The Healer's Burden

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The Healer’s Burden

Part 1

Angelic

In the mirror what stared back was no longer a face. Half-crushed on the left side, missing an eye, a chunk of ear, only half a jaw hanging by two ribbons of flesh. She couldn’t believe it. Lifting the stump of her only remaining limb to her face, she brushed her hair aside. At least it wasn’t a total loss. Small blessings.

*Divraën*

There were three types of troggos in the SubCity slums of New Rio. The scav, the cleaner, and the runner. Divraën was none of them.

Scavs, they dug through the skybirds’ trash gathering quota for the hated Deffies—the Planetary Defence Militia. Waste was no word a hive city could tolerate. Everything that could be, would be reused, recycled, or repurposed. Scavs gathered up the grabbings in The Piles outside their hab blocks before returning to the scrap piles raining death from above every second hour.

Cleaners served Nraþin’s mighty Pipeworks. Buried in the Deeps, hundreds of metres below the 9th SubCity, the Pipeworks were one among dozens of titanic machines collectively called the Atlas Engines. To the troggos, these were the Old Gods. Rulers of the dark places, ravenous deities of metal and metamaterials, ever demanding of service and sacrifice. It was Nraþin, God-King of Rot, the Great Devourer, to whom the 9th gave service. He who drank of the city’s sewage and excreted from His divine bowels the waters of life.

Everyone else worth a thought was some flavour of Runner. Gangsters, gatherers, troggo engineers, anyone useful for a task requiring more skill than a deformed roeb. Runners built the SubCity and kept some kind of order on the filth ridden streets of the slums. Drug makers and barricade breakers brought in the valum and cred. Chugs loiting by The Piles topped the best scrap for sale at the Swamzea Bzaat. Sitting up top, on the throne of lowlifes, wearing the only pair of trousers in the Zone, was the top runner, king of his fiefdom, the Kaj and KP, his crown of spades a circlet of bones and broken teeth still bloody from conquest.

They were a horde of filthy, stinking, slum rats, the lot of them and their parody of society was something incomplete without a mountain of slave labour to keep the gears turning. Subhuman to even troggos, these were Divraën’s own, the roebs.

Rorebs weren’t troggos. They were to troggos what troggos were to skybirds; insignificant sacks of meat of a vaguely human shape with all the same value as a New Rio pteroroach. Spawned in heaps out of the flaccid cunts of the fleshjacked damned—the cubates—roebs were easy to make, cheap to keep, and did the dirtiest jobs even the lowest-down luckless scav wouldn’t do. Clogged sewers, filthy toilets, irradiated scraphauls, barricade passage mapping, cock warming, spawn dropping, and anything else vile, deadly, unpleasant, or downright intolerable, was what roebs were sent to do.

This was Divraën’s lot. These were her people. No easy lives for any. Only difference between any was the flavour of pain and the endgame. Destiny for her was the same as anything falling out a cubate with a cunt to punt. She was slated to be a brothel bitch till her tits dropped and her meat wasn’t worth the piss dribbling from a troggo’s dick. First day on the job was the day she dropped on the floor of the spawning halls.

Kaj of the Red Sea liked to break in the new girls himself. His way of claiming ownership. Grabbed them bloody, gave them three slots, and sent them off to red neon for a dec and sextet. One day past sixteen and a whore was as good as gonorrhoea. Kaj of the Red Lights would ship his spoiled goods back to the Kaj of the Cube for a Subcity sawbones to delimb, fleshjack, and nail to a wall for a short afterlife as a cubate. What a wondrous afterlife it was. No limbs, no agency, just a torso hung from spikes on the walls of the spawning halls, squeezing out fresh batches of roebs every six months until her heart exploded or her crotch imploded and fell out all over the floor.

That was supposed to be her life. It was a good plan. Divraën couldn’t deny that. Problem was, it wasn’t her plan. Which made it objectively the worst plan.

Day before she was scheduled to see the sawbones for the standard chopjob, she’d made up her mind the cubate life wasn’t for her. Wasn’t any glamour or prestige in that. Instead when the big balled badass who called himself Kaj came by to rearrange her GI tract like he did every night since the day she was born, Divraën ripped his cock off and fed it back to him. Shoved it so far down his throat, in fact, he ended up choking on it.

His prettyboys didn’t like that too much, but Divraën had planned for that. Only one walking out of the Red Sea that night was her, holding a chunk of the old KP’s jawbone and a strapon packing a bloody chunk of titancrete.

Down there, in the shitstains of New Rio, you keep what you kill, and the king was dead. Long live the Queen. The crown was hers. With it came dominion over all the Zone’s red lights and bed warmers. Worthless. She wanted more. She wanted better. Having seen how easy it was to top her old boss, she figured she might as well have it. The Kaj Crete Zone would be hers.

And it was.

And when it was, the roebs named her Divraën—Goddess-Empress of the Long Night, She who brings death upon the unwary. But Divraën wasn’t done. Not by a long shot. She kept climbing, kept claiming crowns until she’d conquered a dozen Zones and half the starscraper above the ground where she started.

Until she was Queen of the Starscaper, sitting on top of the Astors, she wouldn’t be satisfied. But that would come soon enough. Old power and money living in the Clouds and Pinnacles would soon recognise the Red Roeb Empress, Domina of Billions. They would know the name of this Goddess Beneath and fall at her feet in worship as the children of her former enemies did whenever she walked the streets she’d toppled.

And skybirds fell at her feet. They cowered and kowtowed in fear before her. It was how they showed their Queen her due. Divraën relished this. Those who lived above ground lowering themselves beneath the one who rose up from the SubCity.

Down in her lands beneath, Divraën’s loyal subjects stood tall, a proud mass of filthy street rats. They rose up for their Goddess, as she had risen up from of the pit. It was how they showed their Queen her due.

From behind tinted windows, Divraën looked out at her subjects, a bottle of Subcity hooch beside her and a scowl on her face. Luxury aerocar motorcades, Grand Tours, and personal visitations were never without reason. Divraën never came downstairs anymore unless a few faces needed stomping in.

It wasn’t that she hated her own, it was that her empire was vast and her Plumber and Panoptek, Pannie the Plumber as she liked to call him, insisted if matters required her direct attention, she descend with all the obnoxious pomp and circumstance of a preening fop from the Highlands. There had to be a motorcade, it had to be comprised of flashy armoured aerocars the picture of luxury. She had to ride in like the royalty she was, surrounded by a posse of prettyboys passing as bodyguards she didn’t need and didn’t even want. Messaging, Pannie had insisted, was everything.

Divraën couldn’t argue with his results, not that she really needed her Plumber to declog that particular patch of pipeworks. Every time her motorcade cruised down the streets of Kaj Crete Zone, onlookers gazed on like they were watching gods pass on chariots of liquid night. Which Divraën was. A goddess, that was. At least by any standards coherent to the feeble minds of troggos and roebs.

Divraën couldn’t decide if she loved or loathed being deified. It was good to be their goddess, she figured, as she looked back at them and the sights she knew all too well, and loathed even more. This was the place all the dark gods of man claimed as their own and these were their people.

Naked, filthy, and malnourished, they were the skin and bones cave dwellers of New Rio. They worshipped the darkness, and the darkness spat piss and vinegar in their eyes. As did she, their Goddess-Empress, her steel boot ever pressed against their necks, benevolence expressed in violence and addictions. Improvements in condition were measured in the price a spaceman paid to ride his rocket high above the clouds.

From hab blocks of stacked concrete bedracks barely spaced enough for a single person to slip into, to dismantling facks packed to the walls with bloody fingered roebs, squalid couldn’t cut the first layer of skin describing this place. Crumbling tower blocks rose like cancerous warts from titancrete coated bedrock. Each building was packed to its limits with what could barely be called people. The towers themselves were like all things beneath; crusty, improvised constructions built of trash and the ruins of whatever was left when a Zone didn’t meet quota. Held together with patch jobs and more prayers than the yearly output of a temple to Lord Kaibrass, these blisters on the shitstained backside of the Hive City of Sãodorovár remained upright only by thirteen miracles and five different direct interventions from the divinities themselves.

If one of these marvels of engineering fell over and the streets ran red, the neighbourhood would celebrate the dead with cries of ‘meat’s back on the menu!’ Waste, after all, was not a word a Hive City could tolerate.

Outside each tower Divraën’s motorcade passed were mounds and heaps of every kind of ‘crete falling from great garbage chutes in the ceiling of the 9th SubCity carveout. These were The Piles. Concrete, cement, grout, asphalt, conquerete, and, most precious of all, titancrete, all stacked up neatly in the narrow streets, organised by type and value, and made ready for collection.

Each tower’s quota would feed the ravenous maw of the hated Deffies at the Kaj Vaor on the borders of the Zone. Overburdened roebs and runners swarmed to and fro carrying chunks and buckets of ‘crete like lines of ants, all of them oblivious to why the hated deffies wanted all this garbage in the first place.

