#valkuri

"You have to remember to burn the bodies. If nothing is left, they cannot use it, and cannot bring them back for more fodder." He can feel the lingering heat beneath his boot as superheated sand-turned-glass cracks under his weight as it sways. Sharp fibers cut into his throat, roughening mellifluous tones into a jagged mess. The tone is quiet regardless, the firmness of instruction pressing past discomfort.

"There is meant to be honor for the dead. Always. But you have always had a gentle heart, and so I know you treasure them all. But the world will force you to be hard, sometimes, and you must be ready." The bodies are limp, the magic of their Awakening long since left them, but Valkuri lifts them in his arms like brides, uncaring of the tar and ichor that slick his cuirass and gauntlets. "These are lessons I neglected to teach you, before. I know it is--"

A breath exhales sharply as the Vabbian adjusts his hold on the cumbersome body, its stretched limbs turned to inhuman grotesque mockery. Another victim of the mass Awakenings. Another victim of a world of lies. "--late. To teach you these things, but mayhaps it will help you in the future."

The wind that sweeps across the droughted plains is hot and humid, whistling through the sparse branches of nearby Manketti trees, their dry lengths clacking together like bone charms on a windchime. They stretch like skeletal fingers, plucked free of foliage like carrion. The stink of the dead fills the air, poisoned fish beaching themselves upon the dry banks in desperation only to drown on air. Pungent enough to make the eyes water.

"They are poisoning it. We do not know precisely what runs rampant, though legends have begun to take blame. Another of the Undying's ploys, to twist what was once Kourna's and make it his own. Their own, the Conclave." Valkuri's head tilts slightly, as if he listens to something, and then sets the body atop a makeshift pyre, amongst others in varied states of decay. A pair of satchels lay nearby, filled with personal effects--a pendant long rusted, its singular sapphire scratched and its cut worn down; a ragged journal formed of hide and pressed leaves, barely bound together; a spear tip bound by a thin leather thong, carefully unwound from a fragile wrist. Boundless things, some of which seem to hold no financial value, each reverently set aside.

There is honor for the dead.

There must be.

Valkuri's laugh is low and quiet, a rumbled chuckle that slips free sweetly. It sounds discordant, too warm against his tongue, too warm for the wolf. "It is important to take them back to those who will see them honored. Merely because we do not know their value does not mean they have none."

"Perhaps a difficult thing, for the likes of us and ours." Reaching up to carefully arrange a shorn arm across the body's chest, its dead skin still yet damp with the stopped leach of ichor, Valkuri exhales a quiet sound and tucks the torch flickering nearby beneath the makeshift, raised platform. Only then does he step back, straightening and rolling his shoulders back to watch. To be their witness, as smoke and the stink of the burning dead dried acrid on his tongue.

A hand lowers to his side, little and ring fingers slightly outstretched in offering, a reach to be taken as he settles in the watch he has decided for himself. His gaze drifts after a moment, from the searing flames that lick and devour hungrily at its dead offerings.

"I am sorry that it took this long to show you, my s--"

The empty air that greets him catches in his throat, words dying on his tongue as his golden gaze searches the dead savannahs in a brief desperation.

The winds that rustle snowy curls do so like the carding of fingers, light and quiet. The air sighs.

Lips pressing thin, Valkuri pivots to look toward the pyre once more, the line of his jaw taut enough to visibly flex masseters. his hand falls to his side, fingers curling loosely in the fabric stained an inky black. The humid air curls around him in an oppressive embrace, pulled moreso by the burning of the pyre.

It's stranger than he thought it'd be, walking through the piles of the dead and seeing both sides as one's own. Kadir and Justice flank him, their heavy footfalls crunching bone and blood and tar-slick dirt the same that break beneath his heels. His armor is drenched and he knows not how much of it is his own, a hum of numbness singing through him as he walks, step-by-step. Another body, its leathery flesh shorn and shredded and soaked with tar. She lay mangled, still and half-twisted up by some magical force. Dutifully, he touches his torch to the weathered skin, waiting for the flames to lick at her fingers. Her gaping chest. A shattered leg.

