Spring 59
Valkyrie landed in Highbranch as an ally of the Tempest and thus found many new friends.
She slept at the villa of the Erudite sisters, sipping tea and chatting espionage. When she mentioned Abigail, the duo just laughed.
“Quite a character, isn’t she?” one said.
“I thought she was going to gut me! Or spank me!” Valkyrie giggled in return.
“You meet all kinds in this line of work, but there’s one thing that holds true no matter what. Laws come and go – your word is the only currency that lasts,” the other advised.
I like these two, Rie declared in the girl’s ear.
Honorable smugglers and villainous priests, marveled Valkyrie.
The wind is also nice, her guardian noted. Would…would you share it?
Puzzled, Valkyrie raised her hand and let her fingers meet the stiff plains wind. Each gust pressed against her palm, rhythmic bursts like breathing across the great green lungs of Highbranch.
“Behold,” she whispered to Rie, “a new sea for you and me.”
Her palm throbbed, pins and needles like a chilly morning racing across her fingertips.
For us both… Rie agreed.
For just a moment, Valkyrie’s fingers curled against the wind under another’s command.
Rie gasped. I should not presume! My apologies.
The pins and needles vanished. The girl flexed her own fingers under her own will again, wondering if this new development was cause for alarm.
“Alisandra always does find the strange ones, doesn’t she?” one of the sisters remarked.
“You have to be a little strange in my line of work,” Valkyrie shot back.
“She’ll get along wonderfully with Tura,” the other giggle.
An hour later, still rubbing her thumb against her forefinger, Valkyrie met the Inventor. He stood amidst the flying machines, two long rows glittering for exhibition, and greeted her like an honored guest.
“Ah, the grand Valkyrie! Finally, we meet in the flesh! Oliver spoke highly of you in his letters!”
Her eyebrows popped up. “I seriously doubt that.”
The slender Whistler wrapped an arm around her shoulders like a bosom companion. “Ah, already I see the wit with which you might dice your foes! You must tell me in excruciating detail how you escaped the jaws of the Inquisition!”
“Just how much did Oliver tell you?!”
“Everything, of course, but fear not. Our code is quite secure. You see, before her passing, the Lady Visage…”
Valkyrie tuned the next bit out, peering instead at the flying machines.
No, the…what was the word… She groped around in demonic memory like a trunk. Airplane!
Still steering, Tura stopped them before an exhibit. This plane featured flexible joints every three feet down the long, slender wings.
“…and here we take inspiration from the majestic swan!” the Inventor continued.
“Wood won’t work. Not flapping. You won’t catch the air. Think how many feathers must press down for even the slightest of birds to rise.”
Tura stopped dead.
He looked at her again, and there was a flicker of recognition – of kinship – in his gaze.
From one demon-touched to another.
“I was her last,” Valkyrie admitted. “She is truly gone now.”
“I…see.” Tura ran a hand across his jaw, sucked his lip, and nodded. “When the world has calmed, let us share notes!”
“Maybe,” she shrugged, “but I have my own responsibilities now.”
“As do we all. Which brings me to a critical question: what of Oliver? How fares he?”
Does my old friend yet live?
Or has Ruhum claimed yet another brilliant spark?
“He was wounded in the evacuation. Alisandra said he made it to the Cathedral of Fire, though, and Mother will surely vouch for him before the Maiden.”
Ali also said – with a barely suppressed smirk – that he and Mother were enjoying a newfound closeness! A fact she found deeply discomforting. He better never expect me to call him Father!
“Excellent! I knew he would never bow before mere indignity!” Tura bounced forward with renewed energy. “Now then, my guest of honor, how might I serve your own cause?”
“Do you have sylphs here?” she asked, remembering the flock she had seen on the day she sang at the Mishkan manor.
Tura laughed. “What kind of backwater do you take us for?!”
“I’ve heard they resound with the song of these plains.”
The Inventor sucked his lip dramatically. “Ah, but that tribe is not my own. Do you understand the balance we strike here at Highbranch?”
He gestured grandly across the plains, sweeping across the many encampments and their wide berth.
“You mean the part where you argue all day and stab each other all night? Of course I get it. I’m from Ruhum!”
