Memories: The Good and the Gruesome

You refuse to panic. Panic is for those who have exhausted all possible solutions. You are still in the middle of discovering all possible solutions; therefore, you have no right to panic. You reach out with your sensing abilities once more, confirming that you are, in fact, still in the dead of space. The inability to breathe, however, is what is truly driving you mad. You want so badly to breathe, to hear your heart beat, or simply to open your eyes. Attempts to enhance your glow state are still useless.

You have just returned from a memory you know to be the last time Shilo saw your parents. You know the designation number on the side of the shuttle in which they just flew away all too well. Shuttle 86492VI87S2M932O was the shuttle in which your parents suffered an all but fatal crash. The very thought that, even with the aide of Shilo’s memories, you will never see your parents in a new setting again causes you unfathomable distress. The fact that you’ve now reached a point where you’re sorting through memories of a person older than you is troubling in itself, as well.

You begin to work your way into a new memory, but something stops you. You haven’t been prevented by any outside force from entering the memory, but you are immensely troubled by something you cannot quite grasp. Then, it occurs to you. You return to the previous memory.



Zhilo’di Khuda’Cronell, Age 6, Qzcivden West Interplanetary, Qzcivden, Thor

“Alright, Shilo, do you have everything you need?” Shilo’s mother moves her hands through Shilo’s satchel, ensuring that Shilo does not encounter a lack of necessary supplies. Her long and nearly entirely blue hair, a rarity even among her peers, hangs softly on either side of her gentle face in tightly curled, glossy locks, her lips pursed as she sorts through Shilo’s belongings. After a few moments, she stops and starts fumbling through her own belongings. “You’ve forgotten your picture album at home, Shilo. Here,” she hands Shilo a picture of the two of them when Shilo had just been a baby, “this one is my favorite.”

Shilo takes the picture and slides it into her book so she won’t forget her spot as she closes it to hug her mother. “Thanks, mommy.” Her small arms wrap around her mother’s legs tightly before she’s picked up and held in a reciprocated hug, her mother’s eyes leaking a few tears.

“Now, remember, sweety,” Shilo’s mother begins again, “you’re going to be in stasis for the entire trip to Osgord. If you wake up, there’s a technician that checks in on you every three centidays. Just be patient and start counting in your head. Don’t worry, though,” she adds as a slightly panicked look crosses Shilo’s face, “you’re probably not going to wake up. That’s very rare.” Shilo’s face relaxes considerably, but not all distress has been cast off of her face. Shilo’s mother pushes the young girl’s long hair behind her ear, and a tear comes forth. “Oh, this is probably going to be the last time I see you with long hair, isn’t it? My little Shilo is going to be a pilot. I just know it.”

Shilo hugs her mother more tightly and asks, “Do I have to go now? Why can’t I wait for my schooling to start here, with you?” Her eyes say all that isn’t spoken: And why aren’t you coming with me?

At last, her father speaks up, ruffling her hair. “Come on, then, Zhilo’di. You know Blue girls have to wait for their admission on Osgord. That’s where legends say the Matriarch lives. I don’t think anyone’s even met the woman in a few hundred cycles. Some stories say she just lies awake in stasis and somehow sends the signal either accepting or denying admission from inside her pod.” His face drifts off into the morbid thought for a while. How lonely and maddening such an existence must be. “Of course, other legends say she’s one of the Valkyri’din and just spends most of her time invisible. And if you were an immortal among the ranks of the Valkyri’din themselves, would you let yourself be carted off to other planets just to watch over the newest students of the Blue and see if they’re worthy?” His smile returns in full force at the silliness of the remark. “Besides, I’ve heard that if she’s really pleased with a candidate, she’ll even come down from wherever she lives and introduce herself.”

Shilo grins widely, her eyes on fire a bit with excitement. Every Blue girl’s dream is to meet the Matriarch, after all. Even her mother can be heard on occasion musing how wonderful it would be. Obviously, Shilo imagines herself being one of those rare girls who meet the Matriarch. “Do you think I can do it, Daddy?” Shilo steps lightly onto the floor as her mother sets her down.

“Do I think you can do it?!” Shilo’s father exclaims as if the very idea that he would think otherwise were absolute foolishness. “Of course you can do it, Zhilo’Biornn.” He stoops low to hug her. Shilo steps into her father’s arms and receives his warm embrace, her eyes closing as they both take a moment to enjoy some of their last time together before she leaves. Shilo has always been a fan of biornns, and in addition to getting her an entire room full of stuffed varieties of th
e animal, her father long ago took to addressing her by the pet name of which she’s now so fond. “You can do absolutely anything you want. You’re a very talented young lady.”


Shilo opens her eyes as her father releases her at the sound of a low chime and looks to his wife. It’s time for their shuttle to leave. Unfortunately, Shilo’s flight doesn’t board for another few millidays because it’s running late, but the shuttles have been running early all day. They have to leave before she can take off. “You’re going to do great, Shilo,” Shilo’s mother says, giving her daughter a quick kiss on the forehead before making her way to the shuttle. Shilo looks at the shuttle preparing to take her parents home, leaving her here before she flies off to another planet by herself for the first time.

“We love you, Zhilo’Biornn. We’ll be praying for you. I promise we will, every day until we see you again. Drigan’di will be so sick of our prayers that she’ll answer them just to get us to shut up.” At this comment by her father, Shilo laughs, her white teeth showing as she grins widely, wiping away the tears that have worked their way forward, a few of the green hairs she received from her father working their way through the blue and across her face. He smiles back, his left hand running through his green hair as he puts his right around Shilo’s mother, the two of them stepping back into the shuttle. They wave as the door closes, the designator ‘86492VI87S2M932O’ easily visible in white against the fading red hull of the shuttle.

The bell indicating that Shilo’s ship is boarding sounds, and Shilo continues to wave as she turns away, listening to the hum of the shuttle’s drives starting back up. She turns back and sees, across the terminal, the shuttle start to take off as she makes her way into the entryway of the ship that’s to take her to Osgord. An attendant helps her along, pressing her hand lightly against Shilo’s shoulder, just as the unthinkable happens.

As the shuttle begins to take off, one of its drives explodes, sending shockwaves through the terminal and across the entire dock as bodies fly like rag dolls through the air and across the room. Shilo watches, almost as if in slow motion, as the shuttle spins and rolls out of control away from the terminal in reaction to the explosion, one entire side of the shuttle simply gone, replaced by a horrifying scene of bloody carnage. Then, the shuttle slams into another shuttle trying to fly out of its way, folding tightly upon itself as the two shuttles are driven down into the water surrounding the docks. Just as it seems nothing could get worse, another drive can be seen exploding in the water.

“No!” Shilo screams, but her own is muffled by the roar of thousands of others screaming with her. Robot crews can be seen running toward the scene just as others run away, the scene of the terminal turning quickly from a terrifying moment of shock to a fully terrified cacophony of panic, wreckage, and bodies. The attendant beside Shilo puts her hand up to her ear to better hear an order from the ship’s pilot and quickly drops it, moving instead to push Shilo into the ship.

Shilo hears the roar of interplanetary drives fully warmed up as she’s pushed through the entryway and into the main compartment of the ship. She barely has time to take in the strange appearance of the ship, which seems to be filled with much more women and girls with blue hair than she expected, before the attendant presses her into a stasis pod with a slight glow in her eyes, her brown wig falling to one side to reveal tightly wrapped blue and red hair beneath it.