In another time, he may have wondered who she was, but that empathy is locked away. Here and now she is a risk. The Sunspear beside her, a boy perhaps barely seventeen, the back of his mismatched armor dark and tattered.

A Risk.

How many of his fellow members of Elysium expected this? Knew? This is not unfamiliar, the knowledge that they could rise--would rise, as they had done before. It is only unfamiliar to wish to see it stopped. Once the sight of the dead rising had been a wonder, a thrill. Hope.

The crunch of bone beneath Kadir's bloodied maw draws his attention, the blood-jackal's growl echoing unearthly, low, a ripple somehow still yet heard with the thrum of war around them. The Sunspears and their allies rage against the gates in a desperate surge, a race against time. It isn't peaceful now, but he knows he must take time to rest. Soon. Soon.

But first, the dead must not be used against them.

Kadir's prey stills its twitching, head lolling back to drop against the ground and roll slowly toward Valkuri's feet. Wide eyes, dry and blank and stark against death-darkened skin. A mouth that may have been pretty once is open, the glitter of gold teeth hard to miss against the bright white only darkened by the slickness of tar. A noble, no doubt.

He could have been her, once.

Diligently, almost lovingly, he touches the torch to her lips. A purifying kiss.

Sleep, now.

Movement catches his eye, and he turns to look as the trembling form of a young woman begins to push herself up. Blood seeps from wounds at her collar, her chest, caking the ground beneath her. A hand rests gently atop Kadir's neck to still him. Justice's approach slows.

With a rolling step, Valkuri moves toward her. Her skin is soft and hale where it's bared, the fall of her matted hair thick and coiled, half pulled from its braiding. She bears bright colors now dark, the iron chain around her waist littered with mismatched, childlike mimicries of the Sunspears' emblem. One hand curls atop Valkuri's boot as he stops nearby her, her fingers slipping on the slick metal of his armor.

"H-help--"

Burdened with the weight of a war far older than she would ever be, hopeful, shattered. She was a plain girl only beginning to show the muscle all her hard work had earned her, pulling herself free of the pit of starvation. Crooked teeth dark with blood and dirt. Her eyes are dim, and her voice echoes layered, like many in one.

As his blade gently eases beneath her jaw to still her, as the flames lick at her curls unbound, as he straightens to begin his search again, Valkuri's voice lifts in song. It is a deep thing, the way his voice rumbles, well-trained and rich. It is a lyric from a time nearly forgotten, taken from shelves he had stolen from, where his eyes opened wide and the lies began to fall away.

The horrors of Elona are nothing new to him, this land where the dead are revered and where the people throw themselves upon the blade of their oppressor with his name full of love upon their lips.

Feet swing idly where they dangle over the edge of the cliff overlooking the library, enchanted fountain bubbling quietly behind her like the rush of a brook. Up here Haven is small, distant, easy to imagine as something entirely other than where they are.

She likes that idea.

By the edge of the fountain is a rustle of movement, quiet and easy, and heard only because he does not wish to hide. They’ve been at this for nearly an hour by now, quiet and otherworldly.

“I am sorry that it has taken so long to realize. And to reach out to you.”

At first, Lysse doesn’t answer. She allows the silence to hang, unbroken save for the whistle of the breeze, not out of malice but in consideration. He has never hated the silence. Not like she has.

“I have heard you apologize more in months than I have my entire life before you left.” When she speaks, her smoky voice is hushed, lilting as her gaze dips to the fuzzy cat-eared headband dyed to match the copper of her hair. She turns it between her fingers gently, though she isn’t focused on the gift itself, long familiar though it is. “I don’t know if I like it.”

“I know many things are different, Lysse. I know I am different—“

Lysse pivots slightly in her sit, her smile faint and crooked and trembling with uncertainty as she casts her gaze back toward him. “You never used to do this when you’d tromp off to fight alongside them.”

“Things are—“

“—different. I know.”