Again, he laughed. “Ah, you’ve the heart of a tiger, my girl! If it is the sylphs you seek, it is the sylphs we will find for you!”
Just like Abigail, she noted, sour at all this magnanimity.
They sense a rising star, Rie observed.
Tch. Fine. If they think I’m going to be so profitable in a decade, I’m going to wring them now!
“Great. What are we standing around here for? Waiting for an airplane to fly itself?”
Tura’s eyes flashed, observing the word ‘airplane’ with interest, but he nodded. “Very well. Though I must warn you – the trek is often difficult for the city-born.”
“I can handle anything!”
***
Spring 62 (and far from Highbranch!)
“My arse…” Valkyrie groaned into her blanket.
A chill wind blew across the plane, and the Whistler’s hide tent shivered like a drum. The flap was already open; the Whistler witch-singers and their sylphs rose before dawn to prepare another day on the blasted horses.
As a guest, she did not have to join the apprentices in minding the beasts. Instead, she wrapped herself tighter in a blanket and stepped barefoot onto the beaten grass of their campsite. Grey clouds swirled overhead, backlit by the growing Light that illuminated the coming day.
Today’s camp nestled at the junction of two creeks, though deep banks hinted at a past as proud rivers. Campfire pits and crushed grass marked the circle of the campsite; a few trees rose by the creeks; and the waist-high grass swayed from horizon to horizon.
“Like a world apart,” she wondered.
The Whistler witch-singers lived in this world; one where hooligans with Auren armbands were only news from the west – received the same way Valkyrie received news of a hard summer on the Plateau or a tribal war in the east.
How vast the world really was. How strange to stand at the edge of a peaceful tent, sharing a dawn soon to illuminate the terrors of Mel.
We become yet stranger, agreed Rie.
Just yesterday, one of the witch-singers had caught Valkyrie mumbling to her guardian.
Defensively, Valkyrie had said, “Don’t mind me, I’m just talking to my soul.”
The woman had smiled. “Ah, then you know Father Panther’s way?”
“Caught him sleeping at the foot of my bed. Scared the icy hells out of me!” she had joked, a blush hinting at her ignorance.
Father Panther’s way.
The witch-singers were a powerful tribe, tasked with hearing and singing the grand storms that wracked the plains. The apprentices swapped stories of the most powerful witches, able to summon the fury of a tornado against their enemies, and aspired to raise their own sylphs to such heights.
I can shout to the sky that I study the faerie fire, and they’ll just tell me to stop scaring the horses.
Waves is the same. Do we remember? Rie asked. They dance the Dragon, shimmering and singing, their bodies covered in a sheen of sweat as they undulate like their serpents…
Valkyrie coughed. Cheeks hot, she changed the subject. “Let’s take a walk. My thighs feel like leather…”
She chose to strike for the tiny hillock where the sentry stood – though she regretted this as her bare feet found harder grasses outside the camp circle. Stubbornly, she marched on.
Why not turn back for shoes? Rie asked.
It’s fine!
…you feel they judge us for such weakness?
I said its fine!
Her feet prickled with electric energy as she marched over one particularly unremarkable patch of grass. Oblivious, she stepped right over the faintest remains of an ancient temple.
The grass gave way to hard dirt on the hillock, and Valkyrie sighed in relief.
“Most people wear shoes,” the old sentry offered, seated on a rock with a rifle slung across her knees. Her long, black hair hung in three braids, each held by a different colored ribbon, and Valkyrie guessed between that and the esteem of the witches that this woman was an elder of the tribe.
“I’m not most people!” she answered.
“Who is?” the woman agreed.
Hail, old soul. Do you hear the Chorus? Rie wondered, an ache in her voice.
“I wanted to stretch my legs, but if I aimed for the next tree I’d be gone till lunch,” the girl huffed.
“It is hard, but you are young.”
“Tell that to my blisters…”
Coming closer, Valkyrie heard sylph-song on the chill morning breeze. A trio of the fairies hummed in harmony, unseen. Their wings played like the tiny instruments to their own Chorus…
Remembering The Care of Creation, this meant the sylphs had been raised together under a single witch. Any one of them was probably a match for the average Ruhum witch’s menagerie; together, they might give Nix a run for her money.
If we asked her about sylph flocks reverberating with Song, she might have something worth telling, the girl judged.