As the stasis begins to set in on her, Shilo takes one last look around, seeing all the other confused faces in freshly sealed stasis pods beside peaceful ones in pods already fully active. Shilo closes her eyes and holds her book tightly against her chest, fully aware of the only possible outcome of two such massive explosions on her parents. They can’t be alive, but she still is. She begins to whisper a prayer to Drigan’di as the stasis finally catches up with her. The prayer won’t be finished until she awakens on Osgord in a quarter of a cycle.



Your mind reels as you return from the memory for the second time. There is so much to learn from that memory that you had never thought about before now. You once asked your daddy why he said that vague, almost subjectless prayer every day. He couldn’t remember. Now, thinking on it all, you’re surprised he remember to say it at all.

You think back to the scene of the ship. There were so many Blue girls there, and yet there are so few Valkyries. You wonder for a moment how selective this Matriarch must be that most of those girls never became Valkyries. Then, you think back to the destination Shilo had you program into the Valkyr navigation systems before entering stasis. You didn’t program Thor as your destination. Right now, as you silently float your rock through space, you are heading to the planet Osgord. You wonder for once what awaits you there.

Hungry for knowledge and still hoping to get out of this wakeful stasis which your mother once assured Shilo was very rare, you make your way into Shilo’s next memory. It’s time you start your training, after all…

Prophecy of the Dragon

Prophecy of the Dragon

Stars shall fall.

Worlds shall burn.

Councils dissolve,

A Monarchy’s spurn.

 

Two races remain,

At peace and at war,

Two fates divide them,

Their sorrows outpoured.

 

Soldiers shall live,

Light People be lost,

And evil shall find them,

Unspeakable cost.

 

Seeds shall scatter,

Their legacies great,

And outward shall carry

In vaults numbered eight.

A home once lost

Will be again found.

A world once great

Will bear a glass ground.

The Angels shall hide.

The Ghosts shall haunt.

The Crown shall destroy

With no détente.

The Red Dragon’s birth

To Blue warrior’s womb

Shall take that Crown,

The Void its tomb.

A king born to flames,

The Dragon shall fly.

For the Blue Water Planet,

His tears will she dry.

Innocent children

Shall fall to the blast.

A traitor amidst

To darkness be cast.

But in this a light

Can yet be found

For to the Red Dragon,

A sight beyond sound.

To Red Dragon King,

The righteous dictator,

Shall be born Gold Phoenix,

Her white light the greater.

The Red Dragon’s bride

Shall find the great Eight,

And all the old worlds

Shall cast out their hate.

Gold Phoenix, she rises,

Sword of ages in hand.

The Light People follow,

Their worlds again grand.

Red Dragon, his bride,

And Gold Phoenix breathe,

Their breath light the stars

As worlds lost unsheathe.

Red Dragon shall sleep

Beside his Blue bride,

And Gold Phoenix risen

His eternal pride.

And Ancients shall find them,

Their company great,

And in Risen Phoenix

Form eternal State.

Memories: The Story of Feliar’Gadi

The ringing pain of absolute stillness rocks your mind as you make your way out of another of Shilo’s memories. You take a few brief moments, or perhaps they were several hours, to contemplate your predicament once more. Somehow, your mind has released itself from stasis to the point where you’re even able to use your higher sensory abilities to a limited extent. A few attempts to enter into an enhanced glow state, however, have convinced you that your body is still entirely static.

A few wanderings in and out of Shilo’s earliest memories have left you a bit shaken. You had  never known your mother to be so young and full of life. Her pregnancy with you, after all, had almost failed due to the aging sickness that tears at Valkyries who have lost their healing abilities. You may not know much about the accident that had almost killed both of your parents, but you do know that it left your mother’s mind and abilities severely diminished, and your mother had never recovered fully before stepping through the Great One’s Doors. Now, seeing her so full of life and wit, your remorse over her passing is redoubled.

You wait a few moments before remembering that you cannot currently shed any tears. In fact, you’re surprised that you can even access memories since your brain shouldn’t technically be working right now. You have a working theory on what may be happening, but you don’t want to get your hopes up until you can at least figure out how this might have happened. Then, you might be able to figure a way out of the situation. You make your way into yet another memory, and you can’t help but think that Shilo must have repressed some of her childhood memories as this one seems to skip ahead quite a bit.



Zhilo’di Khuda’Cronell, Age 6, Basilica of the Great Sword of Drigan’di, Qzcivden, Thor

Shilo is standing in a large crowd between her mother and a man with a disciplined, military look about him. The basilica’s large, mirrored ceiling looms over the massive crowd of people, all of whom are wearing robes, most of them white but some near the front green. In the back of the basilica and the forefront of the crowd, standing before the altar of the Great One, is a piscopoliteer in a red robe reading from a text.

“…At that time, the great Spirit of Faith descended upon Feliar’Gadi, and he slayed the men who had come to his household to take him.” The piscopoliteer’s voice echoes through the basilica and out into the forum as he reads aloud the sacred texts. “When he had done so,” he continues, “Feliar’Gadi took the hair on the head of each man and wove it into a great rope, which he used to tie the men’s bodies together. He then carried the men to the temple of the local Dragons. When they looked inside his heart and saw that the Spirit of Faith was with him, the Dragons were filled with fear that they would be discovered, for the Spirit of Faith holds power over the Dragons when She calls them by name.

“And so, Feliar’Gadi lay before the altar of the Dragons the bodies of the men he had slain and said, ‘See, Dragons, how I have slain these, your minions.’ For the men had been filled with the corruption of heart that Dragons bear from Hikar’Diferus. But the Dragons, fearful that the Spirit of Faith would look upon them with scorn and fill their eyes with the sight of their misdeeds, did not reveal themselves and remained hidden.

“But Feliar’Gadi remembered the day that his family had been slain and remembered the faces of the Dragons, and he untied the bodies, reclaiming the rope he had made from their hair and saying, ‘Teach me the names of these Dragons, my Lady, that I may call them out by name and bring to them slaughter.’ At once, the Spirit of Faith spoke the names of the Dragons into Feliar’Gadi’s mind, and he repeated them, saying, ‘Come out, Dragons, in the name of your Lady and Mother, Drigan’di, and in the name of the Great One.’

“When he had said this, the Dragons were forced out of their hiding place and into his sight. But when he saw the fearful faces of the Dragons and their bodies, so sickly and fearful, he was filled with pity for these beasts. For they had been forced into their state by the corruption of Hikar’Diferus. ‘Oh, Great One,’ Feliar’Gadi prayed, at once falling to his knees with his hands outreached, ‘free these poor creatures from the burden of their dark father’s endless corruption.’

“When they heard this, the Dragons were filled with their father’s anger and charged at Feliar’Gadi. But Feliar’Gadi could not strike them for pity. And the Spirit of Faith poured forth from him and looked upon the Dragons, who rose to strike Feliar’Gadi. The first and greatest of the Dragons there saw her and took on an appearance of great pain and fell to the ground, turning to dust. The second Dragon, too, saw the Spirit and was filled with pain and turned to dust.

“But as the Spirit of Faith looked upon the third and least of the Dragons, the Dragon cried out for mercy and fell to the ground on his own, saying, ‘Forgive me, Mother, for the will that drives me is not my own, and I am too weak to fight it.’ But he would not look upon the Spirit of Faith for fear of her scorn. At this, the Spirit of Faith returned to Feliar’Gadi, whose eyes filled with Her light. Feliar’Gadi rose to his feet and placed his hands upon the Dragon, whose body was at once restored.  The Dragon looked upon Feliar’Gadi and saw the Light of Drigan’di in his eyes. Immediately, the Dragon rose with joy and began to praise the Great One, for he had been restored to the ranks of the Valkyri’din.”

