Sorry for the – the, uh, late notice, folks.

Open the door!

Seems I need to relocate studios in a hurry

Open the damned door now, you heathen bastard!

You know how it goes! Some folks just have no sense of humor!

Get the battering ram!

If you need me, ask Walter!

Spring 44

One hall, two elevators, twenty cells. Each cell was six foot deep and four foot wide, that space split between a molded metal bed, a shelf stocked with the first six volumes of the Catechisms, and a metal toilet. The floor sloped downwards, terminating in a slim grate, and recessed bulbs in the ceiling glowed behind a pane of glass without ever shutting off.

Ten cells to each side, naked before the watchful eye of the Inquisition.

The left-side elevator only admitted prisoners to the bowels; the right-side elevator offered the cruel promise of freedom from behind the guards’ post. The post featured a heavy steel gate, lockers for the confiscated goods, a crooked table full of cards, and cleaning materials.

The favored item? A hose that sprayed water cold as ice at strength enough to flip a girl’s eyelids.

From their vantage, the three men on duty could hear every sound, but they ignored the incessant pleas of their victims in favor of gambling with their prisoner’s possessions. Every fifteen minutes, one would get up, pace to the far elevator and back, and return to note the headcount on their papers.

Valkyrie languished in cell 3B. Still in her overalls, the pageboy cap confiscated, she curled under the meager safety of gauzy, patched blanket and stared into the reality of her situation.

Same reality as the wagon ride; same reality as Angela’s speech; same reality as a tour of basements where good girls never went…

“And God gets to decide who’s good and who’s not…”

Or, more accurately, his self-appointed judiciary.

The basements were so clean – like a clinic – until you noticed the drains in the floor and the straps on the chairs. And how business-like the attendants! Chatting about the beginning of the baseball season while they waited to help the butchers in their work!

The casual indifference scared her more than any lingering bloodstain. These were good fathers that went home to play with their children; good mothers that cared for their families. Sons and daughters; brothers and sisters…

And when they walk into this place, they pick up the hammer and the knife – just the tools of their daily toil.

Such stark evil, and it looked just like everyone else on the streets.

Across from her, a middle-aged man rose from his bed. He wore a clerical suit, now stained, and winced in pain with every right step.

“Excuse me,” he said softly, angling as best he could for privacy.

Valkyrie grimaced. Averting her eyes did little! Every sound, no matter how private, echoed for everyone else!

Flushing, he sighed. “Ah, for want of a sink…” Reluctantly, he wiped his hands on his rumbled pants and returned to the bed. “My apologies. These accommodations reduce us to beasts in the pen. The humiliation is indeed the point.”

“I figured.”

The man tilted his head. “Can you speak?”

Grimacing, Valkyrie shook her head.

“Could…you speak before…?”

She shook her head again.

He relaxed a fraction. “Forgive me. In this foul place, I yearn for even meager grace.”

You are too young for these evils

“Margaret doesn’t think so.” She touched a finger to her swollen eye, testing the shiner, and predictably winced.

One of the guards scraped his chair back, slamming down his cards, and cursed. The other two laughed as he stomped into the hall.

Both prisoners flinched, and the man’s hand flew to his knee. More fluid oozed from the swollen joint, pushing the stain further down his pants leg.

“Quit messing with it,” the guard warned on his way. “That’s our job!”

He laughed at his own joke as he finished the count.

Is he even a human being? Valkyrie wondered. A few days ago, such a question would have affronted her very being; everyone was human! But that was before she met the “Inquisitor on duty” and these cheerful fellows.

Could a man that did not recognize others as living beings himself be recognized as a man?

The guards opened the lockers, rattling around, and complained between themselves how poor the current ‘crop’ was performing. They returned to the gambling table, dumping earrings, rings, and pendants on the table for the next round.

“When they run out of bets, they find other sources of entertainment,” the man whispered, squeezing his knee again. Despite the chill air, a bead of sweat ran down his forehead. “The trio rotate every ten hours. Ten, not eight. Your body will not recognize time correctly without the sun. Soon you will not know day from night. I have been here for thirty-three rotations now.”

She recognized a fatalistic urgency to his words.

Passing along what he had learned for when he was gone.

“My name was…” he swallowed. “My name is Horace Manwell. I am an accountant. Is that not a terrible joke? I have never cared for politics, never styled myself a revolutionary.”

She shook her head and mouthed, “Why?”