Starting small, Valkyrie asked, “Have you lived out here your whole life?”
“Most of it. Journeyed east across the grand empty and wandered with the tribes there in my youth just to escape my father.”
“Sold them some Novian pots?”
“Novian pots and a thousand other things. The trading posts in the east pay in jade and gemstone; they’ve mines on the coast where a man can scoop up emeralds by the handful. Course, that’s only if you don’t starve in the empty and don’t get stabbed by bandits on your return.”
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
“Ever go west? To Ruhum?”
“Lumia, once. Cold shoulder. Put a knife through a man’s hand for grabbing my braid in a bar.”
Grabbing a braid? Bet he had no idea exactly how big a deal that is out here!
Valkyrie rocked on her heels, eyes roving the sea of grass.
Though the sun had yet to rise, the day was already bright enough to read the stitching in the woman’s jacket.
The humming sylphs quieted. With a ripple of wind, they returned to visibility as a trio on a log between Valkyrie and the woman. Each matched the color of one ribbon in the woman’s hair.
“You’re stirring my windchimes. What’s really on your mind, lass?”
“This is…very different. I mean, last week…” she began, trying to gather her mercurial feelings. “A few weeks ago, I was in an Inquisitor’s dungeon. Wondering if I would die there. Then there was the Sevensborough Rebellion, and the evacuation, and now…”
Now I’m a thousand miles east of home, chasing after a silly hunch about sylphs because I think it will help me as Alisandra Mishkan the Archangel’s Spear. Meanwhile, things back home only get worse and worse. We don’t even have a radio to hear…
“Now the world’s bigger than it was before?”
“I’ve been to Waves!” she huffed.
“With your mother and father?”
“Well, mother. Father’s dead. Wyrm.”
The old sentry nodded apologetically.
“But…yeah…with my mother. Tagging along for the dance.”
“Where we go as children, we go because we are sent. We don’t know any other way.” The woman stretched, shifting her rifle to her other hip. “But now you’re on your own horse.”
This woman is comfortable with silence. We are stranded within it, Rie said, and we ache for the surety reserved for childhood.
Rie’s despair welled in Valkyrie’s breast, and she clutched a hand to a strand of hair. “I just…that is…”
“Speak firm, even if you feel like crying,” the woman ordered.
Valkyrie blew away the strand of hair and firmed her lips. She spoke, though she really just voiced her guardian’s ache. “How can we be happy?”
What right do we have to this tranquil morning?
When there is such suffering still to be found over the horizon…
The sylphs caught her echo and sang it right back at them.
Always such suffering to be found over the horizon
“That’s a Jungle question right there. What’s gonna be over the horizon; what’s gonna be next year. They rot their brains trying to get a glimpse of the great weave. All that looking, all those drugs…” the sentry shrugged.
“And?”
“And their songs reek worse than their toads!”
An electric surge burst up Valkyrie’s spine, and Rie burst out through her lips, “And what of your Song? Does it remember us?!”
Valkyrie clapped her hands over her mouth.
What in the icy hells, Rie?! Boundaries!
The sentry’s windchimes sang back.
And what of your Song?
And what of us?
What of the Song remembers us?
Regarding the girl, the sentry advised, “Mind that Jungle way, lass. Not pretty what happens when a Seer falls out of balance.”
She does not know us, Rie sighed.
“My balance is doing just fine!” Valkyrie snapped. “You haven’t even seen what I can do yet!”
The sentry hummed noncommittally.
Sighing, Valkyrie sank to her haunches and watched the grass flutter.
At length, chilled to the tips of her bare feet, she muttered, “Isn’t the sun up yet?”
Glancing into the sky, the sentry waited until the clouds parted a moment and stabbed a finger for a low-hanging star to the north. “See that one, city girl? That’s the Little Dawn. When it sets, the sun rises. Another hour at least.”
The girl frowned. Why was it bright enough to read an hour before dawn?
What day is it? she wondered uneasily. A bit after Spring sixty?
And how far north were they? She’d heard sailor stories of the northern-most waters, where the current turned against a man for his temerity and the sun hovered in the sky twenty-two hours in the summer…but this convoy rode southeast.
Highbranch was not that much farther north than Mel! Or was it south of Mel?