The piscopoliteer looks up from the text and says, “Such are the words of the Great One, spoken to us through his servant, Yisha’idi.”

The response rises up from all the crowd standing in the basilica, “Blessings and thanks be given to the Great One.” Upon saying this, they sit upon their heels on the floor and attend to the piscopoliteer’s interpretations.

“Daddy,” Shilo whispers to the man sitting beside her, “Who’s Drigan’di?” A few eyes surrounding them dart quickly to Shilo and her father before returning to the speaking piscopoliteer.

Shilo’s father shifts slightly on his heels before leaning closer to his daughter and saying, “Drigan’di is the Spirit of Faith. She’s also the leader of the Great One’s army and the Mother of the Valkyri’din. She’s the one who gives us the strength to resist the influence of the Dragons and follow the Great One’s Will.” He looks away from Shilo and to her mother.

Shilo’s mother nods with a gentle smile before taking Shilo’s hand and locking glowing eyes with glowing eyes. “It’s Drigan’di that gives us the light inside us, Shilo. She is outside of time and space, and she is all throughout it at once. She brings us closer to the Great One and protects us from His enemies. She’s the example of perfect choice and trust in the Great One, and she is our Eternal Mother.” As Shilo’s mother finishes speaking, Shilo eagerly begins to raise another question but is interrupted by the piscopoliteer’s invitation to pray. The crowd stands, and as they sign the Sword of Drigan’di, Shilo smiles, her eyes glowing a bit brighter.



The memory fades, and you are again alone in the prison cell your own body has become. This time, however, you are filled with a slight sense of peace that had not been present before the memory. Your parents’ description of Drigan’di may not have been the most complete, but you know now at least that you have encountered Her. You wonder for a moment why no one names their children after Her, but the thought doesn’t linger for great length.

Your patience renewed, you make your way once more into the vaults of Shilo’s memories.

Memories: Hunting Trip

You awake to the diffused red light of Valkyr 43’s cargo hold. Your mind races as you realize your eyes will not open. You also notice a severe tinnitus resonating in your ear. You realize with a sharp and failed attempt to gasp that your body is still in stasis. But, then, why are you–? You reach into the ship with your mind, searching for any life signs beside your own. There are none. You expand the reach of your search, and find that you are in the depth of space, the interplanetary void. You’re also completely alone. ‘Shilo?’ Your internal voice almost seems to echo inside your head. Shilo does not reply. If your heart were beating, it would do so more rapidly at this point. Unfortunately, it isn’t doing anything right now.

You search Shilo’s memories, which are still accessible, for an idea toward what may be happening right now. You find yourself unable to make sense of the material through sheer access without Shilo’s assistance. This leaves you with only one choice: You have to sort through each memory in chronological order and learn what you need to know for yourself. Shilo’s consciousness is still in stasis with the rest of you, and it’s of the utmost importance that you understand what this is so that you can solve your current predicament. If you continue like this for the entire journey to Thor, your mind won’t survive. You start with the earliest memory you can find: the hunting trip.



Zhilo’di Khuda’Cronell, Age 5, Skogr Forest

“Can you see it, Shilo?” A woman speaks to a young girl, Shilo, while dropping to her perch on the branch, her motion almost birdlike in its gracefulness. There isn’t a sound as the woman moves onto the branch, which moves no more than it would have had there been a mild breeze. Her long, almost purely blue hair falls into perfect, wavy locks as it settles against her back. She points in a direction slightly right of forward, her eyes trained on Shilo.

Shilo looks in the same direction as the woman, her eyes training on a small Lake Wyrm, its ulfr-like snout sniffing at the air as it climbs up the side of a distant tree. Its forward paws clench at the bark of the tree with razor-sharp claws while its rear flippers bat at the tree in a typical hunting pattern. A nearby bird hears the wet beating and responds with a low-swooping scan of the water, looking for the creature that so clearly just slapped the water with its fins. As it passes the wyrm’s position, however, the bird sees the predator turn its head toward him. The bird manages a few rapid beats with his wings before the wyrm lands on him, enveloping his wings with its flippers and digging its claws into his neck, already biting into the bird as it passes into the water.

“Yes,” Shilo replies, her eyes fixed on the point in the water where the wyrm just plummeted. Her mouth is still slightly open as the ripples fade.

The woman ties her hair up into a recursive bun and pulls two small knives from the leather pouch tied to the side of her leg. The first knife, she places into her hair, securing the bun. The second, she hands to Shilo, smiling gently. “They all do that. I’m not sure why the birds haven’t caught on yet, but it works, so that’s how they hunt. You’re going to counter it with this knife.”

Shilo gives her a quizzical look. She’s clearly not sure how the knife is going to counter the wyrm’s hunting method. “How?” The question is simple and childish, as innocent as if she were asking how to tie a bow rather than how to kill an apex predator with a single throwing knife.

The woman smiles patiently as she explains, “When the bird is passing, the wyrm will jump from the tree to the bird. Any other time, and she’ll hear this knife long enough before it reaches her, giving her plenty of time to move out of the way. At that exact moment, though,” the woman grinned, “the wyrm can’t change direction. She can’t dodge. In fact, if you throw the knife right through the bird’s neck, you’ll get her clean in the head every time.”

Shilo grimaces at the thought of a knife passing through both a bird’s neck and a wyrm’s head at the same time. Nevertheless, when the woman asks, “Ready?” Shilo nods.

The woman points again, designating Shilo’s target. A wyrm only a few trees away has just started batting her tree. Dead silence runs through the two as they watch the wyrm’s prey approach. The bird flies around the edge of the tree, expecting to find a fish or small water mammal. Instead, he only finds smooth water. The bird caws lightly at the sight in surprise, but continues his glide around the tree. As he passes beneath the wyrm, the predator’s head turns toward him, her front legs kicking out from the tree and turning it about.

At that exact moment, the woman glances slightly to her side toward Shilo, whispering directly into the girl’s mind, ‘Now!’ Shilo, however, grimaces and hesitates for a single moment, long enough for the wyrm to drop with h
er prey into the water before the knife passes through the point the wyrm had just been, planting itself into the bark of the tree.


Clearly disappointed in herself, Shilo looks to the woman, expecting a similar expression from her but instead finding a kind smile. “Sorry, Mommy.”

The expression on Shilo’s mother’s face grows even softer as she ruffles her daughter’s hair. “It’s no problem, Shilo. We’ll just get a different one…”



The memory fades, and you find yourself once again alone with your thoughts. Were it not for the stasis, you’d certainly have produced tears at the memory of your mother and Shilo’s so young. As is, however, you simply focus your resolve and move onto the next memory. This is going to take a while…

