Nightshade: Chapter V
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V–The Fire and The Storm
Noë woke from a dream in the night.
Lightning striking the earth in a stream of electric white blue made her forget the comforts of her bed as her aunt slept peacefully next to her.
She got out of bed hurriedly in her shift, searching for the source of the disturbance. Her eyes widened as the sight of fire spewing upwards from the roof of the stables woke her completely.
“Auntie? The stables–they’ve caught fire!” she called behind her, searching desperately for her scarf.
Dahlia looked around the room groggily. She moved her long black braid over her shoulder, her white nightgown falling to her ankles as she stood up.
Suddenly, pain flashed through her back.
"Auntie!" Noë shouted as Dahlia screamed in agony and fell to the stone floor. She ran to her, only to be stopped by Dahlia's booming voice and outstretched hand.
"No!" Dahlia choked out amongst her pain. "Stay back."
Noë listened to her breathless voice as her back began to morph. The wings from her valkyrie form shifted, trying to release from Dahlia's human form. She continued to struggle, her spirit fighting the constraints her human body put on her.
Silver armour broke through Dahlia's skin, tearing at her bruised purple flesh, Noë looked away. The screeching pain was too much for her.
Dahlia grunted, and dry heaved against the stone. She clawed at her back, begging her body to contain her spirit just a little longer.
The pain began to pass, returning Dahlia's body to her human form. She gasped in air, thankful that she hadn’t yet given in. Ready or not, the corruption was creeping in. She couldn’t protect Noë from what was written for her any longer.
Noë fell to her knees with Dahlia, and held her as she settled. "It's getting longer, Auntie. Your body can't take much more."
Her episodes had progressed through the decades, growing longer and ever more intense. Eventually she would lose herself to her valkyrie form, mindlessly driven by battle lust.
Dahlia patted Noë's arm. "I'll be alright. The stables–quickly."
Noë immediately obeyed.
Though the rain came harder–Noë’s vision blurred in the curtain of water–she held her hand over her eyes, feeling the fire's heat as she ran down the dirt path to the stable gate.
“Hrim?!” She threw open the doors, freeing smoke and flame as it exploded further into the sky. She heard Hrimfaxi’s panic as she drew closer, freeing him from his cove and allowing him to run past her. With no sign of Huginn, she followed Hrim through the flames and back into the rain.
Coughing and soaked, Noë raised her hands towards the flames. Confident she could quell them–her vision shaking and blurred–she attempted to control the cold feeling within herself and focused on the flames, drawing the energy of its heat within herself to put them out.
Dahlia stepped out in her shift, watching Noë as she tried to control the flames. She clutched her stomach, pain in her back and legs as it grew harder to hold herself upright.
She watched in awe as the flame began to change colour, orange and red, purple and sepia, then cool blue and whitest white. With Noës' ministrations–pushing and pulling as if controlling a current as water poured down her form–the flame grew smaller, and the rivets of smoke tunnelled in uniform upwards, clear and dying.
Pride breathed through Dahlia as Aztrit’s daughter proved she was ready.
Then pain overcame her.
Dahlia backed away, sensing Tihala’s presence before she saw her standing in the front door now open wide in the storm.
She shielded her eyes from the cold wet breeze as Tihala stood tall, her figure slim in the red valkyrie armour across her breast and skirt, her grey wings long and proud and her helm bronze with streaks of red runic paint.
Tihala looked around the hovel, uninterested in the dark quiet of the cluttered cottage. “Perhaps you did me a service by abandoning me.” She approached a wooden counter, a homemade hair clip with Noë's energy embedded within it intended for Dahlia. “Maybe I should be thankful you didn’t care enough for me. Then I'd be trapped in this… hovel. Like her.”
“Tihala…” Dahlia groaned at her bitter jabs as she pulled the box further from underneath the bed.
“You see so much hope in her, that she won’t turn out just like Hel. But I know better.” Tihala walked to the back window to see Noë still putting out the flames from her lightning strike. “She wasted no time pressing into my mind.”
