#Wish I could draw on Clip all the time but God forbid me from using all of my power 🙄

[leronboi]

Y'all. If I said I drew ARMS would y'all believe me?

[succubused]

oh child, you have never been alone: pt. 1

xxxxx author note so scroll past if u are tired of my Shit and just want to Read

Here’s a clip from my original story that is either going to one day manifest as a game or as a novel. We haven’t decided yet but

It’s important to me that I get feedback on things like this so if you read it please tell me what you thought, what was confusing, when i used the same words too much (I’m really tired and jacked out on ativan right now so my brain isn’t 100 percent sry friends)

But this is Valkyrie whomst I’ve been talking about a lot, and also Quinn makes an appearance as well as Lace and Maven. Let me know if you want to see the next part of this, because it doesn’t just end where I stopped writing, I just got too tired to finish.

I have posted pics of all these dudes except for The Valkyrie™ (different from Valkyrie herself i know it’s a lot) and so lmk if you want a picture of Lace or of the Big Man Valk Himself because would be happy to draw

xxxxx end author note thank u for ur support

“You mean, you’re saying Valkyrie isn’t your name?”

“Yeah.”

How long had they been walking for?

It wasn’t the sort of rhetorical question you ask yourself at night, awake, how long have I been lying here when you can’t sleep. It was I don’t know when I am.

Where, then?

Snowed-over mountain’s edge. Wooden planks spiky with deformities stuck up through the ice, defiant, still trying to be a fence. The sight amused her. They were still trying. We should learn from that.

The cold was the kissing kind that leached through your cheeks and left your teeth shaking where they stood. Valkyrie pulled her hood tighter, for all the good it did, which was none. Hood, scarf, gloves, boots, so prepared. For all the good they did.

For all the good we did.

I’m sorry.

It was like a voice. Someone was speaking but it wasn't her.

“Something’s off,” she said suddenly and it occurred to her that this might have been the first time she had spoken aloud in

“Valkyrie?”

“Quinn?”

She turned but couldn’t see him, or Lace, or Maven. The snow blew from all sides, thick and falling in a heavy veil over her eyes. Blind.

“What is this? What’s wrong?”

“What is what? I can’t see you!”

Edge of fear in Quinn’s voice that’s not good for him that’s not good for anything I know what this is I know what this is—

“We’re dreaming, aren’t we?” Maven this time. Not afraid. Exasperated. Never afraid. Did he even know how?

“I would know…”

They were still climbing. Had she decided to do that?

“…wouldn’t I?”

A soft thud and a yelp of surprise.

“Not a dream,” Lace called. “Maven’s still here.”

“You pushed me!”

“You’re surprised?”

“Don’t high priestesses take a vow of nonviolence or something?”

A dark laugh. Lace was all right. “Technically it just forbids you from using violence against the faithful. When was the last time you went to absolution?”

“Last week!” he snapped, indignant.

Strange. Valkyrie hadn’t known he cared much for the church. But for them it was absolution or Leaching and Leaching wasn’t really everyone’s thing. Besides, she’d seen his arms. Unscarred.

“Look at that,” murmured Quinn. Hand over eyes, he turned to look at the valley, clear and gray all over, illuminated by a rose gold sunrise. Flat for a long time. In the distance, maybe, trees with white leaves.

Valkyrie crept next to him, cautiously. He glanced at her. “The trees are like us,” he said.

“Realistically impossible to approach and potentially a hallucination?”

Quinn laughed. “No, Val, they’ve got white hair.”

She started to smile. She froze instead.

ice in your chest that is how you describe it is it not

“Wait. Something’s off.”

when it comes and it always does come the air turns sharp for you thunderhead shaker of the earth she has no choice but to shudder when confronted with the burning ice of your fear

She blinked and looked around, trying to break the debilitating feeling that she was wasting time she wouldn’t get a second chance to use correctly.

ice that pounds in every single one of your veins it will crystallize all through your blood and instead of killing you it will turn you into

“The stairs weren’t there before,” she said quickly, “and it was snowing before, it was really fucking cold? Right?”

it will turn you into me, and you little horror have no hope at all of accomplishing anything against your enemy if you have not become me. Valkyrie.

Valkyrie stood still. “I would tell you all to run but I don’t know where to send you.”

“You could say precisely zero things that would convince me to leave you here, Valkyrie, but it’s a sweet thought.” Maven braced his feet against the top stair, drawing the sword that always baffled Valkyrie as it was nearly as tall as he was (and though Maven was by no means tall, he wasn’t exceptionally short either) and yet he wielded it like it was the most normal thing in the world.

“If it attacks you just run, just go. I mean it. It wanted me. You don’t have to come in.”

