head, Levine is refusing to stand down and has been barking orders to what SAF personnel he has confidence in. “You should have called us. You should have called me.”

“We did. The Talons had a competent jammer enchantment as soon as they entered the facility. Curtis also disabled the wireless communications in the hours preceding the attack and timed it so no one would know until it was too late.”

“I’m not talking about why you were unable to call us during. I’m talking about before. When the Talons hit town earlier, you should have called then and there. I would have barnstormed home to stop Julia–”

Levine laughs softly and winces at the motion. She glares at him, his gray-streaked hair is filthy from…some deplorable monster’s innards? It’s repulsive. Plus everything else he’d been showered in, from blood, to debris. “You find this funny?”

“No, Kiera, I don’t. I find it very unfunny that you told her not a damn thing about what you do, like you couldn’t trust your daughter.” He rubs the grime off his face with a clean cloth, as if it’s not been something worth bothering with until now. “I even said it earlier yesterday. How we need to be honest with our children with our work. I always let Mystra know what it is I do, and the risks I took. She never tried to dissuade me. She always would respond, ‘My daddy is a super soldier, who’s saving lives with his wits behind a desk.’ At least, it was a truth I knew that she and my wife could live with.”

His eyes glance down when he throws the rag away, and he pulls out a picture from his wallet. A picture of his wife, and Mystra–bouncing brown hair, both of them. Becky, his former wife has brown eyes, while little Mystra, with the chipped smile and a missing tooth from the tender age of seven, has hazel eyes, like him. He spends more than a good long moment, looking at that precious memento, and lets out a soft exhale. “Kiera, as much as we try…sometimes, our kids want to be just like us. Even though we want a better life for them, compared to the ones we lived.”

She glances down, eyes narrowed, and tenses her finger on the tablet. More reports come in from the team at Asqualia–more survivors had been holed up in the labs, and a few had managed to hide in the caves when the fighting started that had been recovered. But the casualties…are high. The Talons…are extreme. And she cannot focus on this at all. “What you did was put my daughter at grave risk," she says in a stern tone.

“Just like you lied to her, and put her at grave risk? You knew this day was coming. I warned you about it. I pleaded with you to tell her the truth. Are you surprised she’s a little resentful, a little pissed off?” She turns to glance at him, while he rubs at his wrist. Plentiful bruises cover his milano skin, and he grunts. “Kiera…she’s just like her father. I can see that, plain as day. And she’s just like Drenar. Those two held off monsters and madmen. They killed. They bled. They almost died protecting the lives of a hundred personnel of ARC. We dropped the ball as adults, and they had to fight a fight that they should never have had to.”

She closes her eyes and shakes her head. Levine is always logical, and he’s not wrong. She just wants him to be wrong on this particular one. “They’re not doing anything after this–”

“You still presume that it’s in your hands? That she can’t make decisions for herself? Well, she did. She, James, Drenar, Angela, and the others. They faced down an army, and won. I know where her heart is taking her. And I know it’s someplace you don’t want her to go. But, we as parents need to know when to protect them…and when to prepare them for the world ahead. The latter of those two…can be such a bitter pill to swallow.”

A timer goes off on his wristwatch, and he reaches into a vest pocket on his now weathered armor, and grabs a dermal injector made out of cold steel cladding and plastic molding, and a glass canister filled with a clear liquid attached. He makes a fist as he injects it and the solution goes to work, and he lets out a soft gasp. After a moment, he winces and uncurls his fist, flexing it gently.

“You didn’t take it earlier, did you?” He’s slow to respond, and shakes his head, a far away gaze conveniently aimed out at the commons room, before he turns to her.

“Twenty-five years. I’ve taken this stuff for twenty-five years. I’ve kept it at bay. It took five minutes to make a mistake, once. I won’t ever do that again.” He rubs at the swelling of an angry injury on his arm–a bolt had skimmed dangerously close by, and he checks the field dressing. It’s almost healed, she notes–and not by regen potion, either. “I’ve prepared Mystra for the world ahead, because she will have a tough time, beyond high school. Beyond the academy. Every day will be a struggle. But, I’ve done my best to make sure that she doesn’t give up.”

She considers his words, and notes his hair has taken on a darker, shaggier coloration for a spell, before reverting to his normal cracked salt and pepper appearance. “You think I haven’t prepared her?”