Valkuri slips quietly off the edge of the fountain to instead settle beside her, his own legs dangling off the edge. Their silence returns, heavy and cloying and weighted with a thousand things left unspoken. He gazes at her, at the glitter of dying sunlight across the high points of her face and in her hair, the curl of dark lashes. She doesn’t pull away when he reaches to touch the inside of her wrist with the tips of his fingers, a hesitant and uncertain thing entirely incongruent with who she always knew him to be.

“You’re not allowed to die until I forgive you.” The words are blurted out, tight and thin, and she lifts her arm up enough to slide her fingers through Valkuri’s own and press her palm flat to his. “I forbid it.”

The vibrancy of her golden gaze meets his own, and she ignores the tightness in her chest and the watery intensity of her stare. His smile is faint, melancholic, and she pauses briefly upon how ugly it looks on his face in its wrongness.

“As you wish.”

Lysse can hear the strain in his words, the thinness of the sounds. His voice was made for leadership, for war and confidence and greatness, for speeches before a crowd of the loyal. For laughter she so rarely heard.

It, too, is ugly in its hesitance.

Her anger bubbles up like a bonfire, twisting her painted lips. Where had the man gone, replaced by this boy? Where had the flame been extinguished? Where was the great man she had known all her life? The sound that escapes her is small, fragile, and she surges forward to press her forehead to his shoulder, fingers gripping hard enough to feel the strain of his hand against her own.

It takes a moment, takes readjustment to turn and curl his other arm around her strong shoulders, bowed with the weight of what he had left her to bear. She was strong enough to carry it, he knew. She always had been. Valkuri encourages her closer, dipping his shoulder away from her and instead pulling her taller frame so that her cheek could find his chest. Her free hand snaps up, fisting in well-worn fur hard enough to hear the fabric creak.

For once, he does not correct the dampness that stains her cheeks and darkens her lashes. For once, he doesn’t correct the quaver of her voice or the thinness of its whisper.

Fingers to the sand trace idle fractal lines, revealing the long-obscured tile of vibrant cerulean beneath the grains, scraped and scarred by age and disrepair. Though walls are half-collapsed beneath the weight of war and forgotten memories, it is a sheltered place, hidden away from the wandering view of any who might pass. Patrols do not come here, not now that Balthazar no longer walks his warpath. Purpose is a mystery, long lost to be remembered only by the spectres in peripheral.

But a ghost looms above, crouched among the jagged remnants of a dome, its once artful mosaic chipped and scratched into an unrecognizable smear; he is still as the shattered statuary littering upended flooring, silent beneath the sweep and whip of wind and scatter of sand.

When she arrives, he holds breath and remains above, observing as the fist in his chest coils tightly enough around his heart to speckle his vision. She is radiant, bronzed, tattooed skin barely hidden beneath a sandstone hued cloak and copper locks swept up out of her face. Backlit by dying sunlight and the sky’s paintbrush strokes of autumnal dusk, unnaturally golden eyes rake across the ruins with trepidation.

The weight of a tiny body cradled in his arms like the grandest treasure. His wrists pivot to hold a memory, a yearning for the simple. A desperate, infantile cry tears through the barrier of is and was.

Why had he left?

When the crack of haunted remembrance fades after its deafening echo, he finds her staring up into the shadow where he lurks gargoylesque, and the wariness of her expression swiftly is buried beneath the diamond sharpness of a clenched jaw and the flinted steel fire-fury of her eyes. Her lips thin, hands at her side not quite grasping at the softness of the deep violet of her sari.

“You told him not to come.”

She watches him as he rocks forward, one hand grasping at the crumbling stone as he swings down to drop to his feet nimbly, dust and sand fluttering about him as he lands. “I asked him for us alone.”

His steps do not approach, only shift to brace against the broken flooring as he straightens. “You do not ask. You only ever demand what you think is best for everyone. I am tired of being told what is best for me.” Not quite a hiss, her voice is a knife blade, sharp and solid and a whip-cord lashing full of spite.

“I am sorry.”

The Valkuri Asoni she knew is not a man to bend, to whisper apologies in broken tones, to bow his head and press his knees to the sand.

But he does for her.

