Arqivist's Note: This excerpt, taken from The Annals of the Days of Ymara Xiaowensdóþr, was included in the 904th Continuing Eductation Memorandum of Department Valkyria (2nd Epoch, 8th Aion) as its Standard Assessment Test text. Memo 904 saw a 12.7% higher rate of failure over expectation, indicating deficiencies in Department Valkyria's Education and Training Curricula, specifically with regards to Valkyrian Flamekeepers. These deficiencies have been identified and adjustments to Department Valkyria's Education and Training Curricula have been made. A sample text has been selected from The Annals of the Days of [redacted] for a reassessment on a date to be announced.
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Lost in the Margins
Life moved slow in the wilds of Cloud Forest. Neither the spelmen. who placed their halls of stone on mountains they hollowed for riches, nor the nefenor, who claimed the forested vales below for the splendours of what sprouted from soft soil, had much hostility, one for the other—nor for anyone else. A peaceable coexistence they enjoyed, one which won them the Mythica’s embrace.
Each tribe shared with the other the fruits of their favoured labours, completing a circle familiar in so many ways. There was, in this, a shared kinship between them and the Triune Vitae. Valkyrie, Minotaur, and Kitsune also formed a close circle of interdependence. Each could do the deeds of the other when and where necessity demanded, but to no standard of excellence achieved by their respective masters. Growers and makers and shapers of beautiful things: Minotaur, Kitsune, and Valkyrie. In peace, together, they shared their respective bounties as siblings of the same source.
Nefenor and spelmen, like Mythica, were not without their enemies, of course. No creature bound, however loosely, to the larger dominion of humankind could escape entirely the intertribal violence that so defined those spacefaring apes. If one thing was true, it seemed that man could in no way tolerate the maddening silence brought when he was not at war with himself.
There existed, though few, necessary elements to the survival of nefenor and spelman which they could not readily produce themselves. Survival was a meagre lot. Subsistence was hardly worth the weight of the day when one had tasted the fruits of what could be.
To live, then, came at the cost of cohabitation. Cities and settlements where humans resided were established in places that did not appeal to either tribe. Interactions between them were limited, their towers to the sky rarely visited. Still, where there were humans, there were the seeds of inevitable conflict. Sacred mountains and holy forests would be profaned, the boundary waters of each tribe’s province tested, the limits of treaty and agreement pushed.
Lodge Elders calling the governors of the human realms to a Conclave had proven all thus far required to remind the humans in whose house they were guests. There would be a day when words would no longer be enough. Ymara did not fondly think of that day—the day of war approaching.
From the Great Hall, the sounds of horns blowing would call all to arms. Every Valkyrie would don her armour and take up her arms. Hundreds, thousands of them, all in silence, readying for war. The sounds of power armour sealing and weapons being readied a solemn enough hymn to swiftly descending damnation. The Elders would give no speeches, there was no need for orders. They were Valkyries. No enemy survived contact with their plans. When their enemies came, Freyja’s Own would bring such terrible slaughter as would scar the memories of a dozen generations.
This day would come. Its louring shade in the long distance cared nothing for Ymara’s feelings toward it. It simply was.
In her younger days, she would have looked toward days of ruin with anticipation. Now, their inexorable march from future to present filled her with dread. The last of Ymara’s youth was behind her. All its exuberance had been spent. She was old, now. Too old for a Valkyrie. Too old for reckless violence.
Sitting on the porch of her aerie, in this quiet corner of the cosmos, Ymara admired not valour and glory, but the peace between the two tribes she proudly called her neighbours. Nefenor and spelmen were as human as any, prone to all the same vices. Greed, ignorance, bigotry, all the many wells whence men drew hate with which to drown themselves in. Yet these two peoples, who could not have been any farther apart, had no quarrels between them that could not be peaceably resolved. They had no wars, no skirmishes, no fights, only an enduring peace Ymara had no way to understand.
Aions in the midst of mankind had taught Ymara much of humanity’s manner of cohabitation. Even members of the same tribe would so easily rise against each other, blades in hand, eager to bury them in the backs of their own. For the dethroning of tyrants, the avarice of titans, or the ambitions of warlords, it never mattered. The casus belli ceased to matter after the trench lines had been dug and the reality of what they had done began to sink in.
Cycles and patterns repeated. Ragnarök would consume a world torn open by petulant men and their petty disputes. A new generation of gods and men would rise from the rubble to put the pieces of the things they destroyed back together again. Then the cycle would begin again, to play out the same as it ever was. Never would a broken thing be built back better. It would only take on a different flavour of the same pain.
Too much of this misery filled the vaults of Ymara’s memory. Where her recollection failed her, the testimony of hate was written across her body in mementos of strife. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw a face full of scars, full of stories. All the youthful beauty had been cut away. Time had unwound the tethers of her drum. Fine bones chattered too loud the measure of her years. The eyes that looked back at her were as tired as all her colours losing their lustre.
