Arqivist's Note: It is not clear for what reason this memetic archive was created, nor is it known how it came to be in the ArQive's possession. Metadata indicates it was manually entered into Walil ir-Namq's Class-0 Data Arrays, but the personnel certificate of the one logging it into the system is absent. A request for further information and instruction regarding this archive was forwarded to the Elders of Lodge Walil ir-Namq, who responded with a denial of ever having produced nor provided any such memetic archive. The Elders offered no instruction, guidance, nor preferences as to the fate of this record. Out of an abundance of caution, it has been reclassified as Infohazard Type 9-Lepten and moved to the Restricted Access: Superintendent Authorisation Required Arrays pending further instruction. Access is restricted to personnel authorised under applicable Mythic Treaty Statutes.
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Desert Bust
Fennec pushed open the door to her workshop, her shoulder smarting from the paces Eren had put her through earlier that morning. She was not overly fond of Eren, her Lodge’s Combat Instructor. Walil ir-Namq was not a world which often called Valkyries to battle, but Eren saw fit to run her training grounds like the crucibles of Kitsune Hill anyway.
Bitter medicine, Eren called it. There was a sleeping wisdom in this.
Fennec did not often fly into battle, like the most of her sisters did. Lodge Walil ir-Namq’s Elder Vision had seen Fennec’s talents and put her to work in the workshops and studios of the Lodge’s artisans where things of beauty could be made.
When she was called to arms, Fennec was always grateful in the end for Eren’s vision. Tolerance to pain, built up by Eren’s unforgiving hand, kept her fighting when it mattered. The harsh lessons of the training grounds had kept the hands of the Lodge’s healers warm.
Today was not a day of fighting, and the thought of chiseling stone on a newly dislocated shoulder had inspired its share of fresh and foul oaths. Uttered, of course, in private. Eren’s ears were sharp, and her patience for insolence short.
Inside her workshop, the oppressive heat of the Great Alalki Desert had stagnated. Sweat came off of her in sheets as she beat the dust and sand from her skirt. Untying the knot at her hip, Fennec unwrapped the simple pareo, gave it a final few shakes, and hung it over a hook near the door. After filling a nearby washbasin, she washed sweat and sand from her skin before emptying the basin and filling it again to pour over her head.
Feeling somewhat cleaner and cooler, Fennec draped her wings out behind her and parted the blackout curtains she had hung up around the perimeter of her workshop. Inside the ring sat a block of stone thrice her height and as wide as her wingspan. Harsh light from this desert world’s twin suns, Awal and Fatahr, shone in from single window, the others having been blacked out. Awal’s light, a brilliant white, and Fatahr’s, slightly-bluish, were focused into single beam that struck the face of the stone like one of Eren’s drop kicks—harsh and with unrelenting force.
With trained patience Fennec crossed the open floor toward a stool she had placed the night before. Eyes fixed on the stone, each step along her path took the passage of a dozen minutes or more. Heat built in the workshop, the passage of time measured in the thermometer’s bulb and the angle of shadows. The last moments of morning passed into afternoon as she arrived at the stool. By then, a low headache had begun to build behind her eyes, an aching thirst itching at her tongue.
Water would have its time, as would air and the fires of evening. Now was the time for stone. Fennec’s gaze was fixed.
Hammer and chisel did not itch at her fingertips yet. Within the whispers emanating from the grain of the granite, she had not yet found its form. It had not spoken its story to her yet.
Not all stones spoke this way. Those that did were rare, their song audible only to a Valkyrie’s ears, a condition which vexed the Master Quarrier, Thiophon, to no end. His ears could hear the softest susurrations of the finest granite veins, even from kilometres deep in the ground. He could hew stone with such precision, cut it by sight alone to its precise dimensions for whatever purpose required, but he could not see its final shape beyond what was useful for building. Stone was, to him, like all materials, a useful thing.
Thiophon, even among Minotauri, was a patient man. To find the stones that sang was no task of seconds, minutes, nor hours. The days Fennec spent with ears pressed to the blocks he had quarried Thiophon endured with grace.