“House Erudite is completely insolvent,” he whispered in return. “They have been for years. An outside benefactor funnels tremendous volumes of gold notes through their coffers every year.”

“Mishkan?” Valkyrie wondered.

“I thought that at first, too, but Mishkan is rich by the earth. Rutile by the ton, shipped to Highbranch for Tura’s experiments or down the Dragon for processing. They invested years before anyone even realized the…” Mister Manwell paused, wiping the sweat from his brow. “My apologies. I am scatter-brained today. Difficulty sleeping. Regardless! Mishkan is rich in foreign accounts. The Lady brings her gold from Waves through secondary businesses – just enough to keep her domestic accounts in order.”

Valkyrie shook her head, still confused. How did this relate to these hopeless cells? Why would the Inquisition care?

“Unfortunately, I was not the only one interested in such accounts.” Manwell laughed dourly. “You see, child, they thought I was helping this mysterious benefactor. They…requested…my assistance.”

His hand rubbed over his knee.

“I learned more of their plans from the interrogation than they gained from my pleas,” he admitted. “They seek at every opportunity to destroy the Mishkan alliance, and they fear this unseen benefactor may intervene against them. Every unknown is a foe to be destroyed by any means. The truth or fiction of such accounts does not matter – only that the result please the Lord of Fire.”

Such grief in his voice.

Mister Manwell had believed in Aure before all this.

“The guards spoke while you were below with the Inquisitor,” Manwell continued. “You are a 13-C. Hands off, political asset. They will pull you from this place, and you will have a chance to speak on…Ah, that is…to communicate with people outside this icy hell. You must warn them. If they succeed in destroying Mishkan and her allies, the Holy Receivership will number one hundred forty-three.”

Almost half of the entire Conclave held by Angela’s pet.

“What are you?” she asked.

“Me?” He grimaced. “2-A.”

Even their whispers were not truly private, and the man in the cell to Valkyrie’s left added, “2-A. Extract a confession, one way or another.”

How many generations of prisoners suffered these cells, passing these codes like sacred knowledge before they made the final march to the left-hand elevator?

“Shut up down there!” one of the guards roared.

Horace scooted away, gingerly stretching his right leg across the bed, and mouthed to Valkyrie across the hall. “You will warn them.”

Then he closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall, trying to rest.

With nothing to see but bare walls, nothing to hear but the guards bartering mementos pendant over a pair of sevens, Valkyrie followed suit. She curled herself into the corner of the bed, blanket for armor, and rested her chin on her knees.

Slowly, she drifted away. Guttural laughter and the echoes of the prison cell retreated with every brick she built between her heart and that world. The bed beneath her rear shivered, and her world gently rocked in time with her breathing.

Who knows how long passed before she touched down at last?

Returning once more to the high peaks and waterfall of her inner world.

Glancing down, she found herself wearing her school uniform. Fingering a pleat, she could almost imagine today was just another school day…

Valkyrie swallowed against the Truth of her situation, and she felt the choker squeeze against her throat. Tapping, she felt silk wound across her neck, a single seamless strand binding her voice.

Muted even in my own garden!

She closed her eyes, focused her thoughts, and echoed loud as a shout across the pines:

RIE!

The river skipped a beat, and the clouds stopped their cheerful parade.

All her garden straining for a hint of her friend.

Behind her, the clack of wood on wood like builder’s logs shifting in the playroom.

Valkyrie followed the sound, her only clue, and hurried up the slope of a massive peak. The river grew faster and deeper to her right, and the pines grew closer, but she persevered against the tugging branches and river spray.

One final push through a woven fence of brambles, and she stumbled into a new clearing.

At the center waited the guardian of her garden, eight foot tall and clad in white. The guardian watched her impassively, hands clasped over her belly and eyes brimming with Light. A heavy sword rested against the guardian’s back, its hilt a raw chunk of obsidian today, and a broken doll rested at her feet.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Knowing filled Valkyrie at the first glance.

Rie’s corpse.

“A demon’s Truth,” spoke her guardian. “A figment of desire and no more.”

Beneath a crimson wig, the doll’s face could have been any fifteen-year-old girl.

“She was my friend,” Valkyrie whispered.

“As were our stuffed animals, reflections by which we danced.”

“But Rie’s voice in Angela’s office was…”

“Hunger enough for a voice to fill the void, and the fickle mind will provide. Lies enough we have; by such whispers will we be lost. To prevent this madness, we stir.”