Maybe I shouldn’t have slept through geography.
“Kind of early to be so bright, isn’t it?” she asked.
The sentry shrugged. “Dawn comes.”
Dawn comes
Valkyrie glanced at the sylphs, but the three pixies rested together on a rock.
Powerful as they are, they do not have minds as men do, Rie said.
Still smarting from Rie’s words on her lips, Valkyrie ignored the guardian. She rose, pulled her blanket close, and marched back towards the camp. Focused on the clouds, she caught the moment when they parted.
A tendril of Light pulsed on the southern horizon, bright as the dawn. Even as she watched, it inched forward bit by bit with each passing of the clouds.
Growing, forking, spreading outwards in a great weave like cracks in the glass of the heavens.
“Claiming the whole of the world…” she breathed.
Valkyrie stopped at the edge of the beaten glass, staring. Then, shaking her head, she took in the activity across the camp: apprentices brushing horses; witches feeding their sylphs nectar and honey; two old women adding ingredients to the morning cookpot.
These are witches, she reflected. The wise and the Sighted…
How can they not see?
Wrapped so snug and warm in a known Song, Rie answered enviously.
Blind spots even for the Wise.
Valkyrie had given up on adults in general years ago. Now she added mystics to the list!
That weave of Light in the distance pulsed, tendrils crackling further another inch.
Staring, Valkyrie watched a particular tendril spread. Like a hair, twining and billowing outwards, birthing itself, geometric folds advancing like the leading edge of an infinite Blade like the spreading word of the Word of…
Valkyrie! Rie cried.
But it was too late. She had Seen and was Seen in turn.
A bauble of Light broke free and careened like a meteor for the camp.
“Incoming!” the girl shrieked, flinging herself to the ground.
The apprentices turned to stare at her, baffled.
The bauble of Light smashed into the campfire, Valkyrie shook with the impact, and not a single leaf on the trees swayed.
Apprentices giggled and turned back to their brushing, one of the witches quietly asked if Valkyrie had stolen the ritual herbs, and a glowing orb of Light amidst them all unfolded its brilliant limbs.
Slender and lithe, a killer of a woman; a bald, porcelain head pierced by two blazing, empty eyes; and eight arms, each armed with a bloodied sword.
Valkyrie saw little of the camp and heard the giggles only distantly.
Her eyes slowly…painfully…involuntarily…drew up to meet the creature’s own.
It echoed.
Martyrdom calls
Blood like water before the Throne
Its tone beneficent – was she not honored to be selected?
Its gaze like a snake, numbing her legs as its arms shook free of their joints and swept in a boneless whirlwind to render the camp into…
Except the blades swept harmlessly through all present.
Valkyrie felt the chill of death at their passing, and pure animal adrenaline broke its baleful gaze.
“Hells, just some apparition!” she snapped, cheeks red.
Its head cocked to the side, blank features amused.
Apparition?
I am your future!
Her attention fed it – the Dreamer called to witness a new-born dream. Its clawed feet sank into the grass, denting a handful of blades.
“Like hells you are!” Valkyrie snapped, summoning a ball of angry faerie fire into her palms. “Nobody needs a dream like you!”
The camp around her erupted into alarm.
“Fireball!”
“Have you gone mad, girl?!”
“When’d she summon a phoenix?!”
Valkyrie hurled the fireball like a bad pitch.
It winked from the waking world into Yesod and slammed into the creature in molten fury.
Ours is the fire of fantasy itself! crowed Rie. Yes, Valkyrie! Banish this nightmare!
Four arms batted at the fire across the creature’s shoulders. Then, swelling fifteen feet tall, it leaped across the clearing and swung for Valkyrie’s life.
Again, the blades swept harmlessly through her – though this time the sheer malice sucked the air from her lungs.
She stumbled backwards, struggling to breathe against the ice in her throat.
I am a dreamer and it a dream…
The longer we look upon it, the more real we make it, Rie agreed.
And if she ignored it?
Then it will find others to grant it power.
“Tch! Then a battle of swords it is, you matchstick freak!”
Dozens of them – every sword she’d ever seen, heard, or dreamed of – erupted from the ground around her, glimmering with faerie fire hilts like flowers.