“Training’s one thing, Kiera. Preparing them for a hostile mage world…that’s something else altogether.” He leans back in his chair. Everyone else is either sleeping or running mission-critical tasks. For the moment, they’re alone in the room. “You’ve seen it. The Conclave, there’s something wrong with it. I don’t know if those kids have opened my eyes, or if I was ignoring it my whole life. The delayed reactions of SAF today, or worse, betrayal in the ranks, is devastating. Curtis Dullahan, an Ex-SAF officer, was able to be approached, and fed information to the Talons for months. There should have been better safeguards. I’m still grappling with that one." He pauses and for a moment, hesitating to say what comes next. "Kiera, You can’t protect her if you’re just going to lock her out of the decision-making.”

“You think I don’t know that? I made promises to people that I would not involve them in this aspect of my life. At all costs.” At any cost, she thinks with an internal sigh.

“That cost could have been her life. Even you need to realize that. You’re a Valkyrie, but you’re also still a human.”

“Dragon,” she corrects testily. He grunts at this rebuke.

“Alright, a prideful, overprotective Kin, then.” She's nonplussed at the retort. But, Dillenger is one of a few people she truly trusts in SAF, and as a person. “Kiera, there's something really wrong about this whole thing, and I have a notion of what started this. What happened, six years ago? Who killed Drenar’s mum? You haven't said one word about her, and that silence is telling.”

She stops short of saying it. She can’t. This secret is too important to protect. “We still don't know. A splinter of the Talons, we think. The evidence was scant, all the money trails burned up, ID's got us nowhere. Trisha killed every single one of them before she fell. Except for one.” Her gaze lingers towards the commons area, where her daughter and the others are staying, and she can keep a close eye on them. Home is too risky now, especially with that murderous dragoness still on the loose. She has a team headed to Magitech Industries to take her in–a fully decked-out team. And Nick had appraised her that Diane was on her way home–the Valkyries would be waiting to make sure they made it here, safely.

She’s glad that Drenar could cut that monster down to size a little, same as Angela, because she won’t be as gentle if she ever gets her claws on Valosterla. There won’t be pieces big enough for forensic science to identify, by the time she’s done. And Julia had also taken a chunk out of her, along with this…newcomer? Josephine?

The fiery red-haired girl? Given her skills, she’d be a prime candidate for the Valkyries. Levine clears his throat to get her attention. “Look Levine, there are secrets here that even you can’t be a part of–”

“Is Trisha really dead?”

The way he asks stops her dead in her tracks, and she whirls to face him, eyes narrowed. “How dare you even ask that, Levine.”

“Really? Then just answer it. Simple yes or no.”

“I buried my best friend that day, Dillenger. Whoever landed the last blow, I will follow them to the ends of the earth to enact justice upon them.” She hears a few sobs, outside the room, and she steps to the window overlooking the commons.

There are discarded bandage packs, ointments, regen potions, and other magical wares still scattered on the table by the window. But when she looks out, she sees Drenar crying tears of joy, and holding onto the new girl–Josephine? She looks familiar. Then, it hits her.

Trisha’s last candidate for the Valkyries, before her last standing order. She remembers that Josephine is one of the brightest students to come out of the London Academy of the Arcane. A lovely woman, who has desperately tried to hide her identity as a kitsune, out of fear of what people would say if they knew who she was. Mostly, because people can’t be trusted to be decent Kin to each other–much to her lamentation. Then, she hears the words that she been dreading.

“We’ll find her, together.”

And just like that, Kiera knows with a heavy heart who they’re talking about, and her hand goes limply by her side. Levine is there as silent as a specter, and he looks solemnly out the window, while she’s fighting the inevitable tear. They figured it out. Trish, I warned you not to go out…but you said this task was for no one else to bear the burden of.

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“How did you know?” She doesn't turn to face Levine, but sees his reserved expression in the reflection of the window.

“I didn’t. But Val claimed boldly that she didn't take part in a very loud event in town about six years ago. An event even SAF doesn’t have on the record books, either. Or it was so secret, that even I was kept out of it.” She turns to face him, trying to keep a stony face. “Kiera, we need to lay all the cards on the table, right now. Because I need to know if my deepest fears are true.”

“What are you trying to say?” he glances to look at Drenar and Joey, still holding onto each other and talking in hushed whispers, before leaning in, talking in a low tone.