Dahlia sat up against the bed as she struggled to breathe deeply. “You… scared her…” Dahlia said softly. The change was happening now with or without Noë being prepared. "Put… your feuding… to the side…"
Tihala turned to her, weak and leaning against the bed. “Put my feuding to the side? Do what's best for her? Like my father? So I can die in her service too?”
Dahlia growled out suddenly, her voice low and churning. She hunched over in pain again, her helm materialising as she writhed. "You have to end it now. Before she returns. She can’t… see me… like this."
Tihala looked away from Dahlia’s shifting form. So much pain and anguish came with Odin’s Curse on the Valkyries, she never knew if they were better or worse for having won and survived Ragnarök.
Tihala was thankful for her divinity, it had saved her from a fate worse than death.
“Maybe she should. Then she could see where her family’s foolishness has brought us–the sacrifices others have had to make for their happiness and comfort.”
Losing Asgard, their family, their divine forms–was it worth it to have lost everything to save what little remained?
“Two centuries I’ve spent using everything you two taught me. Not to fight with honour like I dreamed, but to kill my own sisters to free their souls. Souls that Odin damned because of you.”
“We’d all be dead–Surtr and Hel would have won–” Dahlia tried to contest.
“Save it.” Tihala bit out. She gripped the sword, feeling her anger taking her away, her green eyes turning a swirling red.
There was once a time where she considered herself hopeful, even happy. Like the old world, that time was gone.
“I didn’t ask for this, Dahlia.” Tihala said painfully, unbearing to take her final sister’s life.
“I… know.” Dahlia said weakly, putting the hilt of a sword in her hand.
“Kulda?” Tihala shook her head in disbelief. “I can’t.”
“You can.” Dahlia said firmly. “If you don’t… could… hurt her–”
Tihala scoffed harshly and shook the beginnings of tears away, “Hurt her?” Still in the face of dying, Dahlia only cared for Hel’s spawn. “And what would we all do without our little saviour then? You didn’t check on me once–once, in two hundred years.”
Dahlia breathed shallowly, “You wanted… space. You were so angry–”
“Because of you! You, Aztrit, my father! Because of all your inane acts of heroism I was trapped here in this gods forsaken realm, killing our sisters because it was the right thing to do!” Tihala shouted, her voice picking up with the coming of the storm. “The fates cursed us, and now we all must serve the lesser of two evils.”
Tihala palmed the hilt of the blade and settled over Dahlia as her form began to grow, her black wings tearing from her skin with her shrieking. “I take no pleasure in this, sister.”
Dahlia closed her eyes and licked her drying lips as she felt herself losing control.
“For Valhalla.” they whispered together as sword met willing flesh.
Noë felt the last of the fire's warmth on her skin as its light went through her fingertips and left her in the dark, the stables badly burned, but still standing.
She took a step back into a puddle as Huginn landed on the roof, his large wings flapping wildly. She smiled and shouted through the rain up at him, “Not bad right?” His praising chirps in return welled pride in her heart. Maybe now her Aunt would have more faith in her.
A groan of agonised pain and a scream ripped her attention back to the cottage. “Auntie?” she called, peering into the darkened back doorway as she slowly made her way up the path back to the house.
With a step inside she found no warmth, but the red valkyrie she had seen in the night standing above Dahlia’s body on the cold stone floor.
“Auntie?” Noë called shakily as her breath began to hitch, tears falling from her eyes.
Tihala stepped out of Noë’s path as she kneeled beside Dahlia and pushed her hair from her bruising skin. Frozen to where she kneeled, Noë tried to stop her tears but they came unceasingly. Her breath grew too ragged to stop her panic from creeping further in her throat.
Amidst her sorrow and fear she felt the cold creeping in, her mind not her own as the void used her sadness against her, but she did not care.
She wanted all to pay.
She wanted blood.
She was owed.
To be continued...