Divraën wasn’t about to tell them, either. Ignorance kept the troggos who served her blissfully unaware of their power. Having built her empire on the same foundations she later learned were those of the hated Deffies, she wasn’t about to trample what kept her in the queen’s seat. Vengeance was a tasty dish, but not that tasty.

Reaching for the cupholder in the centre console next to her, she grabbed the only thing she truly missed of the SubCity; liquid death distilled and dumped into a bottle that hadn’t been properly cleaned since it came out of the production line in the glass mills of IZ Jutland. Only an augur of the Midwinter fare could’ve cast bones to figure out what millennium that might’ve been in.

Pozzal, as the homebrewed hooch of the 9th was called, was a kind of liquor that burned four different ways before it had its victims folded in half over a toilet seat exorcising their colon into a can that’d never forgive nor forget the unholy abominations about to be unleashed upon it. Even a scav drunker than a titan balls deep in the throat of one of Pommelhorse’s head whores wouldn’t be caught dead unloading his guts anywhere except a deffie approved toilet. Waste not the wastewater lest your scabragging ass gets wasted.

The taste of the swill was no less diabolical. Whatever they put into the pot still must have been pulled straight from the pits of no fewer than four different hells. The flavour was like someone had condensed the ideas of venom, molten slag, boob sweat, and dick cheese into something physical, strained it through the local Kaj’s never-washed trousers, and turned that into a liquor so potent it could knock a skybird flat on their ass in one shot. It would also cause a skybird multiple organ failure and gods only knew what other unpleasant side effects if they survived long enough to experience them. Toxic didn’t begin to cover what pozzal was to anyone other than a troggo.

Pannie the Plumber never figured out why Divraën always brought a case back every time she went downstairs. Like her chauffeur, Pannie seemed to have an allergy to fun. The limit for the both of them was a finger or two of brandy and a cigar of high quality synthotine fibres. The pretentious preening fucks.

After making it to the midlands, Divraën hired a tech-decked sawbones to do the kind of cutjob that would make her as pretty as she was lethal. Wound back the clock a few decades too. Side effect of that, or one of them anyway, was that skybird liquor hit with all the potency of down drifting from a torn pillow. Whiskey and wine might have tasted a whole lot better, but if it wasn’t going to get her fucked up, what was the point?

Even jacked to her teeth, packing a suite of cybernetic pollution filters, Pozzal still kicked like a mærkah with a branding iron shoved in its cake hole. This was one of a few ways left she could get fucked up, blind drunk, brain damaged, and incontinent as a sagface with the mories. More than the joys of a good flight to the happy planet, nothing but good memories sat at the bottom of the greasy bottle in her hand.

Divraën took a swig of the ungodly bevvie and offered the bottle to her driver.

“Better I didn’t, madame,” he declined.

“Your loss,” Divraën grunted, popping the door to the vehicle.

Already assembled outside was the small cohort of cyberjacked prettyboys Pannie the Plumber insisted she bring with her everywhere she went. She was empress of the Midlands, after all, high fucking society. A whole new style of public strutwaffing came with to keep the Queen in her seat.

Image was everything. Wherever she was, acting the part wasn’t enough. She had to be Top Bitch. What that meant in the upper tiers was something completely different to the lower bounds and the Subcity. Up there, where the air was clear, and sunlight filtered down into the windows, the token force that passed for police in this city supposedly paid some semblance of attention to what went on around them. PD were more easily bought off than a corner boy in the Barricades, but they had image to maintain too.

Everything was illegal in New Rio, after all, and in a dozen different ways. What was tolerated, was tolerated provisionally, and that depended heavily on the amount of painkillers the local PD Chief required to forget about his current source of persistent pygalgia.

Great word, that, mused Divraën, pygalgia.

Bodyguards, delgatties, and barrel boys were how barons in the Uppers handled business. Getting her hands dirty digging around in the tickers of a perennial fuck-up, whether hers or someone else’s, was considered Un-Queenly Conduct. As skybird thinking went, a queen without her fall guys was a poor queen. Poor queens got their crowns cut down, or worse, dropped by PD like fresh meat in the dog cage of the Barricades.

While Divraën would have been thrilled by fresh challengers, Pannie made it clear that politics was the only path to conquest beyond the midlands. Gang wars would only get you so far. Police in the Highlands were a far more aggressive animal, and the higher a gwakloon went up the tower, the bigger the guns got, and the smarter the lackeys packing them. Real power, he said, was in the greasing of pockets and in the pulling of puppetstrings.

Pannie wasn’t wrong, but by Gaofhann’s Blood Swamps, Divraën resented him for it. Conceding the point wasn’t going to stop her from bloodying herself on her own perfups when the time came. After all, if she couldn’t show these SubCity scabrags and gwakloons who was boss, she may as well have tossed the crown she’d won into a furnace and given up the game.

Murder, mayhem, chaos, and carnage were the four main food groups of a healthy QP’s diet. Pannie may have worked his way up the food chain from Panoptek to Plumber with clever, but if he wanted to sit long as The Lord of Whales, he wouldn’t push his way too far.

Besides, whatever wisdom Pannie had knocking around between his ears, conventional skybird thinking only sank so far below the lighthouse. Divraën’s main power base was in the SubCity and neither Pannie’s logic nor the logic of any skybird applied here. No one Pannie was concerned about would have been caught dead poking around this deep in the muck. Even if they were, no one gave a rat’s dick about what happened in the SubCity.

Down here, Divraën could rip to pieces as many ratfucking scabs undercutting her as she liked and no one was going to give the first iota of a runny roeb shit about it. And ripping ratfucking radwasters to pieces was exactly what she was here to do.

Some special type of perennial fuck-up had undercut her on some high value merch. Undercutting the queen was a dangerous game, and the clown show she’d come down to decom had just lost.

Lifting the bottle, Divraën drained the last of the pozzal. The liquid burned like molten salt running down her gullet—a fire she’d never not love—before hitting her gut like fresh corium blazing with the megatonnage of a noquot nuke.

“Fuck yeah,” she growled, wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “No place like home.”

She tossed the empty bottle onto a nearby pile of assorted rubbish. Immediately a scuffle broke out among a group of nearby scavs. The naked, filthy creatures scrambled and scrabbled over each other for the broken bottle shards like starving rats—which they were.

Up in the midlands, the bottle would’ve been worthless trash. Down here, it was worth six hits of the rocket and a bowl of ration cube soup to whomever won the grand melee to claim it.

One of her prettyboys opened his stupid mouth as if to suggest something like dispersing the scrapping dogs with small arms fire. Not a bad idea. Not if it had been hers. It was not hers. Thus, by transitive property of sublungation, it was the worst possible idea. Unless she claimed it as hers. Which she wasn’t interested in doing. Because it was a terrible idea. The worst. Only a sublunging smogwafter could have come up with it.

Divraën lifted a finger, silencing the prettyboy before his disgusting sublungs could defile her air. If she wanted tactical advice, she would have brought Pannie along. That and the pozzal’s second burn was forming in the back of her throat, followed by the third and a violent gurgling in her bowels, twisting themselves into knots more contorted than a Subcity spaceman’s matted hair after a ride on the rocket. A glorious harbinger of—

Whump!

Divraën lifted her hand and wiped a line of hot liquid from the side of her face. Inspecting her hand, she grinned. That was the stuff. The really good stuff. Red, hot, wet, all the very best things.

Looking over her shoulder she saw one of her Prettyboys standing with his forearm punched clean through the chest of a scav who had trespassed the protection perimeter coded into his limbocyte override implant.

Cyberjacking this bunch of Deffie goons was not Divraën’s idea. It was, as per usual, Pannie’s. The results had, however, turned out to be highly amusing. Another thing she resented him for.

Divraën felt what could either have been a chuckle forming in the back of her throat, or a dragon’s belch. Her guts interjected with a triple-backwards, somersaulting, granny-knot, fister-twister, singularity slam, whilst a boulder of pure lava rose in the back of her throat. Lifting one hand for prime effect, she unleashed a thunderous belch.

“Oh fuck,” Divraën giggled, “that was…oh no!”

A whole mountain dropped out of her stomach. Dropping to a squat, she lifted the hem of her skirt. An army of warhorns and the fire of twelve legions of raging dragons erupted from her backside like a supervolcano blowing a world-ending load.

“Nraþin’s balls!” Divraën guffawed, when the pyroclastic flow of radioactive sludge had ceased avalanching from her backside. “That was a good one!”

Grabbing the trouser leg of the nearest pretty boy, she tore off a few strips of fabric to wipe herself clean, tossing the soiled scraps into the mess she’d left on the pavement. Queen’s right. Besides, nothing down here could top her, save a Deffie noquot nuke.