Valkyries did not weather with time the same way as mortals, but time still bit away at the edges of them. Age did not fold and crease the substance of their undying forms. Gravity’s inexorable pull had little effect. They did not grey, they did not diminish, they persisted, an amaranthine visage preserved as if in amber.
What told the young of age and experience was less in the roadmaps of her struggle, scars inscribing the story of her. Many a younger Valkyrie than Ymara had seen battles that had damaged them in ways even the hands of Sunbeam could not have smoothed over. Accumulation of scars and the winnowing and waning of curves into edges happened too soon than was right for those so encumbered. The time this took might have been measured in millennia, but a thousand years to a Valkyrie was as one to a human. It was only in the eyes of a Valkyrie that one could see the weight of her days.
Into the spirit of the young who had seen too much for her years, one would find her gaze yet fixed forward, into a future she hoped to one day inhabit, or, in its fruit forbidden, create for others what was forever lost to her.
Gaze into an elder’s eyes and all that could be seen was a hollow soul looking only one direction; backwards. In the distance Ymara looked into the past, grasping at the ethereal robes of ghosts she could not let go, lay the measure of her years. In this there was an emptying of her. Each sister she burned or buried had torn holes through the tapestry of all that she was and would ever be. Of her heart, only fibres remained, the tattered remnants of something now porous with all that she had lost along the long road into the west.
Duty and sacrifice was a Valkyrie’s life, but even a Valkyrie could endure only so much. As millennia ground into epochs, epochs dragged into aions, the valorous dead took their ineluctable toll on those they left behind. No matter how a Valkyrie tried to let go, the dead clung on. Remembering rain and trenches running over with red and burning longboats and the sky-fixed gaze of companions draped, dead in her arms and the wailing and the keening and the mourning afterburn and the heavy of it all, it had drained the spirit from her. The strength of her hands was all but gone, spent in holding the hands of her friends, companions, lovers, sisters, and there were so, so many hands. So many. Too many.
There was no more room left for swords. No more strength to swing them. Her blade hung over the crossbeam of her door. Its edge dulled with each passing season, its enchanted steel slowly succumbing to rust. The arms which once kept it sharp and gleaming were too burdened carrying the memories of those since passed to care for them both, and the value in her blades was no longer worth their keeping.
Sitting on the porch of her Kinning’s aerie, Ymara kept the embers of the dead still burning in her memory. The spark and fire of the younger Valkyries sparring and drilling in the village circle had abandoned her. Battle had ground into the very metal of her bones the memories of war. Time could not take from her flesh what it had learned over the span of five Aions of fighting.
If invaders came to their doors, Ymara would rise to meet them. This, she knew. She would take her sword down from the place she had retired it, its dulled and rusting form a challenge. To those so foolhardy as to make of themselves enemies of the Valkyries, she would, as pain’s vessel, teach them meaning of war.
No lesser measure of action could compel her again. What Freyja, in her wisdom, had given her, she had, in its right time, taken away. Until the days of desolation came to this place where Maþr Hjälla had seen fit to retire her, Ymara’s purpose was to keep and share the history of her people, the sacred fires of those who came before.
Here, in this place, where grand mothers were plenty, and daughters abound, there was great need of this. Myths, legends, stories, and the quiet truths sleeping deep in the entwined fibres of fiction and fact gave Valkyries strength and wisdom. This, their story, given voice and passed from old to young, was written in words of power. When Ymara spoke, she told her kin tales of everyday greatness and ordinary achievement.
As her teacher in Sunbeam had instructed her, so she relayed to her Lodge. The greatest of their heroines were not the true story of the Valkyries. One exemplary individual was only as great as the actions of uncountable multitudes. Icons and oriflammes did not stand on the shoulders of giants, they stood atop a pyramid of so many acts of sacrifice, that, each by their collective measure, made possible the brilliance of the brightest stars of their storied history.
Nameless masses of faceless figures whose tombstones and epitaphs had faded from memory long ago made all these legends who they were. Even the granite which once bore the most of their names had been ground down to dust. Time came for all things, except those made worthy by the forgetting of myriads.
A sad truth as old as memory had become a Sisyphean torment to her in recent days. On great walls and monuments might be inscribed the names of the emperors who commanded them built, but where in mortar between the crushing blocks is written the names of the stonemasons?
Ymara’s song had been sung by ten thousand voices before her sword arm tired. The galaxy knew too well her name. Great crowds showered her with praises as though she herself had alone built the wall that bore her name.
In truth, this was not so. Each stone was lain by the hand of someone whose story had been forgotten. Each of these was a story worth telling, worth remembering, worth placing in their rightful place. If Ymara had burned her legend into the bright sky of ten billion brilliant stars, it was only alongside all those who had once joined their shields to hers and marched onwards to eternity. And yet…
War had made corpses of them all.
Only she remained.
Only she remembered their names.
All the rest had been lost in the margins.
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