Her fury is a thing of fire, white-hot beyond its flashpoint. It is a familiar thing, although not from her. Not aimed toward him. Rather than duck away, he braces, bears the burdens of his decisions. He owes her this. He owes her the expression of her anger and hurt, and the weight of the Silenced behind her. It is not the first time he has felt her force. He trained her in martial prowess as he learned much the same, fostered her strength to walk his same path; it is different now, when fragile cartilage folds and pain flares in his senses. Impact snaps his head back, and he scrambles to rein in every instinct that tells him to fight.

No. He owes her this.

At first he does not parse the words that rip from her in her unrestrained anger, garbled from the pulse slamming in his ears. The echo of her voice is a roar, and for a moment the fear of Lyosha’s concern solidifies.

“--swore you would protect him! He was the one we all swore to protect, and you--”

His breath exhales unevenly almost as if in a laugh, bitter and tight and curdling sour in his throat, and through the blur of his sight he can see the trail of scarlet stark against the sand.

Alive. Not the one that should have been. Penance, penance, penance. Deserved better. He deserved better. Bett--

It is the fingers in his shirt that wrench him from his bleary focus, and he blinks against the tears pain summoned in order to see her face more clearly. Nails lacquered and manicured short scrape against the scarred skin of his chest as she clenches her grip, teeth bared. This close, he can see the hurt alongside her anger like an aura. He did this.

“Why?”

A strong hand lifts, resting atop her wrist as he exhales a soft breath, the simple word echoing cacophonous in his ears. It is an accusation he has leveled at himself but from her voice, cracked in fury and fear, the blade digs deep and twists between his ribs. To bleed out here would be no loss. Not a man like him.

Promise me you will not die, my wolf. I will not allow it.

His fingers curl, squeezing around her wrist firmly but not bruisingly, knees grinding into the sand through woven fabric. It is the first time she has seen him bowed, the first time she has seen him on his knees, and it is powerful.

But sometimes power is a bitter thing.

Lysse’s fingers twist in the fabric beneath her hand, and she huffs a sharp breath as she begins to pull, to drag him up until his feet are under him. Scarlet stains his beard, dribbling down his neck and soaking into the collar of his shirt. It slicks her fingers, hot and stark against the cold of tar and ichor of the dead she surrounds herself with. He is alive. Alive and warm before her and more than a memory. The serval pauses, waits with ire in her breath, a hunter stilled before her prey. Her movement surges, yanking him bodily despite his bulk and ignoring all unfamiliarity of the gesture, her broad arms curl around him in a bruising hold. It is a demand more than a question. She will take, as he taught her to.

It is instinct that sees his own draw up, sturdy fingers sliding up her back and curling at her shoulders. She must bend to press her face to the juncture of his collar, heedless of the steady drip of his shattered nose, but she does so with a hand clenching around her heart.

“Why did you leave, father?” In the wake of her rage, the whisper is thin and dusty, the smoky tones of her voice tremulous and nearly lost against fabric. “Why did you leave me when I needed you?”

Long after the sky has been draped in starlight, she stands at the edge of the ruins, sand dusting over the toes of her boots. She stares, watching the broad figure disappear into the night, the ghost of the man he once was. Anger remains with understanding, a bitter pull that roils acid uncomfortably in her gut. Answers breed questions and further uncertainty, leaving her once more feeling the pull between two stubborn forces. Indecision lingers.

I cannot choose for you, little Lysse, just as Lyosha could not choose for me. Your hate is not unfounded, and I do not ask for your forgiveness. Only know that there has never been a day I have not regretted all that I wrought.

Her fingers curl tightly enough to dig half-moons into her palms, the echoes of his explanations a whisper in her mind. The desert evening is a bitter bite against her skin when she steps from the shelter of the ruins properly, gazing off in the distance he had long ago disappeared behind, her jaw aching from the tightness of its clenching. It would be simple to follow, to trail after the man she had idolized as long as her memory lasted, to follow in his footsteps as the little girl within her always yearned to do. But she is wolf and asp.

And neither.

With a shaky breath she turns, chin lifted as she smooths inked fingers over her abdomen to smooth the hang of delicate chains. The glitter of city lights are a siren call, bright and clarion and familiar, a lie of familiarity—a lie she whispers to the wind.