“Fuck yeah!” Divraën exclaimed, leaping back to her feet. “Nothing like the 9th Sub pozzal!

Spotting a runner leading a line of ‘crete laden roebs, she pointed to forcefully to him.

“You!” she barked, in the local dialect.

The runner looked up at her.

Pointing to the mess she’d made on the ground, she shouted, “Collect! Chop chop!”

Waste not the wastewater.

The runner didn’t hesitate. He raced over, dropping to his hands and knees to collect the precious faeces pooled on the pavement. Service to Nraþin was, after all, service to Divraën—and that was the highest form of service.

Wet squelching sounds of a different variety reached Divraën’s ears. She looked over and saw the prettyboy who’d previously punched the guts out of the scav struggling to ascertain how to dislodge a dead body impaled on his arm. Shaking his outstretched limb fecklessly about was never going to do the trick and, by the looks of things, it didn’t seem like he possessed the cognitive faculties to solve this conundrum he’d created for himself.

Divraën stepped up beside Prettyboy.1 and patted him on the arm to get his attention.

“No, no,” she chided, his brow furrowing deeper in bewildered frustration. “Let me!”

Digging her nails into the scav’s open chest wound, she wormed her fingers under the scav’s ribcage. The scav may have already been dead, but she could still have a little fun.

“Okay, let’s see here,” she said, mockingly toward Prettyboy.1.

Warm blood coated her hands and ran down her wrists, a sensation she relished every moment over. She wiggled her fingers under his ribcage, massaging his lungs and heart to get some more glorious crimson body paint flowing down her forearms.

“Oh, yes,” she grinned, feeling blood drip off her elbows. “That’s it!”

Satisfied with her fresh set of liquid gloves, Divraën gripped the scav’s ribs, rolled her shoulders with a dramatic flourish and then, in one, swift motion, tore his chest wide open like a reverse blood eagle. Blood and guts sprayed into the air, coating her and Prettyboy.1 in her favourite colour.

“Oh! Just magnificent!” she exclaimed, lifting her hands to let blood flow down her arms all the way to her armpits. “I’m wet already!”

Beside her, Prettyboy.1 looked at his arm in typical stupid confusion. PDM really did hire only the best.

Worthless, hated, stupid, fucking Deffies.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said, with a melodramatic pout. Patting her bloody hand on Prettyboy.1’s cheek she added, “it’s not like this makes you any less of a man than you already weren’t!”

Erupting into boisterous laughter, Divraën stepped forward, and slammed both palms on the doors to the most recent One Stop Shop to earn her personal attention. To her great amusement, the doors flew off their hinges like a spaceship leaving New Rio and smashed into the wall behind. An eruption of red mist and meat sauce exploded from behind them, delighting her even further.

“Oh dear!” she exclaimed, dramatically. “That must have really hurt!”

Drawing her pistol, she pivoted to the right and shot the other door guard fumbling his firearm.

“Too slow!” she giggled.

The dumb muscle dropped to the ground, screaming and pissing and shitting himself. White phosphorous may have been the stuff of war crimes, but shooting someone through the liver with a salted round was worth every day of prison time she’d never serve. Internal organs ablaze, the man writhed in agony, his screams a symphony to Divraën’s ears.

She squealed and clapped her hands with delight. What a show he put on!

Before the lights went out completely, she stepped over the door guard and emptied her rotgut bloated bladder into his face, letting her Prettyboys file past to let the idiot pissants in the market hall know the queen was back in town.

To her disappointment, she’d barely finished pissing before the little dickie of the onesie panicked the PA. Only six of her serfs had met their grisly end by then. That wasn’t nearly enough dead troggos. A queen deserved a proper entrance.

“Shit! Fuck!” the loathsome squawk of Gij’s voice shouted over the PA. “It’s the fucking boss you stupid lacks! Fuck!”

“That must be Miss Tiny Meat herself!” Divraën squealed joyfully, shooting another bottom feeding asshole in the crotch. “You! There! With the unknown chromosomes! Go get him for me!”

“Ma’am—“

Divraën whipped around and grabbed the useless meat sack who’d opened his idiot mouth and polluted her air with his breath. It seemed this deeble thought she needed to be informed of some insignificant detail regarding the god-king of shit genes. Like how he might be deaf and that she gave the last fragment of a crusty pteroroach shit about that. If they’d hired a deaf gwakloon, that was their problem, not hers!

Deeble Dick struggled under her grip, choking and gagging boringly. Divraën yawned. His eyes hadn’t even gone wild yet. Sighing tiredly, she lifted him up by his throat. That did the trick.

Eyes bulging, veins straining, Deeble Dick was finally putting on a prop—

piff

A tiny, bony, skinny bitch fist thumped fecklessly against her forearm. The blow hit with all the same force as a declawed housecat swatting lazily at a piece of fluff on the end of stick. Divraën looked down at his fist thumping uselessly against her arm with confusion.

It was almost amusing. But why? Why did they always struggle? All the fighting and kicking and gagging and writhing about, it must have been just so exhausting. And for what? It couldn’t have been purely for her amusement. Even radwasted roebs picking at the bones of noquot zones did the same and their instinct for self-preservation was all but non-existent. Every one of these nudlugs ended up the same way in the end, but oh how they fought so hard and so long against the inevitable. It was almost admirable, the effort.

Of course, this pest-ridden waster had put his left hand on her wrist and she couldn’t let that slide. That was the hand slid between the cheeks after dropping a pozzal squap into the can.

“Oh, having trouble breathing?” Divraën asked, grinning devilishly.

She formed her free hand into a spearpoint and plunged it into his abdomen. Blood burst out of Deeble Dick’s stomach, splattering her face and dress in even more beautiful, barbarous, body paint.

This was why she always wore white to the SubCity.

“Let me help you with that!” she snarled, thrusting her forearm fully into his gut.

Reaching a hand up into his chest, she closed her hand around his right lung. Deeble Dick’s face turned every colour of the rainbow as it contorted around the reality that she wasn’t giving him the deep tissue massage he’d always dreamed of.

“Yeah, I think I see what your problem is,” she growled, yanking hard.

The organ gave almost no resistance, tearing off at the trachea. Snaking her hand back out of his abdomen, she pulled the lung completely out of him.

“Y’know, you’re right! This thing is pretty useless!” she exclaimed, tossing the lung over one shoulder. “Better get the other one too!”

The meat sack stopped struggling before she’d even gotten her hand back into him. What a lightweight.

Never one to be deterred by minor inconveniences, Divraën fished the other lung out and tossed it and Deeble Dick’s limp body aside, giving her an unobstructed view of a room full of gun toting, slack-jawed morons standing about like they’d just witnessed the arrival of their patron god.

Idiots! All of them! Nraþin made his presence known in exploding toilets and swarms of pteroroaches fleeing a PDM nuking. Blood and turboviolence were Gaofhann’s thing!

Divraën’s whole schtick was death in general, treading a bit on Gaofhann’s territory. That might have been a problem, but border wars and incessant bickering made Gaofhann harder than titancrete. For Gaofhann, God of Gang Politics, did not desire for peace, but problems, always!

“What? I interrupt your party?” Divraën barked, grabbing a bottle of Pottek Divies Brand pozzal from a nearby table.

Before she could take a swig, the doors at the back of the great room flung open, revealing a flustered—

“Gij!” Divraën exclaimed, chucking the bottle off to the side.

Glass shattered and someone yelped before their body thudded to the floor. A snap of her fingers and one of her Prettyboys stomped the weakmeat’s face in.

Anyone who couldn’t handle their liquor, well, what purpose did they serve?

Gij, the little dickie of today’s palace of sin and vice, cringed at the sight. Divraën didn’t even bother herself to assess the damage. Nothing of value, after all, had been lost. If anything, she’d just increased the value of this palace by reducing its operational redundancies. Not that any of that mattered anymore. At least not for this establishment. Once she’d retrieved what she’d came for, this Onesie would be decommissioned anyway. Anyone getting their tickets punched early, well, they should count themselves only so lucky.

“Madame!” Gij greeted, dropping to one knee and bowing his head in what was only the appropriate fashion when in the presence of royalty.

“This rabble of nudlugging, scabradding wankers must be dealt with!” Divraën insisted, loudly and gesturing flamboyantly at the room. “Replaced! The lot of them! Prettyboys! Make it happen! The manlet of the house and I need to chat!”

Silently, her posse of jacked up bodyguards got to work. Blood curdling screams and the sounds of wet fleshy impacts accompanied the glorious percussive break of small arms fire and furniture being fragged. Such glorious music, Divraën thought, smiling from ear to ear. The singing of angels and trumpets heralding the Gods Above. Wonderful.

Decommissioning commencing around her, Divraën danced her way gleefully across the hall, the joyous noise of death come hard upon the dernahguhd no finer song for the queen coming home.