“I think the Conclave tried to kill her. And that you had to ensure that they saw a corpse. Valosterla is an intricate threat with the backing of an army, but the Conclave? Don't think I haven't had my fears confirmed more than once. But I need to know if I'm fighting for the right cause." Levine straightened in his chair, eyes alight in revelation. "That's why you don't have the sword. Trisha is the Champion. Still is. I've read the legends."

She doesn’t wait for him to conclude his painstaking process. He'll figure out the rest and hate her for trying to obscure this one. "I'm not the one who should be leading the Valkyries, Levine. I'm the fill-in they had left, because I knew Trisha best, and what she would have wanted."

"She was elevated to Champion? When? The last known Champion was Lyssa."

"Thirty years ago. When the Menazarri were becoming problematic. But the new threat that we don't know how to deal with, is far worse." She draws close, and puts a hand up for as if to speak in hushed whispers.

"Kiera, if you ask me, I will take this secret to my grave. You have my word on that," he utters without hesitation.

“They came after her, Levine. She found something. Something no one was supposed to find. And they tried to wipe her out, and killed Drenar's father in the process. He was the cryptanalyst trying to unbury that secret. What I lack is proof, and connections.” There’s a twinge of her lip, and she tries to keep him from seeing her hand trembling. His eyes widen slightly at the implication. “SAF cannot be trusted. Ex-members were involved. Black ops soldiers under orders from the highest levels, if what I fear is true. Well and above you.”

“Fates. Tell me the rot doesn’t go all the way up. No one would dare try to take on a Valkyrie–”

“Davos Renshrak led the charge. Six years ago. He is the only one that managed to walk away alive. That man stood toe-to-toe with a Champion, and pushed her to her bleeding limits." There’s a growl of recognition from Levine. “You know him, too, don’t you?”

“I’ve tried to bury the bastard twice, between me and Nick. He was involved?!” Her shoulders slump. To have to burden him with this secret…it’s too much to ask of anyone. But he wants to know, because he has never been one to back from impossible challenges.

“She fought a small army defending her husband on the road, then on foot. Tore apart a good chunk of Gilford Ravine, not that far from here. She left a healthy trail of bodies behind her, which is what I would expect of her defending her family. But Eddard…they were cornered. He overexerted. He mana burned himself to death, defending her. And Davos just tanked everything she could throw at him, and took her arm off with that giant fucking axe of his. Seconds before we could get there.” The shock is palpable on his face, when she turns to him. “She almost didn't make it. She spent two years in a coma from her injuries, and the dragon-specific toxin coated on his axe. The secret of her survival was limited to me, Malena…and Gale.”

“And now me.” The weight of this unfathomable series of circumstances weighs on him, from his haggard face, and how he glances down at the floor, unable to process this. “Davos is on the Talon's payroll. I saw it, Kiera. That hulking fiend was part of the assault at another site today. Where do the Talons stop, and the Conclave begins?”

“That is something we are going to have to collectively answer.” She glances back at the two who have settled down, talking quietly, and she forces back misty eyes. “I put Drenar and Julia, and the rest of them through hell to keep her safe, to keep the guise that Trisha Rashalda was dead. Drenar almost…they won’t understand why I had to protect the secret of her survival. I will never forgive myself for what I had to do, to protect her, Levine. And they will never trust me again after this.” She doesn’t dare mention what Drenar had done.

She doesn’t say anything for a few moments. All she can do is look at the trauma in the other room, and the occasional motion of one of the medics on the far side, attending to someone sobbing, or in pain. The only thought going through her head is, what good are the Valkyries, if they can’t protect the people that matter the most? The people back at home waiting for them, while they take grave risks to their own well-being?

Her hand drifts over to Levine, who has been following her gaze for a spell, and she runs her hand over his. Tough, calloused hands–not the hands of an office worker. The hands of an agent who has seen much action in the intervening years. He has seen much hardship of his own, for a myriad of reasons. She lets out a soft breath and squeezes gently.

“Kiera, I have a notion of what he went through. Drenar's left-handed...and there's a deep, clean scar on his right wrist that he keeps covered with a watch." He doesn't state it aloud, and he notes her posture slumps. "You blame yourself."