Tunnels

‘This is insane!’ You almost yelp at the blast that just narrowly missed your ship as you maneuver it through the icy labyrinth of tunnels beneath Nivlahim’s surface. The automated defenses for the tunnels have not been deactivated by the flight control station and are now vehemently firing at you, an assumed enemy. When another blast sends a shock wave through the ship after missing by only a hair’s breadth, you shout pointless at the turrets, “I live here!” Needless to say, they ignore your exclamation.
‘Just focus on not getting hit, Keri,’ Shilo’s calm voice resonates through your mind. In response, your face contorts further into frustration. You bite your tongue on the response you could so easily release on her. ‘We don’t want to blow up before we get off this giant ice cube.’
That was it. You can’t take it anymore. ‘Oh, this from the woman who actually got hit and crashed!’ You tear at the controls once more, pulling the Valkyr into a 28-by-15-point turn, spinning round a bend in the tunnel with a heaving groan as the monstrous drives roar to maintain speed. You know that comment isn’t fair. Shilo had been facing not only the automatic but the manned batteries as well, which nearly tripled the defenses and would have made passage through these tunnels all but impossible. Still, you feel better now that you’ve released some of that frustration. You’re almost there, anyway.
‘Overhead,’ Shilo’s voice calls out, and your vision is directed to a small opening that you would have missed otherwise. You press into the controls and send the Valkyr into a forward flip, shooting the ship straight up the small opening in the ceiling of ice before the flip is finished. You’re glad you didn’t miss it, as a shot can be seen passing straight through the point through which you were about to fly before your ship disappears into the tiny tunnel.
At this point, your main goal is to keep the ship from colliding with the sides of the tunnel, which, if anything, seems to be getting narrower. The edges also appear to be increasingly jagged as you pass up through what you realize may simply be a ventilation tunnel ending in rather solid grating. ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ Shilo says. ‘Only an idiot would design something like that the size of a ship. Plus, need I remind you, the atmosphere is toxic on Nivlahim. No one wants to ventilate anything to the atmosphere.’
You can’t help wondering, then, exactly what this overly convenient tunnel is doing here until Shilo interjects again. ‘Look at the walls.’ You do so, and Shilo’s observance once again seems to focus your eyes on what she intends  for you to see. There are claw marks all across the tunnel. Ice wyrms definitely explain the size of the tunnel. While the females are the hunters and fighters, male ice wyrms are the builders and considerably larger than their female counterparts. Some male wyrms can grow to sizes two to three times as big as a Valkyr. That also explains the changing size of the tunnel. As the wyrm dug upward, it lost weight, wanting to finish its tunnel to the snow before breeding season.
You find the ice wyrm’s breeding habits quite extraordinary. Ice wyrms have the unique ability to extract their oxygen from the snow and ice they eat, though in small enough quantities that when on the surface of Nivlahim, they can hardly maintain their hunting habits. Only breeding and hibernation occur on the surface. After ice wyrms breed, they hibernate for almost an entire cycle before the female awakes her mate, and both return to the sea below the ice together before the female gives birth in the water, leaving the male to feed it while she goes to hunt. Both genders of the ice wyrms produce milk for feeding, and while the female is off hunting, the male takes the child to the wyrm caverns, where all ice wyrm children and females live out most of their time while the male adults return to digging after having replenished their strength. It seems strange to you, but nature is a very odd thing.
Sure enough, as the tunnel approaches its narrowest point, a mass of snow can be seen covering the hole at the end of the tunnel. Shilo reminds you quickly to activate the plasma shielding to melt the snow before traveling through it, and you do so just in time. A small patch of snow makes it past the plasma field’s range before it’s raised, causing it to thud softly on the hull of the ship before being melted away. The rest of the snow is turned to steam before it reaches the field and is pushed gently out of the way. Then, for the first time in over four cycles, for the first time since you moved here, and for the first time since your mommy died, you see it. There is a single, solitary source of light in the sky, yet it fills the sky’s vastness with its bright luminance as if there is a hole gently poked in the darkness. Of course, the Bifrost is on the other side of the planet and currently unseen, but you remember it looking more like a tissue that had a rainbow sneezed onto it, simultaneously beautiful and yet somehow disgusting and disturbing. Linthia, however, is like perfection in your eyes, its gentle pinprick of light passing through millions of rosts of void just to reach your eyes. At this distance, it isn’t even harmful to stare at it, and you feel as though you could do just that for days, but you have other business to tend to, and the green star which can look so much like a Valkyrie’s eye during an eclipse isn’t going anywhere.
You press into the controls once more, pulling the Valkyr into a fully vertical ascent and increasing the throttle to full atmo. It is, of course, possible for the ship to fly much faster than this, but the forces would cause undue strain on the air around the ship and cause such events as compression-induced flames and heat lightning, which would not only play hell with the sensors but also draw unnecessary attention to your ship. Full atmo permits speeds well above the necessary for exiting the planetary gravitational field while avoiding such atmospheric anomalies as these. Even at what the ship considers very low speeds, however, you certainly feel the movement of the ship. Your eyes are pressing into the backs of their sockets, leaving your vision extremely narrow as you accelerate to exit velocity. As you pass through the first sets of clouds, even through the dark edges of your vision, you see them.
Large, crudely shaped behemoths barely fit for flying plow through the air like falling boulders. As the compression heat reduces, the ships open their hangar doors, which begin to spew forth small landing shuttles full of Armadian troops. A planet like Nivlahim is, of course, too dangerous to trust with Peacekeeper forces. This is full martial law going into effect, and it’s only after a full surrender will have been issued by the Nivlahimi government. ‘Of course,’ you think to Shilo, ‘the government here is only a shadow government already. Daddy said on the wireless a few weeks ago that the Ginnung Headquarters had been successfully transferred to its new home off of Nivlahim.’
‘What?!’ Shilo’s surprise makes it clear that she didn’t know anything about that before now. ‘Then where are the Ginnung headquartered? We’ve occupied every Ginnung-controlled planet!’ There are a few millidays of mental silence as you rise up through the last of the clouds, the pervading dark of space truly visible now, Linthia a solitary light in the black of the void. You can see the rest of the invading fleet now, its ships issuing forth from heavy carriers and forward operation mobility docks. ‘Then this entire operation was meaningless.’ Shilo’s voice seems distant, sorrowful. So many lives had been lost for no reason, as she saw it.
You can’t respond to her like this. You set the necessary course into the navigation interface and move back down into the cargo hold, where you enter a stasis po
d before your bones start to deteriorate. You haven’t received the proper treatment for extended space travel, and the distance from Nivlahim to Thor isn’t short. Zero gravity for so much time can take a serious toll on an untreated body. As you activate the pod, you utter an audible, “Goodnight, Shilo,” to the hold full of dead bodies and broken parts, your eyes resting on your dipulse as you enter full stasis.