She stepped up a short flight of stairs to a set of double doors with Umploiyeez Ahlnee painted in childish, bubble letters above and half onto them. All the joy in the moment was extinguished at the sight.

Divraën sighed and shook her head in disappointment. High expectations weren’t something she’d had when she reassigned Gij from the Twilights to run this shithole, but this was beneath even those. Gij rose to his feet and opened the doors for her, holding them as she passed.

Apropos of the moment, as she entered into her domain, Gij was quivering and shivering like a politician strung up in his skivvies on the outside of his Astors penthouse. Divraën didn’t stop nor slow down. Her expectations were well known to Gij, something she’d made clear when she demoted him six years ago. The site boss shut the doors behind them before making hurried pace, returning to her left side.

“Madame, would you like to—” Gij began, gesturing forward and to the left.

Divraën stopped, expecting Gij to make the fatal mistake of running into her. The disappointment when the twilight gwakloon’s instincts didn’t fail him ranked among the day’s greatest. There would be more opportunities to give him the free dental services he’d earned from punching the tenth hole on his perfup rewards card. Gij had zomped his last job and his day of judgement had come.

“Why do you think I’m here, Gij?” Divraën asked, without even turning to look at the One Stop Boss.

“To…audit our operations?” Gij guessed.

“Rumours have reached my ears,” Divraën responded.

“What…kind…of rumours?”

“That your emptyheaded runners have stumbled upon something particularly…interesting,” Divraën answered. “Show it to me.”

“Ah…yes…” Gij reacted nervously, “that…. Please, come this way.”

He stepped out in front of her, a mistake Divraën let pass for the moment. Gij led her to the end of the hall, where he opened the door on the left side, leading to a stairway. Divraën already knew where this was going, but she figured she’d let him think he was being clever and bright.

Two flights down, a short walk down a hall carved directly into the SubCity bedrock, through an armoured vault door, and they were in the main storage area of the Onesie. Gij led her through the warehouse—because she clearly needed to be shown around her own house—stopping at a second door even more armoured than the main warehouse doors.

Gij reached into a pair of short trousers so encrusted with filth even a Plaguelord of Nraþin wouldn’t have touched them with the thousand metre beam on which the Maroons were built. A set of greasy keys coated in trouser dust came forth from the cavernous depths of the scabrag’s hameedao junksmugs. Swarms of insects scurried up Gij’s arm, having been so rudely disturbed by his hand digging around in their hive. Had Divraën not grown up down here in the shitstain of São she probably would have vomited.

“Would you like to—” he started to say, offering the keys.

“Hells to the fuckdamn shit no, Gij!” Divraën snapped. “Nobody wants to touch that!”

Shrugging his shoulders, Gij slotted the key into the lock and swung the door open, revealing—

“What the fuck is that!?” Divraën exclaimed.

“That is an Angelic!” Gij announced, grinning with all two and three fifths of his remaining teeth. “Worth a godsdamn fortune!”

His smile faded as he saw Divraën’s deepening scowl.

“Only issue is the bitch won’t eat.”

This. Fucking. Clown.

Brow furrowing into a vertical line, Divraën lashed out. The back of her hand struck Gij in the side of the face, sending him to the floor.

“Ow!” he whined, clutching his cheek.

Split open by Divraën’s rings, the ragged wound had opened up a whole new mouth to breathe out of in the side of his face. Not that he’d have much opportunity to make use of it. This pissbrained, deebled, dipwick, asswanking, blister on her backside had just fucked the scrap crusher!

“You brainrotted knobgobbler!” Divraën screamed, pointing at the crumpled heap of meat in the good shit pit. “That’s no fucking Angelic!”

“Course it is!” Gij argued. “Got wings and everything!”

“You ever see a gods damned Angelic with a shitpile of battle badges, tats, and piercings!?” Divraën shrieked, kicking Gij in the groin.

“They’re! Insufferable! Fucking! Puritans!” Divraën screamed, kicking Gij in the gut with each word.

Picking him up, she smashed him into the wall, the force nearly sending the scab into the dozone.

“Not today, Gij,” Divraën growled.

She took the hypo she’d prepared on the way down and jabbed into Gij’s side. A cocktail of Daylight, r-Him-o, and Thundrunner lanced through Gij’s system. There’d be no dozing off now. He’d be deader than noquot roebs after the bombs hit long before the last brain cell banging about in his empty head caught on to that fact.

While he was still foaming at the mouth, Divraën grabbed him by the back of the neck and thrust his face into the vault.

“See those!” Divraën shouted. “What the fuck are those!”

“Tattoos,” Gij yelped, twitching from the drugs in his system.

Divraën threw Gij out of the cell, sending him into a pile of boxes. Kneeling down, she carefully removed a titanium ring from the creature’s lip. Injuring this thing any more than Gij had already seen appropriate to would only amplify its wrath when it woke up.

Returning to Gij, she grabbed him by the throat and ran the piercing through his left nipple. He winced and whimpered, pushing Divraën beyond her limit.

This sorry sack of shit was crying like a little bitch! She didn’t hire weak little bitches to run her shit! She’d been fucked ragged by a lot of lokromie single-cellers before, but none of them cried like a bitch when she dispensed due process on their stupid, nudlugging, radwasted faces! Gij had no fucking honour and no fucking dignity either! What a roebblowing asshole!

Divraën grabbed the ring and ripped it out of Gij. Flinging the ring away, she whipped Gij around to behold the scale of his fuck-up.

“HOW MANY WINGS DOES A FUCKING ANGELIC HAVE!” Divraën roared, throwing him back to the floor.

“I don’t know!” he blubbered.

“TWO! TWO WINGS!” thundered Divraën. “NOT ONE OR THREE OR FOUR! BUT TWO! TWO RATFUCKING WINGS! THE FUCK HAPPEN! YOU GROW GLOWSHROOMS IN YOUR HEAD!?”

Gij shook his head feebly. Picking him up again, Divraën threw him forward, lifting his face to look into the good shit pit.

“Let’s count!” Divraën shouted.

Lifting Gij by the back of his head, she smashed his face into the floor for emphasis.

“One!”

She smashed his face again.

“Two!”

Again.

“Three!”

Again.

“Four!”

She hauled Gij back upright and chucked him of the goodshitpit.

“Four! Four cubatefucking wings!” she shouted. “Do you know what that means!?”

“N-n-no, madame,” Gij blubbered.

Roaring with rage, she grabbed Gij by his chest, nails digging under his skin and into his pectoral muscles. She lifted him off the ground and slammed him into the bedrock wall next to the vault door.

“That means!” hissed Divraën, thrusting her face so close to his their noses were almost touching. “That! In there! Is a roebblowing Valkyrie!”

She ripped one of her hands out of his chest and punched him in the gut.

Thump!

Gij’s face turned from red to green.

“Do you have the slightest fucking idea how badly your contie ass just shit the bed!?” Divraën growled, worming her fingers deeper into his pecs.

“No…” Gij whimpered.

Thump!

Another punch to the solar plexus.

“You!”

Thump!

“Stupid!”

Thump!

“Sack!”

Thump!

“Of!”

Thump!

“PISS!”

Whump!

“YOU’VE FUCKED US ALL!” she finished, clamping Gij’s jaw shut.

Vomit spurted out of Gij’s nostrils and the side of his face, his gut writhing like a pit of snakes. Divraën flung Gij out of her grasp. Arcing as gracelessly as a corporate demotion, he crashed into a nearby shelving unit, bounced off, and smashed to the floor. Clutching at his neck and his chest to try and stem the bleeding, the little dickie coughed and wheezed and rocked about on the floor, spitting up blood and vomit and gods only knew what else.

With a grimace, Divraën pinched her brow between her thumb and forefinger. This was supposed to be a simple day of dealing with a disloyal ratfuck topping cargo that was rightfully hers. Simple collect and decom. Simple day. Easy day. Fun. Fun day. Good, bloody, ultraviolent, gigamurderous fun. And somehow this deebled, scabradding, lokromie, perfup had made a day of her favourite things the precise opposite of that.

There truly was no lower limit to the depths of disappointment that this perfup could dig. Even beating Gij to death wasn’t fun. This no-brained nudlug had somehow made killing him a tedious chore.

Amidst a pile of merchandise toppled off the shelving units onto him, Gij attempted to get back to his feet. Divraën grabbed a box of metal scrap and hurled it at him, sending him back to the floor. Clearly he hadn’t internalised the lesson yet. Grovelling on the floor like a worm was exactly what he should be doing. Nothing else.

How that imbecilic gwakloon had so categorically fucked up was beyond her, and she’d spent half her life around his kind of inbred, wreath-of-genes-style brainlet. A whole GC disaster relief fleet couldn’t even begin to clean up the legionstorm of shit he’d brought to her doorstep.