“Yeah, we do.” Quinn bumped her aside with his shoulder. “Don’t pull this fearless leader riding solo into the unknown bullshit now, sweetheart. We’re past that.”

Lace and Maven exchanged a look, waiting for Valkyrie to round on him for calling her that of all things, but she just rubbed the place he had bumped her absently and muttered to herself, “Are we?”

Top of the stairs. They had been very steep. Climbing them must have been difficult. They would be very sore in the morning, assuming they actually had climbed them and not just been made to believe they had. The valley gleamed now, gray superseded by the light.

They weren’t in a dream, or a nightmare. Knocking Maven over had been necessary for nothing but breaking the tension. It is very, very difficult to trick a phantasm into believing they are awake when they are dreaming. Even half as she was, she would know, and she didn’t have that prickly-skull feeling she associated with dreaming. This wasn’t right.

Wing beats, enormous and slow, with a disorienting whap-whap-whap that raised columns of ash and dust through the cave mouth none of them had seen,

and then they were in freefall and this is how it ends, how anticlimactic,

and then they weren’t.

“Well, if it isn’t your name, what is it?”

Valkyrie rolled to her feet in a motion more convulsive than fluid. She felt for her swords and was glad to see she hadn’t speared herself in the fall. None of the others appeared to have been impaled either, or frightened to death. Yet. Quinn had jammed one end of his sword into the ground and was leaning hard on the middle guard, but it was hard to tell whether he was doing that because he thought it looked suave or because was in pain. It truly could have been either. Or both.

Lace had her arms crossed, contemplative but not afraid. Maven had his sword drawn and was staring at some point above him, but he wasn’t frightened either.

None of them were.

“My apologies,” they whirled, but the cavern echoed such that it was impossible to find a source. “I would ordinarily ask permission but I was concerned the spike in fear would kill your friends. Particularly that whom is already weakened.”

“Already—?” Valkyrie narrowed her eyes, then saw what it meant. “Oh, you mean Quinn?”

Quinn flinched and glared, muttering something about “weak ass” and “kick your ass” without moving his eyes from the shape slowly moving forward from the darkness.

“I meant no disrespect,” the voice said. It was sonorous, baritone, with a clipped accent Valkyrie couldn’t place. It almost sounded more like five men speaking at once rather than one. “I have seen many Afflicted die of acute terror. It is ugly. I wished to prevent it.”

“I…thank you,” Quinn said, looking slightly ashamed.

Valkyrie stepped forward. “You drank the fear,” she said quietly. “You, it was you, you brought me here, didn’t you? Are you a dread or a phantasm or, I mean, what do you want? From me?”

The laughter sounded of silk and molasses, collected somewhere in her chest in warm pools, filling empty spaces she hadn’t known were there. It was almost as beautiful as the creature himself.

He landed before them with two more of those heavy whump-whump wingbeats and stood, arms folded, still half-smiling a little. He seemed a little under six feet tall, in comparison to Quinn, but it was the way he held himself that made him seem like a leviathan. The man—at least, it seemed to be a man—he had dark skin that made his glowing veins all the more prominent. Every vein in his body, filled with lavender light and shining bright enough to illuminate the entire cavern, glinting off the gold hoops looping through his ears and his lips. He had been using his wings to block it out before, she realized. The wings—hard to see what was happening back there, but he had more than one set of them. The feathers gleamed slightly in the light from his blood. He took off his hood.

“I am the Valkyrie,” he said, softly, not taking his eyes off of her. “I am the same as you.”

They drew closer to one another while the other three backed away, as though propelled by opposing magnetic forces.

“What do you mean, ‘the’? Is my name your title?”

“Did you really think you were the only one?” he whispered. “The only one alive, maybe, but the only one? In all the centuries of the dread plague, the nightmare sickness, you thought you were all alone?”

“I am alone,” she said, quiet and controlled to avoid betraying that her voice was shaking hard.

“Oh, child,” the Valkyrie murmured. “You have never been alone.”

She inhaled sharply.

“You’re.”

“I have waited for another, and you have come.”

And she looked into that face, saw the long white braids, the white eyelashes and eyebrows, standing out so sharply against his skin, and oh god but the eyes, the dark red-gold eyes, his tattoo a single line right down the center of his face just like me and he looked more like a god than a man, really, but he wasn’t. He was—

“They called us Valkyrie. I was not the first.”

Hands clasped behind his back, he turned away.

“I do not know how many there were, nor how many were drowned upon birth, and I cannot find it in me to hate the mothers, not when the way we were conceived—the way most of them were conceived—I hate only the fathers.”

He opened his eyes. “I was half dread, half human.”

Valkyrie almost smiled. “Half phantasm. His name is Paroxys.”

The Valkyrie tilted his head. “Paroxys? I knew him. He was always…reasonable.”