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Journey of a Valkyrie20:42 Jan 30 2026
Times Read: 45
Chapter 1 🕯️
"Seven petals," the woman murmured, pressing her thumb into the wine-dark stain on the stone floor. Her fingers came away sticky. "Not six. Not eight."
The torchlight flickered across her armor—not plate or chain, but something older, layered leather hardened with resins and carved with runes that caught the light like teeth. She wore no helmet; her hair, the color of tarnished silver, was braided tight against her skull. A pendant of amber and iron swung forward as she crouched, casting a fractured glow over the petals.
"Seven," she repeated, this time to the shadows pooling in the corners of the chamber. The word echoed oddly, as if the room itself were counting with her. Behind her, someone shifted—a nervous scrape of boot leather on stone—but she didn’t turn. The petals were fresh. That meant the trail hadn’t gone cold yet.
The runes along her vambraces prickled against her skin, whispering in a language only blood remembered. Freya’s voice, or something close to it. Myrnda exhaled through her nose and let the pendant swing back against her sternum. It burned there, a low, insistent heat. The goddess was watching.
The petals trembled. Not from wind—there was no wind in this tomb of a chamber—but as if plucked by invisible fingers. Myrnda’s own blood, welling from a shallow cut on her palm where the stone had bitten, dripped onto the seventh petal. The drop hit with a sound like struck glass. The petals skittered, rearranged themselves into a shape that made the torchlight shudder: a hooked spiral, the mark of the Disir, the dead who still walked.
Protector. The word thrummed in her ribs, not from the pendant now but from the runes along her spine, where the leather armor opened just enough for Freya’s hand to press between her shoulder blades in battle. She had been chosen for this, not for her sword-arm (though it was unmatched) or her sight (though it pierced veils), but for the way her blood sang to the lost ones. The way she could stand between the living and the hungry dead without breaking.
The spiral of petals twisted tighter. Myrnda didn’t reach for her axe. Not yet. A protector did not strike first; she waited, she listened, she let the thing reveal its need. The air thickened with the scent of crushed yew and wet earth—grave smells. Behind her, the nervous scrape came again, followed by a whimper. The priest from the village, the one who’d begged her to come. She could taste his fear like copper on her tongue. "Hold your breath," she said, not unkindly. The dead loved the warmth of living lungs.
The seventh petal split down the middle. A thread of black smoke curled from the fissure, then another, until the air above the spiral swam with tendrils too solid to be mist. They braided themselves into a shape—a woman’s shape, though it had too many joints in the arms, too many teeth in the smile. The Disir. Myrnda’s cut palm throbbed. Her blood was the invitation; now came the bargaining.
Protector. The word settled between her shoulders like a hand. Not all who wandered the grey paths were ravenous. Some were merely lost. The thing in the smoke cocked its head—too far, like an owl—and the priest behind Myrnda choked back a sob. The Disir’s gaze flicked past her, drawn to the sound. "No," Myrnda said softly, and stepped sideways, blocking its line of sight. The dead had rules. So did she.
The key emerged first—rusted iron, pitted with age, but humming against her senses like a plucked harp string. It vibrated in time with the runes hidden beneath her armor, a call she felt in her molars. The Disir’s fingers unspooled toward her, knuckles bending where no knuckles should be. One nail, black and curved like a scythe, tapped the key’s bow. A question. A test.
Myrnda didn’t hesitate. She took it. The moment her fingers closed around the cold metal, the chamber exhaled—a gust of stale air that made the torches gutter. The Disir’s smoke-body rippled, its too-many teeth parting in what might have been a sigh. Behind her, the priest gasped. “She gave it—she gave it freely—” he stammered, as if this were some marvel. Myrnda ignored him. The key was warm now, pulsing against her palm like a second heartbeat.
The Disir’s arm retracted, stretching impossibly thin as the smoke recoiled into the spiral of petals. The seventh petal, split and blackened, quivered once before crumbling to ash. The runes on Myrnda’s spine flared—not pain, but recognition. This key had been buried in a chest of living oak. This key had turned in a lock made of moonlight. She knew these things the way she knew the weight of her axe, the way she knew Freya’s voice in the wind. The goddess’s hand between her shoulders pressed harder. *Remember.*
The priest’s breathing hitched behind her, a wet, ragged sound. The Disir’s gaze lingered on him for a heartbeat too long, its too-many teeth gleaming like wet slate. Myrnda tightened her grip on the key until the rust flaked against her bleeding palm. "You have your price," she said, low and clear. The words weren’t for the Disir—they were for the chamber itself, for the old laws etched into its stones. The dead could take, but only what was offered.
The Disir’s arm twisted back toward her, smoke-knuckles popping softly. Its fingers—too long, too many—unfurled like the petals of a night-blooming flower. In its palm lay another key. Not rusted this time, but blackened, as if pulled from a fire and left to cool in a murderer’s fist. Myrnda’s spine prickled. Freya’s hand between her shoulders pressed warning. *Not all locks should be opened.*
She reached for it anyway. The moment her fingers brushed the scorched metal, the chamber groaned—a sound like shifting bones beneath the earth. The priest staggered back, his prayer beads clattering against the stone. “Don’t—” he started, but the Disir’s head snapped toward him, its neck elongating like poured ink. Myrnda stepped forward, deliberately crowding its line of sight again.
The key seared her fingertips, not with heat but with *memory*. Names poured into her, syllables sharp as flint: *Hjordis. Arnketill. Thrainn.* Each one bloomed beneath her skin in jagged, luminous lines, the runes twisting like living things. She hissed through her teeth—not pain, not quite, but the violation of being *known* by something that had no right to her blood. Freya’s pendant flared against her chest, casting fractured light over the Disir’s hollow smile.