Departure

You check the harnesses again. Even with the utmost confidence in the expertise Shilo’s merge of consciousness with you has provided, you can never be too careful. Even Shilo never actually piloted a dipulse before her… Well, she never piloted a dipulse. You push aside some of your negative feelings and unchain the dipulse. You wish Shilo had noticed the same glisten you had seen through the webbed grating at the bottom of the dividing partition, but she had been too tall. As it is, you still have to make it to the docks and find a ship. Hopefully, there will be one in adequate condition.
You sit yourself atop the massive machine, its primary reactor square between your legs. Reaching down, you pull the securing pin, licking your other hand’s thumb and placing it on the activator switch. At first, there isn’t a sound. Then, in a slow crescendo, you begin to hear the pulses of the engines grow louder as the coldstone reactor feeds them with unfathomable power, the low tone growing into a roar you’ve never heard from a pulse car. It’s almost… animalistic. You grin, a bit of Shilo’s darker burn showing in your eyes for a few moments. Then, you activate the throttles.
There’s nothing in your or Shilo’s memories to which you can compare the sensation you experience as the dipulse rises from the floor like a yawning drig. Your grip tightens and your legs clench against the dipulse harder as you begin to understand just how difficult this beast will be to control. At the same time, Shilo’s experience as a pilot keeps your hands steady and your eyes forward even as some very distracting sounds begin to emanate from the rear engine. You pull the throttles apart and lean forward into the proper position and very carefully manipulate your feet over the engines’ positioning controls. The dipulse’s engines begin to tilt, and the machine begins to move forward.
You squint a bit as the dipulse pulls out of the side of the building that can no longer be your home, regret toward that fact absent from your focused mind. You turn your toes outward from each other, turning the vehicle left with a true zero turn radius, hard to obtain in even the most advanced pulse cars today. You return your feet into line and bring the throttles up. The sound of the dipulse’s ridiculous engines grows even louder as the beast rises higher and begins moving forward with unparalleled power. Before you know it, you’re turning again toward the docks along the main lowway, your feet adjusting deftly to any fluctuations in the dipulse’s movement against your intentions. For fun, you roll the machine full circle, almost losing contact with the positioning controls. When you get back into an upright position, you decide you won’t be doing that again.
You crank up the throttles even more along the lowway, tilting the engines back toward horizontal more, bringing the dipulse into a lower but much faster position. Wind rushes past you at obscene speeds as you approach over 50 rosts per centiday, and you can almost feel the air cutting at you with a chill factor that would be completely unbearable were it not for your armor. You see the docks ahead and factor down the throttles. When you reach the turn for the docks, you turn your toes toward one another, turning the dipulse to the right.  Quickly, you rotate your right foot to face the same direction as your left, changing the dipulse’s momentum away from its previous direction and redirecting it forward. You gradually bring your feet back in line as you begin to travel along the correct road, reducing the throttle as you approach the docks.
As you reach the ships locked into place, you start looking for one in flying condition. Most of them have been destroyed or severely damaged, likely as a part of the initial incursion. Then, you see a ship that is both foreign and familiar in appearance. Though you have never seen a ship anything like this before, Shilo’s memories tell you that this is a Valkyr, its viewport cracked and covered in old blood from the inside. Your initial suspicion is that there was electrical damage to a vital component for the main drives, and that led to an explosion inside the ship before they were able to finish suiting up. You park the dipulse alongside the cargo bay door in the aft section of the ship and get off, your legs a bit shaky for a choice few moments.
You walk over to the bioswitch on the cargo door and press yourself against the hull of the ship as the door opens. Just as you suspected, air comes rushing out as soon as the seal inside the ship is broken. The smell of death is borne freshly into the surrounding air, and you close the fresh air intake on your breather, switching into recirc. The smell of rancid flesh is quickly replaced by the scent of sterilized air, and you gulp in the clean air like it’s water. Your eyes begin to water, and you feel unease in your belly as the mere memory of such a strong odor almost sends you to your knees.
‘It isn’t the worst smell in the worlds,’ Shilo comments in your mind. At this, you thin your gaze and harden yourself, shaking off the sensation that the smell had sent coursing down your spine. You then step out and turn toward the door, your eyes narrow behind your visor as you analyze the cargo hold. Once you’re satisfied there’s nothing alive in there, you take your first step onto a real warship.
The cargo hold is fairly utilitarian, intentionally built to be as versatile as possible. There are indented portions of the bulkhead which look as though they’re designed to fit stasis pods. A quick check of Shilo’s memories lets you know for sure. The deck has many ports and interfaces in it, as do the struts in the bulk- and overhead. A ship like this could be purposed to serve as anything from a prisoner transport to a concealed command center, as long as the appropriate equipment were brought aboard. A rush of images of items you loaded onto the dipulse without even realizing it make their way into your thoughts as Shilo says, ‘We need to keep focused on the task at hand until we’re off this planet.’
You start unloading the items and hooking them up in the cargo hold, one by one. Once you finish putting together the spare components you might need for repair, you load up the food and medical supplies for your journey and anchor the dipulse inside the cargo hold. Before opening the main hold’s hatch, you activate the dipulse’s engines, and air whooshes through the hold. With any luck, that will keep any foul smell from staying in the ship much longer. Then, you activate the bioswitch with the built-in interface in your armor, preventing you from having to remove your breather to lick your thumb again. In your mouth, a small suction tube extends under your tongue, removes some saliva, and retracts once more, pumping the saliva brought a series of valves and to a small divot in your armor’s lightly padded thumb. You place it against the switch, and the responding light indicates that the process was successful.
The main hold hatch dilates open, and you pull yourself up. Looking about, you find the drive maintenance panel to the aft of your present position and move toward it, carefully treading over the paste-like spread that was once a Valkyrie’s head, walking around the body as best you can. Shilo’s memory of protocols tells you that their present state should be preserved for future investigation and memorial services. Before you open the panel, you receive a memory nudge, and you activate the main drive holographic sensors and your armor’s radiation shielding, which protects you from the high energy radiation of the sensors, which isn’t enough to irradiate any of the materials in the drive compartment in the long term but could make living tissue in the compartment a bit uncomfortable for the next several hours. The high energy sensors, however, could detect even the most microscopic defects i
n the drive system, and that point is illustrated when the sensors deactivate, and the ship’s systems send the results to the nearest handheld interface, which is conveniently built right into the wrist of your armor.
As you make your way through the diagnostics, you notice Shilo’s voice making note of each parameter that is outside of the range she desires, even if the ship doesn’t seem to think it’s a problem. Finally, you get to the list of defective parts and find it to be very similar to the list of parts you assembled in the cargo hold, minus a few smaller parts here and there that didn’t seem to make the ship’s list. ‘How’d you know what was wrong with the ship, Shilo?’
A moment of clearheaded silence follows before Shilo replies, ‘This is what’s wrong with all of the Valkyrs. These are the parts that the ship isn’t actually supposed to use. They just happen to be the best parts we can put on the ships right now. This one,’ an image of a particularly large part that had been very annoying to put together, ‘is what seems to have caused the malfunction this time, which is why we needed so many of the replacement parts. Officially, this may only be Valkyr 2, but that’s just because it’s being used in conjunction with an Armadian operation, and as an official strength of its own, the Valkyrie has only existed for a few cycles now. Truth be told, though, this is Valkyr 43. I was piloting Valkyr 45. We actually have a different drive system that these ships are designed to use, but it hasn’t been reinvented yet, so we can’t use it publicly. Not that that drive system was really used a lot beforehand, anyway…’
Shilo trails off, but the point has been made. Shilo had put together a list of parts that might be needed to repair any expected malfunction, and because of the particular malfunction at hand, you happen to need most of them. You get to work bringing the replacement parts up and installing them as you bring the replaced parts down to the cargo hold and secure them for evidence.
A few centidays later, you seal up the drive compartment and perform another scan. After the diagnostic reports seem to satisfy Shilo, you walk forward toward the main hatch. Again, you step around the remains so thoroughly grafted to the deck of the main hold and now covered with a sealing agent that has been placed over both itself and the other corpse slightly forward of the hatch. This time, however, when you head down into the cargo hold, it is to deactivate the dipulse and seal the ship once more. Once the door has closed, you begin to remove your helmet before thinking of the two bodies upstairs, along with the body of Shilo’s copilot, which had been so horribly decapitated when it found its way flying through the ship’s main viewport. You leave the helmet fastened as you head up and into the cockpit.
You look about at the various displays and interfaces and notice that some things appear to have been intentionally withheld from the design, as if to make it easier to put something in later. Thinking back to Shilo’s monologue only a few centidays ago, you realize why. It hasn’t been invented yet, but the Valkyr was somehow still designed to use it. You shrug it off for now, determined to ask every question you have the moment you get somewhere safe. You begin activating switches and interfaces, and the cockpit comes alight. The displays come to life around you, and you find the seat securing your armor to itself with thick bolts that screw into the joints of your armor.
Without bothering to clear your takeoff with the now-desolate control station, you start up the main drives, a monstrous sound that Shilo insists is normal emanating through the compartment aft of you. With one last check that all parameters are to Shilo’s liking, you press into the controls and start flying a ship toward space for the first time in your life, despite the fact that your feet can barely reach the deck. Keria’Ledrii Khuda’Cronell is not a name the future will soon forget.