“Fire!” she called like a ship’s captain. At her command, the swords lurched free and hurtled for the creature.
It swirled, blade meeting blade in a clang of metal only Valkyrie could hear, never flinching as metal pierced through its core.
The Whistlers, having seen a hundred blades erupt from the grass and vanish towards an unseen center, presumed the girl mad. They called their sylphs, and the camp roared with gathering wind.
Valkyrie pressed, conjuring the same blades again.
Yet the monster swirled, parrying with greater and greater ease as it grew stronger – and more solid.
“Stormmother’s tit!” one of the apprentices cursed, pointing at an icy fog rising like spindly knees from the grass.
“It’s looking for sacrifices!” Valkyrie roared back.
And – like most nightmares – loves the attention!
Her faerie fire stretched beyond her means in Ruhum, letting her enemies see witches in every corner except the one where she hid. Here, though, she stood on the other side of the problem!
The witches gathered themselves, spreading out in a half circle at a distance from Valkyrie.
“Calm down, girl!”
“Stop your arts or we’ll stop them!”
“I’m trying to!” she shrieked, edged with panic. She could name the foe and grant it strength; or leave it hidden and suffer the sylphs!
Two of the monster’s arms cut for Valkyrie’s head.
She ducked, and the blades sliced through her hair. One blade swept through harmlessly; the other took two inches from her locks.
Hells! Did it learn Father Panther’s trick?!
Landing hard on her butt, she envisioned a scythe worthy of a beheading and returned the favor!
Her faerie fire scythe swept wide into its neck and shattered.
Then, for a brilliant moment, she stood astride the sky.
I will protect them
I will bear them
No matter what it takes
No matter what it takes
Even if sometimes I wish I might just…
The nightmare sprouted two more bladed arms, limitless in its desire for blood to wet the altar.
Woozy, Valkyrie threw up a crypt of stone around it.
Every blade stabbed through the stone. The creature whirled again, shredding the illusory stone…two tents…and one horse.
Two of its blades now strong enough for blood.
Chunks of that horse spattered across the grass, and the stunned Whistler witches halted in their tracks.
So much for nixing it before it grows strong!
“This isn’t my Work!” Valkyrie shouted over the howl of their wind. “A monster’s summoning itself from the dreaming just fine!”
The nightmare cracked its neck – the motion confident and somehow familiar – and settled its baleful gaze on Valkyrie…
“Hells!”
She drew her faerie fire inwards, crafting an egg of the hardest steel she could imagine. A second later, the egg around her dented under ruthless blows. She threw her arms out, forcing the egg to swell in size and strength.
Not a moment too soon. The blades paused, reoriented, and lanced into her cocoon from every direction.
One halted a bare inch from her nose.
Valkyrie shifted the fantasy – steel to rubber – egg to balloon – and directed its cheerful pop against the monster.
It stumbled backwards, more stunned than hurt.
Why do you resist?
Do you not understand?
This is for YOU
Any ideas, Rie?!
I cannot grant the sight to others. I am She who Listens only for you.
How calm her guardian sounded.
Almost relieved to face the end…
Sod off, Rie! I’m not ready to be your lunch just yet!
The nightmare raised one of its real blades. Examined it. Caught a gleam of Light along its edge.
That gleam spread to two more blades.
Nice and heavy and sharp.
Learning how to spread your vision of things, huh? Well, you’re not the only one!
She’d heard the Whistler songs. On the plains, they said the first breath of the babe came from the mother.
Valkyrie exhaled up at the monster as it idly flicked away the last remnants of her faerie fire blades.
And she held.
I bequeath unto you my very breath!
The nightmare – to its own surprise – straightened…and took a breath through its featureless face.
You want to be real? Enjoy!
All the fairies suddenly whirled to face the nightmare.
Shaking its head against that odd moment, the monster brought up its blades to mow the camp to bits.
And the sylphs answered with a raging wind that grew heartbeat by heartbeat into a narrow, furious tornado.
Lungs aching, Valkyrie held her lips clamped tight. Held onto the monster tight.
The sylph’s alarm trickled down into the witches – better late than never! – and the Whistlers abandoned their worries about Valkyrie. Instead, they started to sing.
The tornado squeezed, immune to whirling blades, and the nightmare released a roar of proper pain.