Our voice to fill your void

A concession to now be weaned

Those shining eyes bearing down on Valkyrie, shimmering with a guardian’s insight. Just as the tomes warned – the guardian resided within the holy Song, resonating with the very stars.

“Have quiet lips given us pause? Or do we yet crave the self-destruction of stolen fruits instead of the durance of our Truth?”

A superior soul demanding answers of an erstwhile toddler.

“A cold prison cell and a ransom for Mom is your Truth?!” Valkyrie demanded, aghast. “Where was Truth while Margaret was popping my knuckles like piano keys?!”

The guardian lectured. “Who are we to have seen the beginning and the end of a grand–”

Except Valkyrie surged forward, hurling herself like a maddened soccer player into her guardian, and shouted, “Tell me what part of what we saw down there was born of Truth!”

As they collided, Valkyrie heard as her other half did.

A taste of She Who Listens: the Song, spinning ever outward, ringing of all that was, would be, could be. Voices raised in praise, yielding to the Song, and thus delivered upon the narrow path through all that might be.

The Chorus, faithful and united, offering succor to the undying soul through its cold journey of mortality. Until that day when the soul was called by name and carried home what few nuggets of gold the mortal mined.

She saw herself as the guardian saw: a blind and weakened shade, bereft of even the memory of heaven, driven by basal instincts and blind needs to err and waver and chase figments.

A seed for wisdom? Raw materials for a harvest! Merely an interloper into the hallowed halls of the soul; a dream to be awoken from and reflected upon.

“I don’t get to live forever!” the girl hissed. “You do!”

Their eyes locked.

Valkyrie raised her fist.

“Wake,” commanded her guardian.

She lunged forward, smashing her fist into the cold metal of her prison bed, and crumpled in pain as her already brutalized knuckles erupted in white-hot fire.

Around her, the prison cell resolutely remained.

“Tantrum?” one of the guards laughed.

“Go make sure nobody is breaking anything.”

Soon, the unlucky guard spotted Valkyrie in the corner, trying to hide her throbbing hand under the blanket. He took one look at her flushed, strained expression and tapped a finger on his short club. “No breaking the merchandise, little girl, or we’ll put you up in a strait jacket and leave you in the corner to piss yourself.”

He pointed to the convenient drainage grate in the middle of the cell for emphasis.

“What’d you do?” he asked. His tone promised a thorough investigation; whether that involved two guards and a strip search was up to her.

Valkyrie revealed her throbbing hand. She flexed each finger, wincing at the motions, to demonstrate none were broken.

Undamaged. Aren’t you thrilled?

The guard nodded. “If I have to come back, I’m bringing the hose. Shut up and sit tight until Margaret calls for you.”

He returned to his game, and Mister Manwell offered a conciliatory smile in his wake.

“Try to sleep,” the man urged, shifting with some pain.

Sighing, Valkyrie rearranged her blanket against the pervasive chill. Mister Manwell is right. I’ll need my strength.

She closed her eyes and waited until the dark claimed her.

***

A garden, verdant valley amidst the high peaks.

She Who Sings had shaped this refuge – fashioned it from heavenly fragments. Here, the high peaks once glimpsed in the distance; there, the proud pines climbed without fear of falling. Each pure as the world called Malkuth was not, shielded from the foulness and uncertainty without.

She Who Listens resided in this place, insulated from the world, and dwelled among the Chorus.

From the Song, guidance.

Walking with eyes closed and steps assured.

Except tonight.

Every time She Who Listens stilled among the inner-most glades, instead of the Chorus, she heard the raw echo of She Who Sings.

Tell me what part of what we saw down there was born of Truth!

She Who Listens strained for the Chorus. She heard the answer to that plea, same as always.

From the Throne, all flows

Beautiful

Terrible

Behold and marvel

For we are gifted the birthright of severance

She heard, but…but why this flicker of unease?

Malkuth’s contamination – carried like mud into this refuge by She Who Sings.

And now She Who Listens felt the whisper of disunity.

“Why would the Throne…” she whispered.

Chorus notes, confident and steadfast, waivered like her faith.

For a terrible moment, dimming like the parade continued without her…

***

Two hours of sleep, and Valkyrie sat once more before Angela Cecille.

By the cheerful dawn, a new day, apparently. Spring 44 if her mind had yet to betray her.

“Here are two letters we might send to your mother,” the Inquisitor explained, all smiles. “You get to choose which.”