Saori, Fennec’s companion of the Kitsune, ever irritable, made her impatience and vexations known more readily. Saori’s deft fingers, and the acuity of her mind articulating them, could make such mechanisms of marble as to marvel even the harshest critic. The things she made were as inscrutable as they were refined, but a Kitsune would always be a creature of practicalities. Raw materials were, like all things, an empty vessel—a blank slate.
Here, in her workshop, Fennec completed the circle. Raw things were made useful by the Minotauri, useful things became marvellous by the Kitsune, and a Valkyrie made the raw and the marvellous beautiful. Her part to play, however, was one of long suffering. Be it a chess set or a grand masterpiece of granite, only when she could see the final shape would she make the first cut.
The shadows drew in the hours Fennec sat on the stool gazing into the block of marble, the harsh light of her world peeling back its layers. Soon, she felt, the heart of this block would be revealed. Its shape was growing clearer and clearer, unfolding like petals of a lotus coming to bloom.
Midday’s zenith had stretched the shade of her block to half after three when Fennec’s focus was broken by the door of her workshop swinging open. New light cast new shadows on and about the stone. Fennec tilted her head slightly, the intrusion highlighting something curious. Then the door slammed shut.
She frowned with disappointment, but didn’t move to prop the door again.
Fabric rustled followed by the sound of water splashing on skin. Fennec heard curtains part and wings draping behind her. Footsteps padded over to her with the familiar smell of a friend. Fennec smiled. Sejnn’s presence was always welcome.
The sloshing of liquid and the scent of cider grew in its presence. A hint of arm in Fennec’s periphery placed a tankard in her hand, careful to stay out of sight.
“Thank you,” Fennec said.
“Mmm,” Sejnn hummed, backing away.
Standing, Fennec approached the stone, taking a long drink from her tankard. Kneeling down, she set the mug on the floor and craned her neck over, looking up and at a fresh angle.
“Rai is here,” announced Sejnn, after a long silence.
“Mmm,” Fennec responded, lying down on sandy floorboards.
“He grows impatient,” Sejnn added.
Humans had little patience. It was an understandable condition. Theirs were short lives. Most could not afford the patience of the undying. Among those monks and devotees of one deity or another who invested all their time in such pursuits, they only wasted what time they had. Such squandered time was lamentable.
That a mobster masquerading as a businessman had run to the limits of his patience was nothing extraordinary. His patronage meant nothing to her and she thought little of him and his human foibles. What he desired was a masterpiece. Whether for a museum, mausoleum, cathedral, or catacomb, it mattered not. The project spoke to her, and so she accepted it. The stone, however, it spoke at its own pace, and Rai’s purpose for it could rush nothing.
“He requests to assess your progress,” Sejnn added.
Fennec continued gazing up at the stone, letting the light sing and the stone whisper. Those of her kin knew her way. They knew well the winters that would pass while she listened to whispered words in the silence and stillness of her workshop. Only in the unfolding of its time would she be struck like with Lunacy. Then the granite would take its final shape. Not before, not after, but when its time was right.
“Should I send him in?” asked Sejnn.
Yawning, Fennec rose back to her feet, tankard in hand. She drained it and dusted off her back with a fluttering of wings. After setting the empty tankard down on her worktable, she pulled the curtains wide and made for the door, opening it into blinding, sandy streets of Lodge Walil ir-Namq’s village.
Overhead, Awal and Fatahr blazed. Fennec blinked away dazzling light, eyes smarting and tearing up. A gentle wind coursed between adobe structures and passed over her skin, its cooling breath wicking away sweat and leaving behind a fine dusting of sand. Fennec opened her respira and drank in the air, flushing the stagnant heat of her workshop from her bones.
Beside her, in the narrow lane running between workshops smoothed by sand and wind, three large, black AVs were parked, their engines idling. Standing outside each were two burly men dressed in local fineries.
Fennec huffed in annoyance. These were Rai’s bodyguards. She never understood why he insisted on bringing them. Even unarmed and wearing only a loincloth she could dispatch all eight of them without chipping a fingernail. Armed outsiders in the village were only provisionally tolerated, in limited numbers, and even more limited circumstances. The Lodge Elders allowed Rai his because he was a useful asset and pushing the issue wasn’t worth a potential war with the Rust Mob.