Everyone in New Rio knew how to spot a Valkyrie from ten city blocks off, and especially everyone in the SubCity. Crazy bitches were always down in the shitstains painting abstract murals all over the walls with the kinds of shroombrained ratfucks stupid enough to cross them. Having seen their wrath up close and personal, Divraën knew it was a lot easier to cross a Valkyrie than to make a bag off an Angelic, and there weren’t many things easier to do than topping Angelics.

Send Pommelhorse, King of the Maroons, proof of product, and he’d have a crew with a king’s treasury worth of cred down in a matter of hours. Valkyries, they’d be pissed about it, but all they’d do was send a Flight to remind the Zone that clipped the Angelic’s wing what all troggos already knew.

Kicking the political hornet’s nest that was making war with Pommelhorse, New Rio’s HR Disaster Master, wasn’t something anyone had stomach for, Valkyries least. His was a black hole where all personnel problems got disposed of at the pleasure of The Way’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals—the titans. Titans would shit all over a Shadow King for not showing the proper respect, and the clue of his power was in the name. King of the City, running it from the shadows. Some madlad named Bearfist had cut more than a few of their crowns at the behest of some titan soured on his investments.

Once HR made it into Pommelhorse’s tender embrace, it was gone. No recovery. For the Kaj or KP who got the goods delivered, it was all money bags and a good night’s sleep. It was his underlings that would pay the price.

If Gij had actually topped an Angelic, it should have been gone day one. This sack of skin, bones, and barely breathing organic material was not an Angelic. It was the one thing even Pommelhorse wouldn’t touch.

Kitsune Hill and its army of Valkyries tolerated Pommelhorse’s shit for the sake of stability or some other half-assed argument to cover the fact they were too lazy and too afraid of the titans to drop the Maroons off its big-ass support beam. If any of Pommelhorse’s butcher bars served up Valkyrie to the titans and tyrants that came his way, that unspoken detente was over. A whole army of flappy-assed, flat-chested, hyper-belligerent, murder-bitches would be on his doorstep like armageddon plays hardball in God’s house. The whole garrison, led by the biggest dick on the Hill, would topple the Maroons off its bloody pike.

A pretty bad bargain, all put together, even if the fucking creatures were overhyped wannabes less than half the badass of Divraën’s braindead prettyboys. Heat that mean wasn’t anything worth going toe-to-toe with unprovoked. Even Divraën respected that. That and she didn’t have enough prettyboys to take down the half-milly Kitsune Hill would send if she declared on them.

Gij, in his infinite brilliance, had just tried to sell one of the caustic cunts. If ever Divraën was going to throw down the gauntlet with the Valkyries, that was a top-five idea on how to do it. There was no telling what hell’s own angels would take as payment for trespassing their turf and taking one of their own, but she had a pretty good idea.

What to do, what to do…

Impulse told Divraën to just kill the bitch while it was out and dump its body in the Barricades. That would have been easy, but the fucking things had eyes and ears everywhere. If Valkyries weren’t munching each other’s carpet, they were in bed with those damned Foxes. If Divraën had heard about Gij turning traitor on her, the Kitsune of the Hill’s namesake had too. Killing and dumping a Valkyrie in the ‘cades like a sack of meat in a dog kennel would only piss the others off more than they no doubt already were.

Leaving it here would have been a solution, except those crazy bitches would know the queen had been here. Given that Gij had seen fit to let the poor creature wallow in its own filth for gods only knew how long, Divraën didn’t even need to question how personally its rescue party would take that affront. Now that Gij knew what he was sitting on, if left it would be dead by the time the Valkyrie kill squad arrived, and that could only result in an even bigger disaster.

Only things left on the table were shit and piss. War wasn’t an option she really wanted to entertain, so that left handling things personally. Back at her castle Divraën did have something useful. Some unigo KP thought it would be a good idea to put a plug on the Queen of the 9th’s rise. Real genius, he was. After putting his dick in the dirt, Divraën won herself a Vostok witch. Healing hands were among the witch’s magical powers. It was a stupid idea, but just stupid enough to work.

Scowling even deeper, Divraën felt her burning rage return. All of this effort, expense, and lost profits on a decommed Onesie just to get fucked up the ass all over again by some flea-ridden scab in the SubCity. She didn’t come down here to relive the gloryhole days. She certainly was not about to walk out of it leaking blood and jizz down her legs like she’d just fought her way out of another whorehouse with a jawbone and a chunk of titancrete dangling from a strapon.

“Do you have any idea how badly you fucked up!?” Divraën snapped, kicking Gij in the chest again.

“I didn’t know!” he blubbered.

“You didn’t know!?” Divraën screamed, hurling a box full of scavenged gun barrels at him. “Where the fuck you even find this one anyway!?”

“Middle…of…a gunfight!” he answered between pained gasps.

He was done. Even the drugs were at their limit. One or two more hits and he’d flatline.

Looking back into the goodshitpit, it finally clicked in Divraën’s brain that the Valkyrie had been stripped completely. Nudity being the baseline for everyone and everything down here in the SubCity, it only just registered to her that Valkyries never came down here in anything less than the galaxy’s finest power armour. Divraën felt her blood—already boiling—go hotter than a stellar furnace.

“And was it wearing SCABRAGGING POWER ARMOUR!?” Divraën shrieked.

“Yes! But…”

Divraen clobbered Gij in the ear, bursting his eardrum.

“Where the fuck is it!?” Divraën demanded.

“We…”

“WHERE’S THE FUCKING POWER ARMOUR!” Divraën screamed.

Gij blubbered incoherently. Looking down, she saw fresh piss and shit in his trousers. Gritting her teeth, she ripped the filth-encrusted garments off of him and stomped her heels into his balls. The noises Gij made only amplified Divraën’s rage. This present quagmire had soured even the joy of crushing testicles and his sobbing only pissed her off more.

“Shut your fucking face!” Divraën snapped, knocking Gij out with a kick to the side of the head.

Heavy footsteps echoed off the stone walls from the direction of the staircase. One of her prettyboys was on his way. Sighing, Divraën attempted to compose herself before the dopey fuck could assault her ears with fresh stupid.

Pretyboy.3 clunked his cyberjacked tank of a body up to Divraën. She sniffed twice. All the flavours of death in the shitstain came off of him like an open sewer baking in the heat of the jungle. On any other day, this would have pleased her. Today it was only another irritation.

“Ma’am,” he grunted. “Theys is dead.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Divraën grumbled, dismissively, “tear the place apart. Find whatever looks way too fucking fancy to belong here and bring it back to the castle.”

“What do hims?” Prettyboy.3 asked, pointing a meaty sausage finger at Gij.

Divraën thought about the question for a moment. Then she lifted a foot and stomped Gij’s face in. Bones crunched, warm blood sprayed up her skirt with chunks of brain, the sensation tickling her between the legs. Grinding her heel in Gij’s mushed up brains, she looked back to Prettyboy.3.

He looked up, slackjawed and emptyheaded as usual, and pointed a meaty sausage finger at the Valkyrie.

“What do with…uhhh…that?” he asked.

“I’ll handle it,” Divraën answered. “Find me whatever these scabrats didn’t sell of its kit and decom this op.”

“Yes ma’am,” Prettyboy.3 grunted.

Returning to the Valkyrie, Divraën lifted it off the floor. The creature was astonishingly light for its size. Nearly twice as tall as Divraën, it was half her weight if that. Draping it over her shoulders, Divraën turned and walked back out of the warehouse.

The march out of the One Stop Shop may have been the only enjoyable part of the whole ordeal. Her orders had been automatically relayed through Prettyboy.3’s limbocyte implant to the rest of the prettyboys and a glorious fanfare of smashing, crashing, bashing, screaming, crying and dying, complete with all the visual delights that went with heralded the queen as she went. One good thing on an evening otherwise completely in the shitcan of a barricades krogg.

Small blessings.

begin record

🔻

The Healer’s Burden

Part 2

Memories of Soot

Weight. It came to rest on her chest in three ways, the least of these in the heaviness of Freyja’s Tears filling her breast. The sword held overhead by a horsehair had fallen at last. Syrinx sealed, she would sing no more the mourning light.

*Luba*

Silence hung heavy in the blue veil paling. Dawn was breaking in the east, the sun’s face still hidden behind the towers of Sãodorovár and the mountains which bounded the bay on which the first hive city sat. High up the slopes of Kitsune Hill, an inselberg sanctuary, the last sacred place of New Rio’s Mythica, Luba woke to cloud forests still shrouded in fog. The dim light of dawn and the winds with it had yet to push downslope heavy cloud kissing the face of the mountain.

From where Luba lay with weary eyes, she could just see in the first hint of morning’s twilight the shapes of a dozen standing stones standing vigil over this sacred garden. Through fog and dim light, only the vague outlines of their silhouettes could be resolved. Each one’s form was a progression of decay, their remaining pieces smaller, more worn down, their fragments more numerous as they receded into the mist, rounded and reduced by the relentless march of time. This that came for all things.

