Chapter 2, Part 1
A Valkyrie: Ragnarok Story, by Rodney Sloan
This is the third piece of fiction in the Valkyrie: Ragnarok and Valkyrie: Saga settings, and sits at the start of Valkyrie: Ragnarok, following on from Coercion. I hope you enjoy it.
Because of adult content, the following is not recommended for readers under the age of 12.
When she awoke, Faya was lying on the rotting floorboards. Her senses were muddled, and she gasped with pain when she tried to move. Bors had somehow broken a rib, she was sure. There was blood across the floor, leading to the door, but he was gone.
Faya pulled herself slowly up and dressed. Each movement triggered a sharp pain in her side. It was hard to breathe. She carefully brushed out her hair with a hand while holding her side, careful to cover her ears with her bangs. She then rifled through the sheets and searched the dark corners of the room. Besides the sleeping pallet and a small smokey lamp in an alcove the room was empty, and there was no sign of her weapon. She cursed, then slipped out of the room, and into the darkness of the undercity.
It didn’t take long to find Anders lying in a dark alcove, covered in alcohol and his own blood. If the alcohol was meant to mislead anyone, it wasn’t necessary; the stab wounds spoke volumes. Here, so close to the Depths, nobody would care about a bloody corpse anyway.
Bors had figured out enough of Faya’s history to scare her. It was her mother, not her father, that was elven, but he’d been right on many other accounts. Her mother was a queen of the Lotus Courts, and that had given Faya an unlikely refuge in a world that hated her for her mixed heritage. She had never known her father. It was possible that he’d escaped during the Night of Betrayal, but she would likely never know. She knew how terrible life in Savonin was for humans—she’d known the whips and the thousand tortures herself—but she could only guess at his fate. So many slaves had fled into the deserts of Angor that night. Many had died in the weeks after, killed by the mokith, the heat, or hunted down by Savonin slavers. Still, it was possible that he’d died before that mass escape, even before her birth. Her mother had never spoken of him. She would whip Faya for daring to ask, so her life had been one of noiseless service within the gloom of the Lotus Courts. She had been a shadow, veiled and jeweled and ever silent.
After the Night of Betrayal, the hunters of the Savonin raided far into Angor. By the third cycle of the moon, they’d recaptured many of the last surviving slaves, slaves who had been too weak to run any longer. These were kept in camps for collection by the caravans that went back and forth from the forests of Savo. The mokith had proven to be a deadly obstacle, and so the caravans moved only under heavy guard. A lifetime under the green, lightless canopy meant that the Savonin could not stand the brightness of the sun, so they only ventured out across the sands when it was dark. It was slow going, and so supplies were always short, and morale low. Soon the Lotus Courts were sending the queens they could spare with the caravans, to heal and work their seductive magic over the Savonin’s elite hunters. Inevitably, Fethfaura, Great Queen of the Enticing Needle, Faya’s mother, was called to cross the scorching sands to work her needle magic. Faya went too, hidden within her mother’s palanquin as a favored slave.
***
The red desert shimmered in the scorching midday heat, a vast, uncrossable barrier. The caravan was camped out in the shade of a mighty crag of black-singed orange stone, spread out between the great blasted boulders between the cliff and the shadow’s shifting edge. The guides called the landmark “little castle.” Some of the soldiers had dared each other to scale the tower of rock, but most rested uneasily, tired from the nights of marching and their running battles with the mokith. It would be another long, harrowing trek through the dark desert as soon as the sun kissed the horizon.
Fethfaura slept easily on her palanquin. She’d perfected the art of sleeping serenely, yet with a sultry smile on her face and her hair draped perfectly across her shoulders, accentuating her breasts. These were adorned with necklaces of silver shards and blood-red rubies. She wore a silk summer sadi, in the style of the Angorian badawi, coloured in the black and red of her sect. Around her waist was the wide black belt of a queen of the Lotus Court, with her sect’s distinctive silver ring pierced with eight sharp needles. Each was as long as a finger and their wicked points caressed her skin, but drew no blood.