Keri

You look in disbelief at Shilo’s faint smile as the incredible glow she exudes fades to nothing. Your heart sinks as you watch her body fall to the ground with a dead weight that you’ve seen entirely too often in the past few days. Your mind rings with the years of information that have just made their way into a mind far younger than the information itself just as you realize that this was your sister. Instantly, you continue your run to her side, your eyes filling with tears, even as you come into concurrence with reality that Shilo is, in fact, dead. The glow in her eyes is gone as you drop to her side and lift her head, that smile still present on the face which has been emptied of life.

Words fail to reach your lips. You aren’t sure how long it is that you sit there, the smell of blood filling the lobby as the chill sets in. The room had been warmed by the battle, but now, its stagnance returns the former temperature to place as your eyes drain all tears from you. Your breathing becomes erratic as your nose runs with grief. Finally, a flimsy wail begins to make its way out of your throat. Any need for pomp and circumstance has just vanished from your world, which has grown geometrically in the past few days. Tears, snot, and noise emanate from you without apology as your grief and anger at the world are released, your own glow burning brightly. As you approach a brighter glow than you’ve ever released, however, a voice in your mind whispers softly, ‘Stop.’

Your glow fades to its normal level instantly, and you sniffle as you recognize the voice: Shilo. You look down at her body, sniffling again, your eyes searching her own for some sign of life. There is none. Death is your only greeter on the other side of those doors. Nevertheless, you reach out in all directions with your own mind, screaming soundlessly into the void, ‘Shilo?! Are you there?’

For a few moments, you look about yourself, holding Shilo’s empty frame with shielding arms. But then, ‘Of course I’m not here, you silly girl, but did you think I’d leave you all by yourself?’ You can’t make sense of it, but surely there’s some explanation. Shilo is dead, but that voice is Shilo’s, too. How can that be? Then, the voice speaks again from inside your own mind, ‘Look, I know this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but with the amount of my mind I gave you, there’s bound to be a certain residual amount of me left over in it. Now get up. We have to get you off this planet.’

You stand, setting Shilo’s head on the marble floor. She’s right, or you are. You suppose they’re really your own thoughts based on Shilo’s residual personality ingrained into the associated information. Nevertheless, it’s good to hear her voice, at least, and you take the time you need to reach the entrance to your home to sort through some of that information. You realize it’s mostly memories, but some of it is schematics, training, and technical information that would have taken years to learn. There are techniques for breathing, and you think you can catch a passing glimpse at a special type of sleep, but then you reach the room with all the gadgets and gizmos Daddy had left behind.

Looking at the room with new eyes, you see weapons and armors you never would have recognized before. Farther along, toward the back of the room in a more dimly lit section, you see a glint of metal. Moving your way toward the glint, you stop here and there to grab new weapons and refasten better armor. Your healing has almost finished when you reach the back wall. The glint is behind it. How did it–?

‘Bioswitch,’ Shilo’s voice says. At that moment, you notice a small, dusted-over switch in the darkest corner of the room. You brush off the panel, lick your thumb deftly, and press it against the switch until you hear a light beep. A panel lifts slowly, a motor whining weakly as you begin to see a small hole behind the panel. There is no lever to indicate a larger door, but the hole seems small enough that you could squeeze through it. You bring yourself down to all fours and scoot your way through the hole.

Once through, you look up and see an old dipulse: an early form of pulsecar that was designed with two primary pulse engines that rotated freely as opposed to the now-standard eight with up to twenty stabilizers. The skill required to pilot a dipulse was compared with that required to pilot a fighter ship. Well, that’s odd. You didn’t know that at all before. The wonderment at the novelty of such knowledge is soon drowned by a renewed grief over Shilo’s departure, which is followed by Daddy’s, and that by Mommy’s. You’re very nearly overwhelmed by the emotions when you hear Shilo’s voice call out, ‘Not yet, Keri. You can grieve later. You need to get off the planet now.’

She’s right. Or, rather, you are. You decide it’s best just to think of it as Shilo and not yourself for now. It might comfort you enough to make it off this world which has so long been your home. Casting that thought aside, you start looking for a way to exit the room with the dipulse. As you do so, you realize that you do not expect any difficulty piloting the vehicle and that you are quite aware of how to reach the docks from here. Thanking Shilo just as her voice points out a mechanical lever on the opposite end of the room from where you were even looking, you turn about and remind yourself to be more aware of the wider view allotted to you by these helmets.

Jumping up a couple of times, you finally manage to reach the lever with a bit of glow, and your weight pulls it down with a loud clacking sound. A chaotic grind can be heard from inside the wall as, to your surprise, it lowers instead of rising. You blink once or twice before making your way back to the dipulse, noticing that with the lowering outside wall, the wall to the rest of the armory rises, and the wall into the apartment slides back. WIth a sudden realization, you realize that the pictur
es are still inside, and you use a bit of glow to ensure you beat the slow-moving walls in and back out of the apartment, the boxes which have become entirely priceless to you held firmly in your grasp.


You make your way back to the outer room and begin to load up for your trip. The first things you load into the dipulse are the boxes of pictures, followed by the choice weapons and tools Shilo had noticed on her first pass through the armory. You even mount a few specialized weapons onto the dipulse before firing its engines, their familiar, low pulse providing a small comfort as you prepare to make your way to the docks, where Valkyr 2 is awaiting small repairs whose associated damages had resulted in its pilots’ deaths. ‘Let’s go,’ Shilo’s voice echoes into your mind. ‘You’re going to have to drive, though.’ You suppress an urge to roll your eyes and grin. Maybe Shilo isn’t as gone as you thought.