Even the granite of the Ásjagärðír—The Memories of Soot—the sacred memorial garden of Kitsune Hill’s Elders Healer, it paid homage to the inexorable passage of all things. Nothing could withstand the weathering of Aions unbitten. Ten of which had made of the first of this garden’s stones all but dust in the wind. The fragments of Eynra the Hungry had been lost to times before Luba’s, before Løryinn Shadehand’s even. The stone which bore the name of Kitsune Hill’s first Elder Healer had passed into memory before the waning days of Sunbeam’s tenure, now three generations ago.

Eynra’s memories lived on, but time would consume them too, as it had consumed her runestone, as time had consumed generation upon generation of Valkyries, their names remembered only in Hjälla af Sjœrt ok Vindr—The Memorial Hall.

Nothing was forever. Not even the marble of The Memorial Hall. Each plaque had been remade, recarved, reset a hundred times, the hall itself rebuilt six times since the Triumph of the Nameless. Even the dead and the grief that lived on in their absence would, in time, fade away. The Rafnar and the Elders Healer from afar spoke these truths when they visited to pay their respects to the fallen.

Their truth, how softly spoken ever it was, could make no salve for the ache deep in Luba’s being. She knew well the words of her sisters. Spoken for their own comfort more than her own, they gave no consolation. It was no friend, companion, nor battle-sister, but maþrblúð, a sister of blood, Luba’s twin, who had fallen.

Grief’s testimony made, though, no rejoinder. It was a truth unto itself, spoken selfsame of worth at the Conclave of Elders, a testimony only to the depth of wounds and the volume of soul hollowed in the absence. Friends, companions, lovers, Luba had borne a hundred bodies to the Pyres of Returning. Time and again, death’s thin melody keened from her throat.

She had endured these pains before. In the absence of those returned to Freyja was always left a void around which the spirit grew, the boundary a scar, the cavern a hollow of precious memories. Luba was porous with the places where only ghosts remained. Her heart was a sieve, sifting through the names of those returned to the Almaþr. One hand could count the names of those she had grown old with. One digit fewer was required now for the task.

Standing unbitten by time, nor gnawed to the least by moss and lichen, was one half of a broken whole; a runestone yet incomplete. It rested there in the space reserved for the thirteenth generation of Kitsune Hill’s Elders Healer. On it were carved the names of Luba’s sister, Ivii of the Captainseve, Daughter of Hönna the Sunbeam, Guardian of Kitsune Hill, Hands of Mercy left cold and abandoned in the darkness of New Rio’s most foul and unforgiving places.

Six lunes past, the day before Nuísk Aunnún, a great need arose in the 9th SubCity Barricades. A siren of Venus Sjoebal’s coven, imprisoned by Kaidani Inquisitors, cried out for release. Without delay, twenty-four of Kitsune Hill’s best, a great wariafælkr—a Flight—of Saaja the Sanguine’s chosen, descended into the deep. Nine returned.

Eleven were slain, their deaths recorded in feathers pulled from broken wings. Four were lost, left behind, their fates unknown. These were a visendakona, two of Kitsune Hill’s best krygskalar—commanders—and Ivii, Elder Healer. With swarms of mutated Barricades rotspawn chasing them, no passage through the Barricades could be made. Those walls lived and breathed. The Barricades were great god machines of malice and death, their innards churning with greater wrath and hate than their skin, pustulant with guns and turrets. Someone had to remain behind, to hold back the rotstpawn at the gates of the passage, so the rest could escape.

When Ayris the Diamondheart, third amongst Kitsune Hill’s greatest, the leader of the Flight, returned, bloody, battered, and exhausted, her footsteps echoed heavy on the floors of the Apothecary. The old Flamekeeper, pulled from her fires by the weight of the hour, was of singular mind. Blood dripping down her face and arm, gait full of limp, she pushed through a crowd of healers blocking the path from her to where she was intent to go.

This porous heart of Luba’s had many a time tasted the cruel arrows of the Norns. Pierced by the pain of last goodbyes given before altars where spirits of her beloved were returned to Sessrúmnir in flames, Luba had thought herself wise in these ways. Tears had gone quiet, the song of of her sorrows held steady and solemn. Grief’s razor cut and slashed and her knees remained locked, her face made of stone.

Seeing Ayris return alone broke her of this foolishness. Silent as the grave, her expression shattered, eyes heavy, the great visendakona had been broken open and hollowed out. Luba remembered falling to the floor, tears pouring down her face, feeling like she had been cloven in two. When she had crossed the hall, Ayris knelt down before Luba and placed a weary hand on her shoulder, head bowed.

Luba remembered howling. Howling and wailing. None could console her. The only thought in her mind was that she should have been there. She should have been there with Ivii, with her sister, at the end. They should have faced the darkness together. They should have fallen together. It was their way, their most sacred oath, a duty which transcended all others. At each other’s side, in everything, always. In battle, in ceremony, in silence, in everything, even unto the last step on the long road of a Valkyrie’s life.

Hafdís-varþa-Grigor, their Captain, denied them this, insisting Kitsune Hill needed her Elders, even if it meant tearing her Ældrahjællar in half. The wisdom in this, Luba could not see. What Grigor, upon Þæs dais and throne, beheld in the Sight of All Souls, Þæ had not shared with Luba.

She remembered Grigor coming to her side whilst Ayris was still there, still holding her. Apologies mumbled barely reached Luba’s ears.

Ivii was gone. Her sister was gone. Dead. Lost in the darkness. Body and spirit trapped forever in the blackest reaches of New Rio. Ivii would not even await Luba in Fólkvangr. To console this pain, this anguish echoing through the Ancestors assembling around her, was beyond the powers of even the Gods.

Heart no longer a sieve but a tattered rag of threadbare fibres barely clinging together, Ivii was the last measure of loss her spirit could take. This was a pain she did not know what to do with. Carving her sister’s runestone broke more pieces of her off than she broke off the stone. Carrying the stone to the Ásjagärðír, reading Ivii’s name into the Annals on Mjölnirsnatt, placing Ivii’s plaque on the Wall of the Dead, these moments were all out of focus, memories which existed in the liminality of spaces between spaces. They were real, but grasping them was like holding fistfuls of sand slipping through her fingers. Lunes lost in the washed-out landscape of pain contained only in the fog to which her mind retreated.

Laying before her sister’s runestone, Luba’s mind drifted to the dignities denied her. All the things hers by right, taken or denied by her Captain, burned like branding irons in the ruminations she woke to each morning. In the mourning light drifting between branches in filaments of gold, resentment rose like bile in the back of her throat. Grounded and confined to Kitsune Hill for the selfish desires of Captain Grigor, her sister’s death yet remained without retort.

Luba gripped a fistful of rocky soil, rage dissipating at the falling dagger of recall. This was not the way Ivii would have herself remembered. Strife and wedges between the things she held most dear would have seen her spirit weep were it let to return to Freyja.

She thumped her fist against the ground, silently cursing the Norns for their cruelty. In the distance, the unmistakeable sounds of pine needles crunching beneath bare feet startled her, sent her scrabbling, back against the trunk of a wide tree, hearts racing. Clutching her sword to her chest, Luba only relaxed when the footsteps stopped abruptly at the edge of the garden.

It must have been a þrælrafn—a page-trophy—sent by Úlja, Luba’s protege and heir-apparent. The Apothecary needed the return of its Elder Healer.

Looking up, Luba beheld the daylight ageing. Old growth pines catching light, their innumerable fingers scattered splinters of dawn which, in thinning fog, fell down like filaments of gold. In the mourning light of dawn passing into day, Freyja had draped her golden hair over the forest floor.

Since Ivii’s passing, its lustre was all but lost. Like birdsong and wind in the branches of trees on mountains themselves once the glory of creation, all had been dulled. This ache, as persistent as it was potent, robbed the world of its colour. Everything was washed out and faded. It was as if her eyes had glimpsed fragments of the unspeakable malice her mother’s great seiðr brought to bear. All was greyer now and too many mornings began like this.

With pained resignation, Luba rose and dusted off her dress—low-backed and of a fresh and pleasant green, the bodice untied and hanging from her hips. A flutter of wings dispersed brush and debris from the rear of her skirt and her feathers as well. It was time to meet the day.

Luba took up her sword, Könnr. She was a rare and prised honour her hands once held with pride. Now she remained a persistent reminder of things lost to the cruel whims of the Norns. Without her twin Kvenna, Könnr’s gleam in the harsh sunlight had been reduced to barely a glimmer.

The skill of Forgemaster Akridis of Grandmother’s Holyfields and the cunning of Supreme Archon Jussho of Fuchinyan had together forged these twinned sabres. Grand Masterworks of rare equal, Kvenna and Könnr were to be drawn together. Könnr was now but a shadow of herself, a faded remnant of her former splendour.