As usual, this was a poor showing. Fennec had rarely seen an outfit so ill-equipped for their mission. Three layers of fabric, no matter how fine, was too many for this heat. Silk, cotton, and a blended underlayer, they looked fine as could be. A few Valkyries might even have fawned after them, but without thermal regulators, they were in no condition to put up any meaningful resistance.
Wealth and privilege was nothing but a poison. It led only to this; attitudes of hilarious incompetence and the hubris that always came with. All presentation and no practicality. At fifty-three degrees, if a fight were to happen, these poor bodymen wouldn’t last five minutes before heat stroke dropped them. Even as she was, Fennec wouldn’t risk a prolonged fight in this heat if she could avoid it.
In the middle distance, Fennec saw a figure dressed in a white robe perch on an awning. Though the hood was raised, and the mask of her thermal bodysuit was raised, Fennec knew by her wings and rifle that it was Eren.
Scanning the village, Fennec saw three other figures take overwatch positions. It seemed the patience of the Elders had run short. Fennec sent Eren and the other guards a nudge. If Rai was going to cause an incident, Fennec would take point on it.
A door opened from the middle vehicle of the motorcade, drawing Fennec’s attention back to Rai and his laughable attempt at a show of force. Out of the AV stepped a squat, greasy, and ostentatiously dressed man. Neither young nor particularly old, but with eyes too heavy for youth, Serai “Rai” Ivyenei was a man whose prime was on its wane. The creep of inevitable senescence, though centuries forestalled by human ingenuity, and millennia defied by drugs and other lesser forms of the fabled font, was beginning to eat away at the edges of him.
This was Rai’s greatest insecurity, one he disguised with all the selfsame beguilings of his forebears. Wealthy as he was, he lacked the means of the titans. Even though he might yet endure for several multiples of the lifetimes of those beneath him, the doors to artificial immortality were shut to him.
His turn in recent days toward thoughts of legacy were the work of the inevitable reality of his sun beginning to set, and the harsh bite of age burrowing deep enough into his bones to wake him to it.
When Rai saw her, dressed as she was for the weather, and not for the pleasure of petulant men and their insatiable desires, his face contorted into one of disgust and disdain. Such insolence would have earned stern rebuke from others in her Lodge. Fennec was unmoved by it.
“You wanna get dressed first before we talk business?” Rai commented, giving her an expectant look.
“To your satisfaction?” Fennec challenged. “Or to mine?”
This seemed to strike a nerve. Rai was used to getting his way, as men of his station were. No was not a word present in his working vocabulary, unless he was the one to use it. A proud man he was, and one used to the privileges of his power.
Valkyries were a proud people, too. One of power only the dead and the damned dared to challenge. The expectations and demands of those outside their circle were honoured with defiance. A Valkyrie bowed to no man, unless he bore the name Valkheart—a title this impudent ratling would never earn.
“Fuck it,” Rai disregarded, recognising a losing battle, “go to a nudist colony, expect nudity. Lemme see this beast. It’s gotta be a real looker. Six anno and all.”
Fennec pushed the door to her workshop open. Removing his sunglasses, Rai squinted inside. On seeing the block of granite as it had been the six anno ago, he blinked a few times in disbelief. Aghast, he glanced to the bodyguards to his left and right in a dramatic display.
“The fuck is that!?” Rai exclaimed, gesturing at the block of stone. “Six fucking spins around and you haven’t done a damn thing!”
Hearing Rai’s outburst, Sejnn approached. She leaned against the door sill and Fennec heard her fold her arms across her chest. Fennec didn’t need to see Sejnn’s face to know the expression on it. Even before she’d given birth to her daughter Tove, Sejnn had mastered the motherly glower of disappointed, disapproving, exasperation.
“You want to explain this shit to me!?” demanded Rai. “I pay you for a statue, and you’ve been doing what!? Sitting around fingering yourself the last six anno!?”
Sejnn sighed angrily.
“Rai, you damn fool,” Sejnn said, “you didn’t buy anything! That’s not how this works!”
“Don’t fucking talk to me about work!” Rai snapped, pointing a finger at Sejnn.