Bleary and despondent, Valkyrie nevertheless shook her head. She was in their clutches; the only volition that remained was her refusal to comply.

“Unfortunate,” shrugged Angela, dismissing the girl back to that little cell.

***

Once the girl was gone, the Inquisitor glanced to Margaret. “Thoughts?”

“Stubborn. Clinging to spite. Easily fixed below, but per your requirements…”

Angela nodded. “Indeed, she is useless broken. I would much prefer a convert. Ah, imagine the headline! ‘Even the daughter of the Wavespeaker brought into the fold.’ Let them behold our beneficence!”

Ever practical, Margaret asked, “Failing that?”

“Then we ransom her to destroy the Wavespeaker,” the Grand Inquisitor shrugged. “Do whip up a letter from her mother later. Something histrionic.”

“As you command, Your Grace.”

“What else do we have today?”

Margaret dropped a fresh packet of pictures and testimonies onto the desk. “Oshton killed Tommy last night, and Sevensborough has sent out couriers to every corner of the country with the dawn.”

The Inquisitor leaned forward, paging through the furtive photographs. “Interesting…” She thought a moment and smiled. “Such a flagrant crime deserves the attention of the Conclave, wouldn’t you say? Be a dear and summon the Receivership.”

“At once, Your Grace.”

***

Pallid and pained, Mister Manwell spoke less when she returned. With effort, he pulled his pants up to reveal a knee swollen to alarming size and color.

She had never known a leg could turn that color.

He would surely die without medical care. And soon.

The guards escorted their prey past his cell without so much as a glance.

Valkyrie slept a little more, drifting in and out. With every waking, the cell felt less real.

Is Mom searching for me? she thought, remembering when she got lost in the park years ago. Found at last, how Mother had cried, hugging her tight.

You’re all I have!

What a pity. All that love wasted on somebody like Valkyrie.

Letters untended still waiting on a Mishkan table for the daughter that figured she would respond tomorrow.

Twice now we have defied the Inquisitor, whispered Rie in her ear.

She scowled to hear that voice. She almost told her guardian to stuff it…but then the cold cell would truly be her only companion.

“What do you want?”

Her guardian’s voice was strange in her ears – closer, softer, with no rumble of thunder. Why?

“Anything I give them is just ammunition against Mom. She has enough on her plate as it is. I mean, she hates crowds! She hates public speaking!”

And yet she is the Wavespeaker.

“Yeah…”

Why? asked the guardian again – the question cast to both Valkyrie and the cold cell. A sliver of worry in that holy voice.

Did her guardian ache too?

The thought jarred loose a memory, something faint and distant from when Valkyrie still slept in her mother’s bed at night.

There’s no need for you to keep playing Wavespeaker, girl.

I know, Betha.

The Stormmother anointed you on a lark. It is her way. Easily given, quickly forgotten. Those bastards in the Conclave will never let up. There’s no sense in this suffering!

I…I know. I know it was Lynne’s fancy.

Valkyrie had felt a gentle finger caress her hair.

But I will gladly spend the rest of my life repaying that debt.

Weak though I am.

The cell faded away, leaving Valkyrie atop the bluff of her garden.

Rie waited behind her, hands folded over her belly just like Mom.

“I…I don’t understand Mom,” the girl confessed. “She should hate the Stormmother! Dad would be alive if not for Lynne!”

The guardian closed her eyes, straining for an answer.

Yet none came from afar, and the guardian at last pressed her hands into her belly. “The Wyrm was etched upon the Song.”

“By who?”

Rie flinched as if struck. “It is his nature to seek the end of the stars. The angel of Oceans bears no sin for his appetites.”

“And where did he find his nature?”

Instead of answering, the guardian knit her fingers together and prayed.

For a moment, the garden rumbled with the steps of ivory giants across a silver moon. Their steps were sure, their course well laid, and they trod with the confidence of gods as they gave all in the name of the Song…

The path forward, straight and narrow.

As Rie prayed, a white feather floated out of the clouds to alight perfectly upon Valkyrie’s curled fingertip.

The girl tilted her head, rocking the feather across her fingertips.

“I know this feather…” she breathed, though she strained for the memory of it.

A woman’s necklace; a woman that shepherded together bright cherubim and told wondrous stories of a cold place far below where the woman’s lover yet remained in eternal service.

Her name rose to Valkyrie’s lips.

“Alice…” she breathed, lost in memories that sang of golden honey…

Another bright morning, my cherubim

Yes, even you, my little firebrand!