Kneeling down, Luba placed her forehead against her sister’s runestone. weighed heavier than its stone. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto the cut granite. The ache of want closed the harsh fangs of Ljókinn’s serpent around her two hearts. She wanted her sister back. She wanted Ivii. If only for a moment, to hold her close one last time. To say goodbye.

But Ivii was gone. No prayers to the gods nor even the sacrifices of Saëwa the Silent could bring her back.

Luba released her white knuckled grip from her sister’s rune stone and pushed herself away, forcing herself back to her feet despite the bite of betrayal she felt in the act. The duties of the day called and she had delayed all she could. It was time to depart. Ivii would understand.

“I’ll be back, sister,” Luba whispered.

One last look at the stone and she turned away. If a messenger had come to the limits of this sacred space then some great need had arisen. Luba had delayed all she could.

After brushing away the dirt and foliage freshly collected on the front of her dress, Luba pulled her hair and crown feathers over a shoulder. She lifted the bodice of her dress, pulling it taut before tying the ribbons of its halter neck. She threw her hair back over her shoulder, shuffling her wings to settle the her pale locks between them. Taking her sword again, she tied its belt about her hips and departed the garden.

The short walk down to the Elder Gate she used to compose and steel herself. It was not good for the Elder Healer to show her pain. In reverberations across the subtle connections between Valkyires, her sisters-in-arms would feel it amplified tenfold. Cruel as it was, and hard as the day’s aches came, Luba’s duty was to soothe the pain of all sestren of the sword, not to burden them with her own.

At the end of the winding path, before the gate, Luba found not a þrælrafn waiting, but her closest companion, Aþril. Luba smiled. Aþril replied with one of her own, a beam of sun always on overcast days.

Following a track worn by dozens of Elders Healer, both New Rio’s own, and visiting Elders Healer alike, Luba stepped carefully around the eastern pillar.

At one time, in the distant past of the Garrison’s long history, a third stone spanned the two pillars, forming a simple archway under which passage into the Ásjagärðír was made. The spanning stone had fallen many millennia ago and its remains lay as they had when it fell.

As with most things of its era, it had neither been repaired nor replaced. Ásjagärðír commemorated and gave honour to the impermanence of all things. What weathered with the ages passing felt right to leave as it was.

Whether it had crumbled under the weight of time or been cut by the fury of the Nameless Valkheart during her Triumph could not be rightly said. Time kept the memory of such things close. Either way, the spanning stone was to remain as it was. If it had fallen on its own, the ground must keep it. If it had been cut down by the Nameless Valkheart, only by her blessing could it be restored. While none but two remained who might know the story of its fall, neither survivor of the Nameless’ Triumph would rob Kitsune Hill of her stories.

More than tradition, duty, or honour, Valkyries were a people of lore. Born of the dreams of humanity made manifest inside a collapsing gyre of time, myth, legend, and lore created them. Stories told over firelight gave them form. They were, before the Gods gave them shape, the whispered words in the ears of the old skalds.

Tales of old valour, like unto the humans who spoke the Valkyries into being, gave them hope in places where light did not shine. Songs and poems of titans and legends of yore taught young and old lessons more valuable than the truth of things ever could.

What tales were told of the Nameless Valkheart were no different. Shrouded in mystery, none knew whence she came, nor why she sought Triumph at Kitsune Hill. It was whispered in quiet places that she was once a child of the Great Er-Alaþ, but had been twisted and reforged in the same malevolent forge that made of Alvarão’s Stalwart a Broken Spire. A malformed creature, of no name, no origins, nor even a home, she came and conquered Kitsune Hill. As if to humiliate them, she stood Triumphant in the manner of the Nattsurtrkonar, those condemned to conquer great foes only with what gifts nature had blessed them.

Her bare mettle triumphant, the might of her flesh alone, bare before the gaze of Freyja, the Nameless was hailed the greatest of the four Valkhearts. A captain lay dead by red and tooth and claw. The mountain was split, broken open, a chasm cut across its face to devour the Captain-Valorous, Brindi-varþa-Bartimeus. All that she, the Nameless Valkheart, claimed of her Triumph was the Steel Feather, the fabled lightblade of their noble Captain-Returned.

Then she disappeared. Returned to the darkness of the Deep Places, neither the Nine Tales due to her nor anything else right to her claimed. The Nameless had neither blessed Bartimeus’ bones so that his spirit might be returned to Freyja at Raven’s Rock, nor had she hallowed the ruins of Kitsune Hill’s old værkrhjeim. She simply vanished.

Through whispers and rumours from the þrællr of the Kitsune, silver hair and a blade of icefire flashing in the Deep Places of New Rio made known that the Nameless Valkheart yet lived. She yet stalked the Deep Places, but none knew where to find her. The Kitsune listened, yes, but they did not look for where the Nameless Valkheart wandered, nor did they seek the place she laid her head to rest. They did not want to know.

So lay the spanning stone as lay Bartimeus. The scattered pieces of both decaying and crumbling, dust and memories the fate of more than half of what remained. Pieces endured, but like with all things broken and left in the wake of the Nameless Valkheart, they endured as she had discarded them; sacred ruins, untouchable, left until, by her blessing, they could again be touched.

A rather cruel fate for such noble things, Luba felt, but it was their way, their tradition. Like those of the hallowed space through which it was right only for an Elder Healer to walk, and to walk slowly, in reverent contemplation of the lives and sacrifices of those Elders before her, these cruel and peculiar ways were the binding fibres of what made Valkyries who they were. These were their traditions. Sacraments and rituals Luba honoured as had Ivii, as had Løryinn Shadehand before her, and Hönna the Sunbeam before Løryinn, and Ránni Thunderwhip before Sunbeam, and Elders before Elders, generation upon generation, ancestors upon ancestors, the bones of the dead blessed by the reverence of the living and the keeping of sacred fire.

On the other side of the Elder Gate, Luba lifted her gaze to Aþril’s. One of the Garrison’s veteran vólar—a seiðrkona, a witch— she stood tall and proud. Regal in the morning sun, she kept a stoic silence in honour of the fallen as Luba crossed fully the boundary of the Ásjagärðír and returned to the narrow path back to their village.

In the way of her caste, Aþril wore only a plain linen skirt the colour of fresh cream. It sat low on her hips, the hem just above her ankles, the lower quarter spotted with morning dew and flecks of dirt. Around her hips, a plaited belt of leather adorned with totems and raven feathers secured a leather pouch to one side and a sword and scabbard to the other, both engraved in runes of power. The bag, like all such vessels, was enchanted to hold within a space many times larger than the volume of the bag itself. The sword, engraved with words of power, roared, when drawn, with Þórr’s thunder and blazed with the fires of Surtr.

From Aþril’s head, a queen’s mane of auburn hair flowed unbound, cascading over her wings and down her back to her hips. Crown feathers of speckled browns, reds, and white sprouting from her scalp draped as long as her hair, matching the colours of four wings tucked neatly against her back. Luba envied the complexity and dynamics of her companion’s raiment, hers being a plain and pale blonde, like the colour of snow in the late-morning light.

Though Luba had abstained from the tatooist’s needle, but for small symbols to honour those who came before, or those memories of greatest import, Aþril had made of her body a canvas. She bore openly many scars and markings which decorated her arms and torso in tales of valour and glory. Those on her abdomen, the emblems of motherhood, were the greatest of these.

More beautiful than their Captain, Aþril was Luba’s hjärtahóldi, her beloved, her favourite. Smiling, she touched her hjärtahjóldis belly, memories of Aþril’s beautiful daughters filling her mind with starlight. Three krygskonar—three warriors—fierce and elegant born under a swift sunrise. Three daughters to carry the torch forward, filling Luba’s throat with song and Aþril’s heart with pride. Of every honour bestowed upon both, to have been their mother was the most distinguished of these.

Before she could pull her fingers away, Aþril pulled Luba into her arms, awkwardly crumpling Luba’s between them. Luba looked up, smiling, the side of her face smushed between Aþril’s breasts. Aþril looked down at her, a greeting like birdsong and liluljúnnr falling from her lips.

“Good morning,” Aþril said, the words echoing the ineffable feelings pouring across innumerable fibres of their entwined minds.

“Good morning,” Luba returned.

Though the words were only a shadow of all that flowed freely between them, Valkyries were, before humans formed them, Freyja’s skalds, Asgard’s songbirds. Messengers of the gods, the voices reaching down Yggdrasil to the skalda and vólar of yore, speech and song were sacred in ways that defied description and yet demanded it all the same. All the mead in Wótann’s horn would never be half as sweet to a Valkyrie’s ears as the sound of a lover’s voice.

“I miss you,” Aþril murmured, her hands gripping Luba’s back with need.