Bet you wish you had stayed in dreams now!
She felt it trying to slip free, but it could not. Not while it held her breath, and the monstrosity did not understand the breath enough of the living to release it.
Spots flared before her eyes, but pure spite fueled her determination.
Screw your holy sacrifice
How’s it feel when you’re the one bleeding?
Getting a good taste of all that holy martyrdom?!
The sylph tornado lifted free of the ground. Squeezed, tighter and tighter, into a gyrating orb of impossible winds.
Then smaller still, the pressures within enough to–
The nightmare imploded.
Valkyrie’s breath rebounded back into her chest, and she collapsed. Sucking for air, she heard a ragged ball of bone and meat slam into the torn grass.
Icy hells…elemental beasts are scary!
Dizzy with exhaustion, she felt hands grasping her arms and shoulders.
Heard the expected kinds of questions like “Are you alright?”, “What did you do?!”, and “Why in the icy hells did you summon that in the middle of the camp?!”
And decided to collapse into darkness instead of answering.
***
The skies were silent
But they were free
A flight of fancy
But this was her Garden to dream
Silence bearing down on her back
So she beat the wings of fancy higher
Valkyrie awoke with a gasp in her garden as a distant figure dipped out of sight. She jerked upright, faerie fire knives leaping into being…
The high mountains glimmered with a pleasing dawn.
“Hells,” she sighed, slumping back onto the rock. She let the knives dissipate and pressed her hands into her forehead.
That was close. So damned close.
If she counted all the close calls in the short weeks that she had walked this path…
“Mage isn’t really a long-term occupation, is it?” she muttered to the air.
A burst of wind behind her announced Rie.
Valkyrie craned her neck backwards to look up from her guardian’s feet.
Today, Rie wore a loose, earthen shift dappled with little speckles like flowers. Plus, obvious from Valkyrie’s vantage, no underwear.
“I’m a bit jealous,” Valkyrie admitted. “No shoes, no panties, no responsibilities.”
“Shall we switch?” Rie asked.
Quick as a blink, they had. One flower-speckled shift for Valkyrie on the rocks.
The girl yelped at a sudden breeze!
Her guardian smiled. “Behold. We endure once more. Well done.”
The girl tugged down her new dress and rolled to her feet. “Yeah. I guess we do. But…”
How long can anyone’s luck last?
She who Listens sobered at that echo, uncertain.
“Sorry. We lived.” Valkyrie shrugged. “Could have been worse. It had to incarnate into Malkuth to bleed anyone. If it had learned Father Panther’s soul-shredding gimmick, we’d all be dead.”
“Father Panther understands the nature of man. Destroy the web of spirit, and the body becomes mere meat. This creature only understood blood and thus required payment of flesh.”
Rising to her feet, Valkyrie stared eye-level at her guardian.
They both wore the same braid today.
Yet Valkyrie had a bone to pick. She crossed her arms. “Why’d you seize my lips like that earlier?! You could have asked!”
But in the garden, her real worry echoed out clear and loud.
If you can seize control at will…
How strange and new their balance.
How precarious a perch.
The guardian took a step backwards. Mostly to herself, Rie recited, “I am She Who Listens.”
“I heard you singing just fine with my tongue!” Valkyrie dared poke a finger at her guardian. “Don’t pretend you’re the high and mighty soulkeeper on your rock when you pull a stunt like that!”
There’s no way back, the girl admitted. I used to feel superior every time I thumbed the school’s nose. I used to feel smug every time I lifted coins from the tip jar. I used to…
“Our Grace has fallen away in tatters,” Rie agreed sadly.
Blissful ignorance exchanged for waking eyes
Our natures intertwined
We must find a new balance
“Fine. I get it.” Valkyrie spun to drink in the view – a welcome way to settle her stomach after meeting a monster. “We’ll figure it out, okay? But no yanking my lips!”
It’s scary, okay?
Rie nodded. “I promise.”
“Good. I need you, you know! I’d never have made it half this far without you, Rie.” Valkyrie beamed. “…even if I don’t understand most of what you preach!”
And I will need your help more than ever now
Cause I know you feel it too
That sickening false Dawn emanating from the south
Familiar in all the worst ways
Something is wrong with Ali’s Work