The Song is yet deep and vast, and don’t you just want to see more?

Her garden and guardian both shivered.

“We must not reach for…” began her guardian, hand rising towards her sword.

But, holding the feather, Valkyrie could pretend that she laid in a warm bed on a cool night, watching the heavy clouds swirl as Esmie hummed a southern ditty. Alone, together, skimming her fingers through the clouds, floating above the streetlights.

“I…I feel the weight of what Mom sacrificed for me,” the girl murmured.

Truth from those lying lips.

Rie froze, two fingers on her hilt.

“I…I feel it, and I know I can’t ever repay it, and I hate it. She just keeps giving, and giving, and…”

And I can’t look at her when she buys me new shoes while hers sprout holes

“So I ignore her letters because what am I going to say? That…that I screwed up again? I was just so angry, and so bored, and…”

A silence grew around the two of them, and Rie hardly dared to breathe.

For a glimmer of Light between them.

The next step had to be Valkyrie’s own.

“I don’t think I’ve been a very good daughter,” the girl admitted to the patient feather.

In their silence, girl and guardian, something answered.

Something fragile and blooming.

No

We have not

“And I caused so much trouble for everyone.”

Yes

We have

“Hells! I just…I never even stopped to think! The constables could go after Katherine and Lyla! Drag them down here just for knowing me!”

And they are not daughters of the Wavespeaker to be preserved for future use

Valkyrie shivered against fresh tears.

This time, not for herself.

Rie watched the girl shudder, back exposed, and looked down to her palm. There, a tiny bead of gold swelled from sand. A bare speck…

Was the time of harvest at hand?

In silence, the Song did not answer.

They were the both of them deaf in this moment.

With no other guidance to shape wisdom, Rie hazarded to ask, “How would you Sing?”

To do whatever I want however I want it.

To live like a Queen in a high loft – and screw the peons!

To grow up but never age a day.

To dance above the Rules, hand in hand with demons, and smirk at meager men shackled to the millstone.

Yes, she wanted all those selfish things.

But what was needed?

Teachers throwing rotten fruit

Black-robed fanatics begging for the purity of death

Angela Cecille, placing her pawns in the name of God

Mom had wanted to send her away before the rot spread too far.

“Too late…”

The Inquisition; the boroughs; the whole damned country!

This was bigger than her now.

“Rie…we have to stop this madness.”

Her guardian scowled, hand flying back to her sword. “So now we might play the fetching heroine?”

A golden-haired savior

Not content with beauty nor intellect

Let all extol her virtue!

“Cruelly have we wielded our beauty and our wits,” snapped Rie. “Our smile the brightest, our tongue the sharpest, and woe to any that dare to challenge our sweet supremacy.”

Like the girl who had dared to win first place in the Harvest dance and ran afoul of Valkyrie’s black-bladed tongue in fifth grade.

Like the boy who offered her flowers last Spring and received laughter in his face for his audacity – a peasant propositioning a queen!

He had never returned to school, had he?

“We have danced above every other and laughed as they bore our weight,” the guardian remembered. “Will we not be content until the heavens themselves yield?!”

Valkyrie shook her head. “No! No, I can’t…”

I can’t unsee what I saw downstairs

“And we would bury the memory in fresh heroics!”

Valkyrie surged to her feet, rounding on her guardian, and shouted with a feather clenched tight, “And I can’t let it keep happening!”

Rie glowered down. “All things have a price, child.”

“Then kill me when we’re done!” challenged Valkyrie. “That’s what you guardians do, isn’t it? Put down mages before we can steal too much? Before we get too close to you?!”

For those who suffer

For their dreams, not our own

We will brave that judgment

Now Rie hesitated. What did the girl know of this dance? Of gifts freely given and not easily reclaimed? Of the danger that came when She Who Sings and She Who Listens…

Deep in their silence, she had to make her choice as well.

She glanced at a seed of gold in her palm and wondered how many lifetimes one might need to shine like a keeper of the cherubim.

To shine like Alice that had once told a little firebrand that she could be the herald that shook the very Foundations themselves – and meant it.

Did such a soul grow one speck of gold at a time too?

And how hard the road to carve that first mote?

“Very well!” the guardian roared, casting their fate to the wind. “Until the moment when you stray!”

We who have been granted grace cast off our hallowed veil!

Until the flaming sword calls your name then!

Are we ready to bend our talents to service?

An apple fell into Valkyrie’s waiting hands.