The Beat

‘One.’ Your fist reaches up, pushing away the wyrm’s massive form and snapping its neck with a flick of the wrist. Your hand then grasps the top of its head between its ears and crushes it brains as you use the force of it to pull yourself out from beneath the wyrm, tossing yourself over the beast and hurling yourself toward Keri, who remains unseen behind the swarm of wyrms slashing and gnashing at her. Your heart beats audibly in your ear. ‘Two,’ you think to yourself.
At some point, you appear to have reclaimed your sword. The where and when of it doesn’t really matter as you cleave your way into the nearest wyrm, its skull splitting open in a satisfying but somehow distant, wet, and crunchy sound. Its body slumps down, and you ride it to the next wyrm, which turns its foaming jowls toward you just in time for you to reach out and tear its lower jaw off, sliding your sizzling blade through its brain and pulling it down through its spine. Your heart beats again, the sound of it pounding like a large drum. ‘Three.’
A wyrm bites your empty hand, trying to keep you from reaching her sisters. You turn your helmeted head toward the beast, the black and green tendrils of dark light associated with full glow emanating from the inside of the blast visor, and the wyrm’s eyes go wide as, instead of trying to pull your arm out, you plant your feet and drive it farther in, blowing out the back of the beast’s neck just below its nape. You clench your fist and launch a plasma bolt at the surprised wyrm behind it. At this range, one would be enough. Your world shakes as the sound of another heartbeat echoes in your ear. ‘Four.’
You swing your hand around, firing two more bolts as you go and using your other arm to skewer a wyrm only a hair’s breadth away from your face. The wyrm’s momentum carries it through the motion, slamming its now-dead body into you and knocking you back several steps before you manage to toss it away beside you just in time to be tackled by the white, heavily furred figure of a particularly large wyrm. You grab its head with both hands and twist it viciously, throwing its limp carcass into two of the others. The remaining three wyrms are huddled together facing inward and snapping at something. That must be Keri. You dispose of the two wyrms buried beneath their fallen comrades with a bolt each to the brain as you jump toward the final trio. You plunge your sword into one of the wyrms, and the last two finally turn toward you. You extend an arm to fire a bolt, but your launcher’s overheated. It wasn’t designed to fire so quickly and frequently.
An explosion can be felt in your head as your heart beats again. ‘Five.’ You’re cutting it close, but you have to reach Keri. The nearer of the two wyrms launches itself toward you, its claw slamming directly into your collar, disengaging your helmet and sending you several paces to the side. You managed to right yourself before sliding to a halt. Your helmet’s damage is just sufficient enough that your display has gone black, so you remove it before launching yourself toward the wyrm, throwing your helmet with enough force to slow you down significantly and to crush half of the wyrm’s skull, allowing you to redirect toward the last wyrm, which has started to rear its claws, preparing to swing down. You don’t hesitate as you prepare one last burst of compressed energy behind you, projecting you at a speed nearing that of the sound of your own battle cry as your hair flies about in the wind of your own motion, the dark light of the full glow turning your hair a deep green with tendrils of dark green light emanating from your eyes and hair, even your eyebrows and lashes, almost seeming to absorb the light around rather than emitting it.
Your fist comes into contact with the wyrm, and you flick your wrist down, bringing the sword down and cleaving the wyrm clean in two straight down to its shoulder blades, its spinal cord cut cleanly in two, and its brains draining into the newly formed space between hemispheres. You suppress a gag at the sight as you sheathe the blade, looking to Keri, who is uncurling from the fetal position, your helmet crushed and tossed to the side along with several pieces of her armor. She’s bleeding in several places, but she seems to have sustained no permanent or even overly severe damage. Her mouth moves slowly, her arm seeming to be at a near halt despite its current path toward you. Piecing the expressions together, you realize she’s asking if you’re alright. You blink, the motion taking what feels like an eternity. You look around and see that some of the wyrms are still falling to the ground with a pace like syrup.
You’re forgetting something in the elation of saving Keri. You just know it. At that moment, you recall the words of the Valkyrie who had trained you most closely. “Never stay in full glow more than six heartbeats,” she had said. “The stress of the exertion and friction on your body could take a serious toll on you. It has a nasty habit of killing most Valkyries who don’t spend much time in full glow regularly. I would recommend avoiding full glow entirely, since a lot of us don’t have the discipline to spend only a few moments in a state of such speed and power. If you must, though, Zhilo’di, don’t stay in it too long. You’re powerful, but I’ve only ever known the Matriarch to be that powerful.”
You think to yourself how odd it is that you remember that now, but your thoughts are coming to a halt. You look one more time at Keri, who has started to kick her way into a run toward you, and you smile, the sensation of such love that you hadn’t known for cycles overwhelming you. Using the last power of which you can be certain, you reach out to Keri’s mind and send as much information that she may need as you can. The stress that would take on your brain ceases to bear relevance as the world booms about you a sixth time, and your hair returns to normal, the glow in your eyes fading forever with a single accompanying thought borne upon your lips. “Goodbye.” The world goes cold, and your vision turns black, only the long-past sound of your mother’s voice in your ears, a faint and gentle smile on your lips for eternity.

Battle

Your hand reaches the hilt of your great grandmother’s sword just in time to be absolutely useless. Before you can come into reach of the wyrm in front of you, its great claws slam into you at full force. The momentum from your charge is reduced to nothing as the impulse of the collision takes its full effect on your arm, which had absorbed the brunt of the trauma by snapping like a twig. A part of your mind registers the pain for a single, screaming moment before you disengage from the thought. You don’t have time for pain as you hit the ground, looking up in satisfaction as you see that the wyrm’s nearest limb has been rather badly mangled by the impact, and the wyrm isn’t as determined as you are to ignore pain. Its shrieking scream resonates in your teeth and along your spine as it reels back from the pain.
You take advantage of the moment to grab the sword and draw it as you leap forward again, this time with the sweeping cut already in progress. You barely record the spray of blood in your memory as you make your way straight through the wyrm’s neck. What does stick with you is the ease with which the sword cuts. Naturally, it would immediately after being drawn. The plasma scabbard had a handy side effect of heating up the blade. Nevertheless, the sword feels unnaturally natural in your hand, despite the pain screaming through your arm even as you can feel the bones repairing themselves as you push yourself further into full glow, the hauntingly emotionless harbinger of death that exists there coming nearer and nearer to the surface of your mind as your left foot hits the wall.
At the sensation of the event, your eyes glance out the door lazily while your leg kicks you out of the small passage, your hand grabbing the edge of the doorway as you pass through it, twisting you around the corner and against the wall just to the side, the frame of the door bending outward beneath your fingers as you spin around it with a force well beyond the structure’s design limits. As your legs brace against the wall, you take in the scene before you. It seems that you made a slight miscalculation in the number of wyrms outside your shelter. In addition to the not twelve but instead eighteen wyrms in the main lobby, there are eight more making their ways in and out of rooms in upper floors, their massive bodies squeezing into the doors like rodents.
The wall collapses slowly as your feet plunge into it, and you take one last moment to plan. Then, before the sweeping claws of the nearest wyrm reach you, your legs kick off again, this time compressing the marble wall to at most half of its original thickness, the energy produced through the action sending you tearing toward the top of the lobby at a ridiculous speed.  Utilizing this time, you extend both arms, the microwave beam emitter cooking the brains out of two wyrms in the time it takes you to fire five bolts each at two others’ faces utilizing your armor’s built-in bolt launcher, their heads turning to mush beneath the force of the plasma slugs.
You tuck your body into a ball, kicking your legs out above you to catch the ceiling as you reach the top. Just as you do, one of the ice wyrms that had been crawling about up there took a swipe at you, catching you straight in the chest. Your armor protects you from any damage beyond a few cracked ribs and a loss of breath, but you’re thrown entirely to the far wall. You hit the wall with considerably more speed than really works in that position, so instead of bracing, you roll it out along the wall, catching the lip of a walkway about a floor down with your left hand as your right brings your sword to meet the nearest wyrm’s horrible maw. As the end of the blade emerges from the beast, your feet kick off again, sending you spiraling back down to the ground floor, where you can feel Keri moving toward a wyrm with the same stealth she used to follow you on your first day in the city. You land directly on the head of another wyrm, and you kick its roaring head into a forceful roll with enough of an impact to twist its spinal column out of alignment, its vertebrae snapping with a sound like the crack of a bolt of lightning. The remaining twenty wyrms must hear it, too, because the shriek that follows is too uniform, too simultaneous, and entirely too much like a war cry for your comfort. One of the wyrms is quickly silenced, however, as Keri’s own microwave emitter aims straight up and cooks its brain like steamed korn. You hold out your own and boil the life out of the two that had just turned toward her.
 
‘Seventeen left,’ you hear her say into her own mind. ‘I can get…’ There is a pause as she fires a bolt straight into the eye of an approaching wyrm. ‘Seven.’ She turns to you and calls out over the wireless, “Can you get these ones next, please?” A series of ten target identifiers appear on your screen, each corresponding to a different wyrm.
In response, your hands go out, and two of the designated wyrms die within moments, the work of your emitter and bolt launcher. Before you hit the ground, still riding the head of your earlier kill, the wyrm that struck you earlier drops toward you from the ceiling, sweeping its paw toward you with more foresight than you would normally expect. It screams as you start to dodge, and it swings its tail wide, realigning its motion with your own. You twist about, pressing your hand into the flesh of the dead wyrm beneath you to change your direction again, but you can’t find a good grip, and now it’s too late.
The wyrm’s massive fin strikes you with the force of a high-energy repeater blast straight to the back, breaking the sound blaster sitting there. In response, the other wyrms shriek victoriously and move in, their aggression renewed now that the sound inhibiting them has been eliminated. You can feel their malice as they move toward Keri, who has just taken out another wyrm. You try to move out toward her, but the wyrm has you pinned, its massive jaw trying to close over your head. It’s all you can do to give your neck the strength not to break, the light in your helmet almost obscuring your view of your screen completely. You hear a scream over the wireless that sounds entirely too little like a wyrm as Keri turns toward the approaching thirteen wyrms, who are stampeding toward her with a speed she hadn’t seen before.
“No,” you whisper to yourself, tears trying to force their way out of your eyes. The world turns dark as you pass completely into full glow out of desperation.