In a flash, Fennec grabbed Rai’s finger, twisted his wrist over, and gripped his palm. Guns were drawn, and panicked shouting ensued. Both Rai and Sejnn tried to de-escalate before Eren and a half-dozen other Valkyries opened fire.
Fennec paid little attention to the commotion. Her kin would not miss their marks. If any of Rai’s men moved their fingers to triggers, they would be shot dead. Fennec closed her eyes, and, through Rai’s desperate tugging, trying to free himself, she felt the measure of him in the soft skin of his palms.
“Work?” Fennec smiled, pulling her hand away. As she did, she maintained a grip loose enough to allow him to feel the rough calluses of her hands.
“What would you know of that?” Fennec asked, opening her eyes to a stunned expression. “I had respect for the man who preceded you. Foul as was his business, it was something he had built, an empire he fought in the trenches for. I could feel in his hands the mountains he moved and the bodies he buried. Your hands are soft, the mettle of you measured in how little you know and how much less you’ve done. Yet here you stand, presuming to speak to me about work? Disgraceful.”
“You did not just bring my father, gods rest him, into this!” Rai growled.
“Cultivate some of your father’s patience,” Fennec retorted, “the majesty sleeping in mundane things does not so swiftly emerge to the intemperant mind.”
“Fuck you!” Rai swore. “I’ve been patient and all you’ve done is sit around doing jack shit!”
Down the lane, Eren raised her rifle.
“You asked for a masterpiece,” Sejnn spoke up.
“I’m not fucking talking to you!” Rai shouted.
Down the street, Fennec saw Eren’s finger shift. From the look in her eyes and her finger on the trigger, Fennec knew Rai’s disrespect had reached its limit. Sighing heavily, she sent Eren a nudge imploring her to not get involved.
“If this damned thing isn’t done by…” Rai bellowed, his voice trailing off as Fennec walked away.
“Hey! Where the fuck are you going!? I’m talking to you!” Rai shouted.
“No, you’re throwing a tantrum at me,” Fennec replied, one of Rai’s bodyguards stepping up to intercept her.
“Boss isn’t done with you,” he grunted.
In the split second before she reshuffled his neurons, Fennec admired the bodyguard’s confidence. Anyone going toe to toe with a Valkyrie was either a dead man making his last mistake or a First Marine looking for a sparring partner. Soldiers of a much higher calibre than this whelp, cosplaying as a black ops body bagger, had fled with soiled trousers at sight of her. She was the least of her Lodge’s warriors.
Having thrown his gauntlet, Fennec had no choice but to oblige him the fight he desired. Gripping his face with the palm of her hand, Fennec thrust the bodyguard into the ground. The back of his head struck sand, knocking him out cold. His partner, having stepped up, received through sand spray an open backhand. Fennec felt her knuckles split skin and shatter cheekbones. Gunfire erupted, but Fennec was already out of the way, having used the shroud of the first two pounding sand to skitter under Rai’s vehicle.
On the other side, she punched a hole through the driver’s side door, ripping it off. After tearing the driver out of the vehicle and throwing him into the guards to her rear, she flipped the door around and crouched, bullets pinging off the door. She pulled a pistol she knew would be mounted to the door and racked the slide on the AV’s running board.
The two guards directly behind her took bullets through their knees. They weren’t dead, but they weren’t soldiers either. A real warrior would pick up his gun and fire back. They were done. Out of action. Those on the other side of the vehicle she shot through the ankles before kneecapping the remaining four guards.
The last one, covering Rai, saw Fennec rise, car door in one hand, pistol in the other, and did the only wise thing any of them had that day. With shadows descending down his trouser legs, he raised his hands and slowly squatted down to set his weapon on the sand, inspiring a stream of the foulest oaths yet to fall from Rai’s mouth. Sejnn walked out of the doorway and knocked the guard out with a swift strike to the side of his face.
Tossing door and pistol aside, Fennec extended her wings and began to approach Rai. Predictably, the cursing ceased and Rai soiled himself—both vectors. He stammered out a few half-hearted attempts at forming words, stopping only when Fennec grabbed him by the jaw and forced his mouth closed.
“Sshhhh,” Fennec shushed, glancing over her shoulder, “see her? On the roof there?”