"It was my fault, Levine. I made a bad call, and I should have been able to trust our kids with this secret, and I didn't. I almost lost him. Julia almost lost him." Being able to say that, almost broke her. She clenches her fingers on the table. "That's how fucked up this is. Drenar almost killed himself because we lied to all of them."

"Kiera, the threat was, and still is real, if what you're telling me is correct. This tragedy isn't on you, it's on the people that went after Trisha and Eddard. I can't be one to judge you for that. But, we need to start laying cards on the table, no matter how painful it's going to be." He takes a measured breath, and gazes at the room filled with people who've just had the worst day of their lives. "The child he was, is vastly different from the young man I witnessed over the past few days. Just like your daughter, he has grown up a lot in a very short time. If it’s any consolation. If we ever get the chance to bring Trisha home…she’ll know that her son has done right by her.”

“Trisha is still in danger. She’s had to keep to the shadows. Even with the best medical care, she was weakened for a long time. Someone is still hunting her. And she, in turn, is hunting them. Whether it's the Conclave, the Talons, or this infernal Uroboros where the two are the same, I don’t know yet.” She does relent, after a moment. It feels…nice, to have someone to talk to in confidence again. Levine has always been a calm voice in the room for the years she’s known him, though those had been little more than brief meetings during his rising years in SAF. She lets out a soft sigh, and dreads what she will say next.

“You know…if we ever do make this a thing, Levine? If I allow my daughter to do this…I won’t always be there to protect her. The burden of my command isn’t something I can just cast aside to the next person. I don’t know if there are any as good as she was–is.'' The correction is forcible, and she regrets the word by biting her lip gently. He nods almost imperceptibly beside her, and laces his fingers across her gauntleted hand.

“Kiera…if you’re asking me to be her mentor and guardian in what may come…then you can be damn well assured of one thing. She will be trained and disciplined by the best. Myself, Nick, and others I trust without hesitation, and no one else. If everything you’ve told me is true…We don’t have just the Talons to worry about anymore. And they may come after me, if they think I’m onto them. We’ll be fighting the world.”

“Isn’t that what we always do?” she asks, with a palpable sense of relief. A man focused on the greater good, despite all odds. “Fight the whole world, giant monsters, eldritch gods…and win? We are not called living legends for no reason. And I know for a fact that the Luminaires sit entrenched in legends as well for their tenacity, daring, and bravery in the face of impossible odds. They took the first step tonight, even if I didn’t want them to. I don’t know if I could have ever asked more of any of them.”

“We’re going to have to start small. And it’s going to be painful. You need to tell them. Soon. Because they need to be armed with knowledge, if they’re to be prepared for the fight ahead.” He rubs uneasily at the ring on his left finger, a memento of a loving relationship broken by unfortunate circumstances. “Drenar needs to know the most. Because I know him and Josephine are in this to the end. So are Angela and Julia. I’ll also need a favor.”

“Oh?” she looks at him, surprised. “What could you possibly need that you can’t improvise, Dillenger?”

“Valhalla, your best techs, and Valkyrian steel for our young upstart technomancer. Because they’re going to need it.” She lets out a slight gasp.

“Not going to be gentle, are you? Cutting right to the chase?” He manages to hide half a smirk.

“They don’t call me gray wolf in the office for nothing, Kiera. I’m a hunter of secrets and monsters, and I aim to find both.” He lets out a low grunt. “I guess I don’t mind the nickname, in retrospect.”

She lets out a faint smile that she allows him to see. Briefly. “You do remind me of my husband a little bit. Steadfast to a fault.”

“You’ll have to tell me about him someday. I get this feeling that we’ll have a bit of time in the trials ahead.” He glances at the time on his wristwatch and grunts in irritation. “I suppose some things can wait till morning. Paperwork, screaming adolescents, and administrators wanting my head.”

“Aye, Dillenger. You’re not the only one running on fumes. I’ve been up for two and a half days.” She realizes she's exhausted now. The murmur of voices fades in the waning hours of the night, and Kiera eventually sets down after talking to one of her fellow sisters and informing them that she needs a few hours rest. The spritely young woman nods and talks to the others briefly. By the time Kiera sets her head down on the scratchy cot made of sub-par linens, she’s out like a light in thirty seconds.

Takoshi…please forgive me for what I have to do. I know neither of us wanted our daughter to live our life…but the fight has come to her, first.

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