Lessons Learned

The high-pitched squeal that cries out beside you reminds you of the first time you ever saw a wyrm. The ice wyrm is, in addition, the largest and most vicious of the wyrms. Seeing an entire pack of the vicious monsters climbing about the walls of the lobby as you gaze carefully through the crack in the doorway is enough to put a deep pit in your own stomach. You place your hand against Keri’s chest, pushing her farther back into the residence as you close the door softly, stepping coolly back. Once you are satisfied the wyrms haven’t detected you, you turn around and look at Keri.
Her eyes are wide with fear as she looks pleadingly up to you. Instead of smiling kindly at her, however, your face turns hard as the shine in your eyes grows brighter. She backs off slightly, letting you think as she tries looking for something useful to do.
There have to be at least twelve wyrms out there, maybe more. You didn’t exactly get a good look at the scene through that tiny slit. Looking about the large apartment which had been so thoroughly designed, you start looking for that which Valkyries so rarely need: a weapon. You go into the bedroom from which Keri had retrieved the pictures. Surely, your father had owned a weapon, despite any memory loss he had suffered from such a total annihilation of his cortexes. He had, after all, maintained his paranoia as a member of the Qzcidell Plant which had been placed on the outer worlds in conjunction with the Valkyries so many ages ago.
You find nothing in the main section of the room, but you should have expected as much. He probably didn’t even trust himself after your mother died. Your mind quivers as the impact of the thought hits you like so many repeater rounds to the chest. Your mother is dead, and so is your father. You’ve known this for a long time, but your father only died a few days ago, really. For some reason, this bothers you more.
The thought comes to a pause as your eyes catch glimpse of a carefully concealed bioswitch on the upper right-hand corner of the far wall. Walking to it, you lick your thumb and place it on the switch deftly, hoping it will recognize the descendant of its proper operator as valid in the genetic coding. The switch lights green, and you grin wryly as the switch slides down the wall to reveal a handle. You pull on it, and your footing is called into question as the room quivers with the opening of a blast door which had been so well hidden as a wall. You turn to see Keri standing at the door, a small Valkyrie fight suit put on half-wrong, the armor connectors misaligned with the proper points on her body. Armor wouldn’t even latch onto it like that. She walks closer to stand behind you as the blast door’s opening reveals a room full of the equipment you had known your parents would have had.
The room was a treasure trove to any warrior, and before extensive brain damage had surely swept away large portions of your parents’ memories, they had been some of the best. Before your eyes lay a horde of weapons, many of which would be unknown to some of the system’s most highly trained special forces, excluding the Valkyries and Qzcidell Plants. You’ll have to be sure to come back and load up before you left the planet, but right now, you have more pressing matters to which you must attend.
From your previous encounter with an ice wyrm, you learned a handful of helpful facts about the massive foes. ‘Lesson One,’ you think to yourself as you reach up to grab a directed sound blaster and set it to its lowest pitch settings, ‘Wyrms communicate with high-frequency sounds but absolutely hate ultra low-pitched sound. That’s why they stay away from cities under most circumstances. The pulse-cars drive them crazy.’
‘Lesson Two,’ you think, grabbing a device that would look remarkably similar to a spotlight to untrained eyes; to yours, however, it’s a focused microwave emitter. ‘That tough hide may be able to withstand projectile blasts, but it cooks easily enough.’ A quick flick of the wrist sends it spinning over your forearm, the notch on its side sliding into an accepting groove in your armor. It slides firmly into place, and it’s controls go dim as they integrate with your armor’s DPU.
‘Lesson Three,’ you think, moving over to the armor rack and grabbing the first of many pieces that will add further plating and shock resistance to your armor. ‘Getting hit by an ice wyrm hurts like an Oa’din, regardless of where or how glancing it may have been.’ As if to emphasize your point, a loud pounding begins against the door into the apartment. You find it simultaneously fascinating and frustrating that they’ve already made enough of a dent in the main door that the vacuum seal preventing such noise from reaching the apartment has been breached.
At the sound, you notice, Keri’s eyes grow hard, as if in memory. You wish for a moment that you could tell her everything will be alright, but you know that it’s already too late for anything to be right. This war had taken its toll. You see that Keri has fixed her clothing and has begun attaching armor in an effort to follow your own actions. ‘How much does this girl already know?’ you wonder. You push the thought aside at the sound of another pounding against the door, this time accompanied by a painfully unpleasant scraping sound.
‘Right,’ you think, ‘Lesson Four.’ You take hold of a sword which was distinguishably crafted for a Valkyrie, the engraved Valkyri’din wings carrying not the star of Linthia but a tesseract whose borders are formed from a single double helix. Above the wings is carved the name of your great grandmother, for whom it had been crafted: Jeron’dia, supposedly named after a Valkyrie-like heroine from a war long ago, before the Ragn’Rouk. ‘Never be too proud to use a weapon again.’
You slide the sword into the open scabbard throat awaiting it which had until now been hidden neatly in the face of the plating from which it emerged. As you slide the blade gently into it, a plasma field is generated over the blade to protect the blade from wear and tear while it sits seemingly exposed to the air. Your thumb reaches the throat, and you press the hilt onto it, hearing that satisfying clack as the blade locks into place.
‘Lesson Five,’ you think, grabbing a heavily armored helmet and lifting it over your head, quite a different experience from the typical piloting helmets which collapse and expand over one’s head of its own intricate devices. ‘I need a better helmet.’ You look down for a moment and see Keri pulling a helmet over her own head. You grin slightly as the pounding and scraping grows louder.
The helmet comes over your face, and your vision turns black as the interior of a heavy helmet with a proper blast visor blocks out any light from your field of view. The bottom of the helmet sits neatly into the receivers at your collar, and you twist it to the right, allowing it to interface with your DPU. Immediately, the screen inside the helmet comes alight, and your display comes into view for the first time in days. The familiar red lines, symbols, and characters make their way into your view, and the world about you is visible in a comfortable, full circle field of vision. You glance slightly to the side to look behind you, where Keri is giving herself a few good shakes to dispel the disorientation caused by such a view when one is unaccustomed to it.
You restrain a giggle at the sight, and your eyes quickly grow hard, the inside of your visor turning a bit green as your eyes light up with new fire. This time, you can feel and almost even see the wyrm’s claws coming against the door before it even makes contact, your attention undivided as the door can be seen flying across the main room through the doorway to your late father’s room. Your grin flashes an unseen white as the
huntress inside you comes to the forefront. A gentle memory of a dead voice you haven’t heard in over twenty cycles reaches into your mind, sending your thoughts to a long-past, failed hunt as a child; but this time, you don’t hesitate to follow your mother’s command as the memory whispers the echoed word, ‘Now!’ Your feet break contact with the ground as a burst of energy compresses behind you, propelling you into the fresh heat of a battle which you can finally fight for all the right reasons.