One by one they fall to Sefi’s axe. Until only the woman is left, her head held high, her words ringing clear. She looks me in the eye, as sure of her right as I am of mine. “Sacrifice. Obedience. Prosperity.” Sefi’s axe sweeps through the air and the last god of Asgard flops to the stone floor. Over her body towers the blood-spattered Princess of the Valkyrie, terrible and ancient with her justice. She bends and removes the tongue of the female Gold with a crooked knife. Mustang shifts beside me in discomfort.
Sefi smiles, noticing Mustang’s unease, and walks away from us to her dead mother. She takes the woman’s crown and ascends the steps to the throne, bloody axe in one hand, glass crown in the other, and sits inside the rib cage of the griffin where she crowns herself.
“Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?”
In reply, her Valkyrie raise their blue-feathered axes high above their heads to drone out the Obsidian chant of death. Even the warchiefs of fallen Alia join. It seems the ocean itself crashes through the stone hallways of the Spires, and I feel the drums of war beating inside, chilling my blood.
“Then ride, Hjelda, Tharul, Veni, and Hroga. Ride Faldir and Wrona and Bolga to the tribes of the Blood Coast, to the Bleaking Moor, the Shattered Spine and the Witch Pass. Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”
As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.
For seven days after the death of Ragnar, I travel across the ice with Sefi, speaking to the male tribes of the Broken Spine, to the Blooded Braves of the North Coast, to women who wear the horns of rams and stand watch over the Witch Pass. Flying in gravBoots beside the Valkyrie, we come bringing the news of the fall of Asgard.
It is…dramatic.
Sefi and a score of her Valkyrie have begun training with Holiday and me to learn to use the gravBoots and pulse weapons. They’re clumsy at first. One flew into the side of a mountain at mach 2. But when thirty land with their headdresses kicking in the wind, the left of their faces painted with the blue handprint of Sefi the Quiet and the right with the slingBlade of the Reaper, folks tend to listen.
We take the lion’s share of Obsidian leaders to the conquered mountain and let them walk the halls where their gods ate and slept, and show them the cold, preserved corpses of the slain Golds. In seeing their gods slain, most, even those who knew tacitly of their true condition as slaves, accepted our olive branch. Those who did not, who denounced us, were overcome by their own people. Two warchiefs hurled themselves from the mountain in shame. Another opened her veins with a dagger and bleeds out on the floor of the green houses.
And one, a particularly psychotic little woman, watched with great malevolence as we took her to the mountain’s datahub where three Greens informed her of a planned coup against her rule, showing her video of the conspiracy. We loaned her a razor, a flight back home, and two days later she added twenty thousand warriors to my cause.
Sometimes I encounter Ragnar’s legend. It has spread among the tribes. They call him the Speaker. The one who came with truth, who brought the prophets and sacrificed his life for his people. But with my friend’s legend grows my own. My slingBlade’s symbol burns across mountainsides to greet me and the Valkyrie when we fly to meet with new tribes. They call me the Morning Star. That star by which griffin-riders and travelers navigate the wastes in the dark months of winter. The last star that disappears when daylight returns in the spring.
It is my legend that begins to bind them. Not their sense of kinship with one another. These clans have warred for generations. But I have no sordid history here. Unlike Sefi or the other great Obsidian warlords, I am their untouched field of snow. Their blank slate on which they can project whatever disparate dreams they have. As Mustang says, I am something new, and in this old world steeped in legends, ancestors, and what came before, something new is something very special.