Faya had often wondered about those needles, but she would never dare ask her mother about them. There were many rules in the Lotus Courts, but Fethfaura had given her daughter only two; go unsee, remain unheard. Faya had quickly learned the consequences of disobeying those two rules.
One of her earliest memories was of her mother’s terrible scoldings. Minor delegates had come to the Lotus Courts that day, and all of the queens were on display, as was the custom. Faya knew her place in the pageantry—it happened often enough—she stood on the stair below with Fethfaura’s lesser servants, while Fethfaura’s handmaid stood in front and to the right of the Queen of Needles, holding the black shroud of eight pleasurable deaths. Faya wore a black cape with a red hood that covered her eyes. It was light enough that she could still see through it. The dignitaries approached and were greeted before each of the queens was presented to those assembled there. Then the dignitaries filed past and through the wide doors of the Lotus Court. As their party moved to follow, Faya’s foot caught her cape and she tripped on a stair and struck her knee. Her crying brought a servant, Jarro, a water carrier and the lowest of the servants, who pleaded with her to be quiet. That night Jarro had been flogged on Faya’s behalf. Faya had been forced to watch, and she had never forgotten the sight of his flesh splitting open under each stroke of the lash. From then on she had learned to swallow her tears. Her pain, her fear, even her joy, dwelt deep down inside her.
But Fethfaura had been good to Faya too, in her own way. The silent shadows were the only place for a daughter of a human and an elf, for someone who should have been consigned to death, and so Faya skulked in the shadows, until darkness enveloped the world and the halls of the court fell silent. That was when Fethfaura, Pain Queen of the Eight Needles, disappeared and her mother emerged, with a whisper.
“Dearest? Are you awake?” Faya slept in a cot in a dark corner of her mother's opulent accommodations. The main chamber was surrounded by carved pillars of ironwood, dark and decorated with dragons, snakes, and masked figures entwined in thorns. It was behind one of these pillars where Faya awoke with her mother over her, invisible in the darkness. “You can speak now, there is no one to hear you but me.” Her mother’s voice was soft and gentle, but her own reply seemed like a hollow, forgotten thing.
“I’m here.”
“Come, dear. I’ve something to show you. Here, take my hand. Step quietly, but keep your eyes and ears open. We mustn’t be seen.
They’d left her mother’s room and slipped through the halls of the Lotus Court. The guards outside were nowhere to be seen, and all the world seemed asleep, as if only the two of them existed in all the universe.
They passed under the great baobabs and mighty acacias, half-seen monoliths that Faya knew more by touch than by sight. There was no moon this far below the canopy, and no fires or lights shone along their route. For Faya, the darkness was complete, but her mother’s touch was a comforting guide. Her true elf eyes could see what Faya could not, and sometimes her mother would pause to let her touch the bark of a new tree, or describe some creature moving through the undergrowth. “Here, feel this. It’s a cork tree, and this is a sweet night lily. Smell it. Now, what’s this? A small wood mouse is eating seeds in a low branch. He’s twitching his ears, but he hasn’t seen us yet. Now come, we’re almost there.
Then her mother had told her to close her eyes. Faya had not been sure if her eyes were already closed or not, but she did her best to obey. They walked a little further before she heard crickets and frogs, a cacophonous chorus of life. Then her mother whispered, “open your eyes, child.”
“Faya felt as if she’d stepped among the stars. Balls of yellow light floated around her, illuminating silver leaves and reflecting off the dark surface of a pool that spread out before them.
She didn’t know how long she’d been standing there, enraptured by the fireflies and their play of light. It was like a perfect dream, an alien and beautiful island in the ocean of darkness that was her life.
She’d sat down beside her mother and they’d shared a meal of bread and sweet wine, fruits, and berries. Her mother had spoken gently to her then, but Faya could not remember much of what they’d spoken about. Like all joy in her life, it was over too soon. She’d known that the magic of that night had to be hidden, deep within her soul.
Faya and her mother had played their game for years, brief glimpses of joy hidden in a black ocean of hatred and unkindness. That was, Faya knew, the only way to keep her safe. Their joy played out in the lightless twilight only when her mother deemed it safe, while Fethfaura ruled with vicious wrath during the long, lonely stretches between.
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