“I know,” Luba said, sorrowfully. “I’m sorry.”

“Come back to me,” Aþril pleaded, “come back to us all. Hjärtahjeimr ok Æþihjeimr.”

“I’m trying,” Luba responded, tilting her head down.

For a moment, ear pressed to Aþril’s bare sternum, Luba listened to the sound of her dearest’s twin hearts beat. Two engines so slowly thrumming, the strength and power of Aþril’s breath mighty enough that her pulse came once or maybe twice each minute. From the underside of her ribcage, a slow, steady, and warm wind passed from Aþril’s respira—a continuous exhale brushing feathers of finest wind Luba’s chest.

How many times had she fallen asleep like this? Head at rest between Aþril’s hearts, her breath and pulse like wind and waves, always pulling her back. Many, many hjärtahjeimar—many kinnings—both had made over the Aions. Lovers, friends, kith, kin, and all the nights each had shared their nests with evanescent pleasure were but single drops in a vast ocean. Since they had discovered each other, neither Luba nor Aþril could do without the other. Always at the nucleus of ever widening circles they held each other’s hearts steady. Loss, grief, and heartbreak had formed rifts before. Bridging them was always a hard task of long suffering.

Aþril, tall as a mountain, strong as a legion of men, gentle as a Grace, took one of her hands away from Luba’s back and placed it on her head. Warm fingers pushed through Luba’s hair in long, slow strokes. Delicate and deft around the crown feathers of her head, each caress of Aþril’s hands over her scalp brought Luba closer and closer. Luba’s eyes drifted shut, a smile forming on her lips, as she melted completely into Aþril’s embrace.

Words did not need to be spoken in these long moments stood beneath the shade of old-growth pines. All they needed then and there was a silent but complete understanding, minds closer than bodies. Touch and feeling and sensation washed between them like wind on a high mountain peak. Each felt the other, felt the other as the other, and as themselves, as one, united being. There was no closer form of companionship.

The sun crept across the morning sky, her warmth kissing the air. Wind rushed through the woods, and dried away tears from Luba’s cheeks. Flavours of need draped across her tongue like strands of gossamer coating spring sproutlings, the sails of young spiders adrift on the breeze discarded upon their landing. In them was tangled a tang of fear, the spark of adrenaline, a bittersweet desire now lanced with something foreboding.

Reverberations sparked across their neurons entwined. Luba tensed. Aþril spoke again.

“Visendakona Ayris requests you in her Aerie,” said the vólva.

“Diamondheart?” Luba questioned.

“Yes,” Aþril confirmed. “She requests audience and counsel.”

Luba stepped back, shocked. Even as Elder Healer, she rarely, if ever, interacted with her peers of the Seiðrhjeim. The Circle of Visendakonar. like the Ældrahjælr Conclave, was a closed circle. Being composed of New Rio’s best and more powerful vólar, as well as the chief administrators of not only New Rio’s many Lodges, but of the whole Galactic Province, they rarely had time nor interest in interacting with any outside their Kinnings and Kithings.

At the head of the Circle of Visendakonar sat dual-Þænnanr Elder Vólva Kita the Emberflame and Blóðjarla Saaja the Sanguine, Visendakonar Thrice-Affirmed, Sole Survivors of the Nameless Valkheart’s Triumph, Seven-Times Victorious, Twin-Pillars of New Rio. Just beneath them was Visendakona Ayris the Diamondheart, Wrathbinder, Wraithbreaker; Eagle, Nightshadow, and Final Feather of Na Altu; Legionslayer, Bane of the Ignoble, Deathstalker, Ashen Phantom, Lightfoot, Shadewing, the Harbinger of Mercies, Bearer of a Hundred Names, each earned by deeds greater and more glorious than all the deeds of the remaining visendakonar of Kitsune Hill combined. Together with her only equals, she, Saaja, and Kita had etched their legends into the very stars, their names sung with rejoicing across the Galaxy, by Mythic and Mankind alike.

Ayris did not request audience and counsel. Audience and counsel was requested of her.

“I…” Luba floundered, the thought overwhelming her. “She requests my counsel?”

Aþril grinned with amusement, the thought forming in her lover’s head reaching Luba’s. Kitsune Hill’s Garrison was unique in so many peculiar ways.

“You are our Elder Healer,” Aþril said, bowing dramatically.

“Yes,” Luba chuckled, slightly embarrassed, “sometimes I forget...”

“Ayris’ shadow stretches long,” Aþril mused, “so much that even Sunbeam lost herself in its depths.”

Luba snorted at the absurdity. The thought of her mother losing herself in the legends of anyone was, at the same time, as far-fetched as a thought could come, but also as true to her mother as the beams of sunshine glowing from her smile.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Aþril commented. “Someone so much grander than even Saaja could aspire to be losing herself in the shadow of another’s greatness.”

“She always put others first,” Luba remembered, “I can’t think of a time when she ever took what was rightly hers.”

“Yet she is the last of Freyja’s Own,” Aþril said, “there is not a one alive today, not even on New Rio, who could say her deeds are even a half-measure of what Sunbeam achieved before the first of our kin kissed Mother Súlna farewell on our journey across the stars.”

“Five thousand nattsurtr sjönlæþ,” Luba murmured, “even Saaja has only completed a hundred.”

“Sunbeam’s shadow extends so long, I’ve heard even High-Captain Inga-varþa-Njörðrín bows before her.”

“A rumour which inspires such loathing in her,” Luba mentioned.

“The rumour? Or the act itself?” Aþril asked, grinning.

Responding only with a smile, Luba let the question hang. An answer, any answer, would sap the story of its strength. Aþril grinned in reply.

With a sigh, Aþril brushed a hand over Luba’s cheek, saying, “You are your mother’s daughter. In every way.”

Luba hugged Aþril again, nuzzling her head into Aþril’s chest, beaming inside and out. She felt a hand on her head, and a long exhale of pleasant contentment flow from her companion’s chest.

“Ayris...she needs your sword and battlesong,” Aþril said, rubbing the side of Luba’s head, “whispers from our kinfolk speak of Angelics in the Deep.”

A shiver went down Luba’s spine.

“There are no Angelics on New Rio,” Luba objected, “there haven’t been in Aions. Not since Pommelhorse fed the last of them to those fucking hærkimannr!?”

“They say it is trapped in the 9th SubCity,” Aþril added.

“That…. No! It cannot be!” Luba exclaimed, pushing away from Aþril. “It can’t! They lie!”

“Luba…”

“Stop!” Luba shouted, backing away. “No! I...I already...I can’t hear this! It’s not true! It can’t be!”

“It comes on the lips of Pommelhorse’s men,” Aþril said.

“No!” Luba cried out. “It can’t be!”

Hot tears coursed down her cheeks and Luba felt the ground give way beneath her feet. She fell backwards into the trunk of a tree. It couldn’t be true. The Norns couldn’t be so cruel.

Aþril knelt down and gathered Luba in her arms, saying, “There are lines a man so evil as Pommelhorse will not trespass.”

“It’s not her,” Luba whimpered, clutching Aþril. “It can’t be her.”

“It is all but certain she is one of our own,” Aþril continued.

“It’s been six lunes!” Luba cried out.

“Ayris defies our Captain!” Aþril barked.

“This...no…” Luba floundered, “that’s...she wouldn’t!”

“She calls you to your own!” Aþril exclaimed, “Sanctioned or not, it is your right! Grigor be damned! Ivii is your blood!”

Thumping a fist against her chest, Aþril shouted, “Maþrblúþ! Sisterhood!”

In Aþril’s face, Luba saw the same pain, the same indignity and betrayal that she had felt since the day Ivii was taken from her. Though all Valkyries saw themselves as sisters in arms, the bonds between sisters of blood carried great weight. Sisters, daughters, and mothers, theirs were bonds beyond the honour, duty, and reverence expected elsewhere. Theirs were rights and responsibilities that transcended the ordinary course. To deny bloodkin what was theirs by right, to break the sacred bond of Maþrblúþ, was something just short of treason. Only a Captain could tread such dangerous waters without facing the wrath of Þæs Lodge, but even then, only by High-Captain Inga’s permit.

“Maþrblúþ,” Aþril repeated, pressing the palm of her hand over Luba’s sternum.

“She lives?” Luba questioned.

Aþril nodded.

“Ivii?” Luba said, with insistence.

“Yes,” Aþril confirmed.

“Are you certain of this?” Luba demanded.

“Go,” Aþril commanded, hoisting Luba to her feet, “go and bring her home!”

Hearts racing, Luba unfurled her wings and took to the skies. If what Aþril spoke was true, if there was even a chance it was true, Luba had delayed too much already. As she broke through the canopy, Luba spared only a single glance back at her beloved. On Aþril’s face was joy, but there was something else there. Pain tugged at her lips, and tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.