While Fennec had been occupied with neutralising the ratling’s bodyguards, Eren had shifted position, now to the roof adjacent to Fennec’s workshop. Squatting on the edge, the grizzled veteran and combat instructor had her rifle aimed at Rai’s forehead. The ratling gulped and gave a tepid nod. Fennec shifted into Eren’s line of sight, blocking her shot.
“What is it your organisation likes to say?” Fennec said, “Dead men learn no lessons? Yes, I think that’s it.”
Turning her head, she barked out, “Eren! Stand down! I claim this one!”
Eren nodded and lowered her rifle, signalling to the others standing overwatch.
“You are useful to us, ratling,” Fennec reminded, “but we do not need you. Consider your next words very carefully lest I put your foul tongue to work cleaning my toilet and washing my floor.”
Fennec released Rai, who blurted out a one word apology like a boy to his mum.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“For?” Fennec responded.
“Being a piece of shit,” Rai said, his less than honest attempt at appeasement obvious.
“Mind your tongue and your tone,” Fennec warned, “you might have gotten away with your disrespect if you had directed it only to me.”
Drawing the knife tucked in Rai’s belt, Fennec slashed her palm, closing her fist to let the blood drip onto Rai’s suit.
“Speak to Sejnn that way again,” she growled, “and I will personally destroy your entire world, brick by bloody brick, before dragging you back here as my trophy.”
“Thousand apologies, ma’am,” Rai sputtered, turning to Sejnn.
“Eren’s not buying it, Fennec,” Sejnn said, nodding toward the adjacent roof.
“Eren!” Fennec barked.
The sound of a rifle safety engaging was Eren’s reply.
“Take your wounded and go,” Fennec ordered, “I’ll send word when I’m done.”
“Sure,” Rai said, a trepidation in his voice Eren would appreciate.
“He’s going to leave them,” Sejnn said, watching Rai retreat into the only AV Fennec had not in some way destroyed.
The door slammed and AV engines powered up. Fennec sighed tiredly. Cowardice was a dishonour second only to betrayal. Leaving his comrades behind in cowardice was nothing beneath what Fennec expected of Rai. It still disappointed her to watch.
When the dust of his dishonour had cleared, Eren dropped from the rooftop and approached, eyeing the bodyguards lying in various states on the ground with a mixture of mild disgust and sympathy. Some were groaning, others were cleanly out cold. She pulled the half mask from her mouth so she could speak.
“Twelve pretty boys with their dicks in the dirt,” Eren grumbled, resting rifle at her hip, “all for the ego of that festering rat.”
Fennec surveyed the mess left behind and shrugged.
Eren looked over the situation again before asking, “What do you want to do with them?”
“Huh?” Fennec reacted.
“They’re your keep,” Eren mentioned.
“They are rather pretty,” Fennec admitted, “it would be a shame to let them go to waste.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” Eren agreed.
“What do you think, Sejnn?” Fennec asked.
Sejnn looked disinterestedly at the men scattered about the lane and shrugged her shoulders.
“Well, we can always put trophies to work,” Eren assessed.
Fennec looked at the men variously passed out or clutching knees or ankles, moaning and groaning in pain.
Sighing heavily, she said, “It’s not right. I’d have them treated well and returned to their own when Rai comes for his commission.”
Eren cocked her head in confusion. Still in the doorway, Sejnn shrugged her shoulders.
“I’ll inform the Apothecary,” Eren agreed, taking flight once more.
Returning to her workshop, Fennec stopped on the threshold. The shadows cast by her frame, overlayed onto those of Sejnn’s, stretched long across sandy floors. Passing between parted curtains, their overlain shapes draped across the granite block. Lightning bolted through her eyes and coursed down her spine. Static buzzed at her fingertips, her toes, working its way through her body until a hum in the crown of her head erased all thoughts.
“Oh shit,” noticed Sejnn, freezing in place.
The low hum in the crown of her head began to spread, growing louder and louder, until her palms burned and itched, and her eyes went blind but for the shape taking form.
“Ask Saori to come, please,” Fennec requested, releasing the door.
Without questioning the request, Sejnn stepped around her, leaving out the side entrance. Fennec needed her closest companion, her muse, for what was to come. She could feel it like Lunacy.
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