The priest was babbling now, a stream of half-prayers and pleas. Myrnda barely heard him. The last name—*Yrsa*—carved itself above her left collarbone, and with it came a scent: crushed juniper and burning hair. The Disir’s fingers twitched, its smoke-body coiling tighter. It was waiting. The dead always waited when they’d laid a trap.
Freya’s pendant scorched against her sternum. Myrnda bared her teeth, and the runes along her spine *moved*, slithering beneath her skin like serpents rising to strike. She didn’t command them; they acted on their own, her magic flaring in defense. The leather of her armor groaned as the carvings split open, releasing tendrils of gold-tinged mist that lashed out—not at the Disir, but at the names writhing beneath her skin. The runes hissed as they met, the foreign syllables unraveling like knotted thread.
The Disir recoiled, its smoke-body flickering. Too late, Myrnda understood the trap. The names weren’t offerings—they were hooks, sunk deep into her marrow. The Disir hadn’t wanted her blood; it wanted her *memory*. The runes on her spine flared hotter, Freya’s hand pressing urgent between her shoulders. *Not your past. Not yet.*
She bared her teeth and let the axe fall from its harness—not to strike, but to *bleed*. The blade kissed her forearm, parting skin with a whisper. Blood welled, thick and slow, dripping onto the scorched key still clutched in her other hand. The moment it hit, the chamber *screamed*. Not a human sound—the shriek of rusted hinges forced open after centuries, the groan of a coffin lid pried too soon.
The Disir's too-many arms spasmed, smoke unraveling like a frayed rope. Myrnda didn't watch it die; she *fed* it. Her blood sizzled against the blackened key, each drop hissing out a name—*Hjordis, Arnketill, Thrainn*—scouring them from her skin with fire and salt. The runes along her spine *heaved*, Freya's voice roaring through her marrow: *"Mine."* The Disir's hollow eyes widened—too late—as Myrnda's blood hit the seventh petal's ashes.
Its scream was the sound of a hundred burial shrouds tearing. The torchlight bent around its thrashing form, shadows clotting like old blood. Myrnda stepped into the maelstrom, her axe still dripping, and pressed her bleeding forearm to the thing's shuddering chest. Not a strike. A *seal*. The runes along her vambraces *bit* into the smoke, golden threads stitching through the dark like a net thrown over a thrashing fish. The Disir's teeth shattered first, then its fingers, then its stolen names—each one popping like a bubble of grave-rot.
Chapter 2, ,⚔️
The scorched key melted into her palm, its edges dissolving into her lifeline. It burned, but not with heat—with *hunger*. The metal writhed, forging itself into a new rune just below her thumb, pulsing with the rhythm of a buried heart. One that shouldn't still be beating. Myrnda's breath caught. She knew this rhythm. Knew the uneven double-thump between each pulse, the hitch where a blade had once slipped between ribs. *Hers*. Before the armor. Before Freya's hand between her shoulders. Back when she'd had a name that wasn't *Protector*.
The priest collapsed. Not a swoon—his body arched off the stone floor like a gutted fish, heels drumming against the ancient carvings. His jaw unhinged with a wet *pop*, tendons straining as the Disir's unraveled essence slithered into him. Black smoke poured down his throat in thick ropes, his Adam's apple bobbing grotesquely as he swallowed, *swallowed*, until his pupils dilated into twin hooked spirals, pulsing like the rune in Myrnda's palm. His fingers spasmed, nails splitting to reveal the same blackened iron beneath as the Disir's talons. The chamber *breathed* around them, stones exhaling the stench of opened graves.
Myrnda didn't move. The priest's robes tore along the seams as his shoulders dislocated, arms elongating in jerky twitches. His prayer beads melted into his flesh, forming a grotesque necklace of bubbling skin and amber. She knew this dance—the dead always took their pound of flesh. But the key in her palm *thrummed*, insistent as a lodestone. Not toward the priest-thing, but *deeper*, toward the shadowed archway behind the petal-spiral. The Disir hadn't just wanted her memory; it wanted her to follow.
Freya's pendant shattered. Not a crack—an explosion of amber shards that hung suspended for a heartbeat before dissolving into a hundred winged embers. The moths spiraled toward the priest, their wings carving luminous trails in the thick air. Where they landed, his skin turned to glass—ribs visible beneath, then the wet fist of his heart, *pulsing* in the skeletal cage of the Disir's smoke-bones. The creature's fingers flexed inside him, each joint clicking like a lock turning. Myrnda's own pulse stuttered—not fear, but recognition. She'd seen this before. In the mirror. After her first death.
The priest-thing's mouth unhinged again, wider than any living jaw should stretch. Black vapor poured out—not fleeing, but *rearranging*—as the moths clustered over his heart. Their light seared through the Disir's grip, etching the bones with fiery sigils. Binding-runes. The same ones Myrnda had woken with carved into her sternum after Freya pulled her from the pyre. The priest's glass-flesh frosted where the moths clung, forming a second skin of glittering rime. His hooked-spiral pupils fixed on Myrnda, suddenly too-clear, too-human. "Keybearer," he rasped, with the priest's voice but the Disir's cadence—each syllable a knife dragged over gravel.
The archway behind them exhaled, stone grinding against stone as unseen mechanisms stirred. Myrnda's new rune burned hotter, pulling her toward the darkness like a lodestone. She flexed her bleeding palm around the key's imprint, letting the pain anchor her. The Disir had wanted her to see this—to see *him*. The priest's trembling fingers rose, not toward her but to his own chest, tapping the glass where his heart juddered beneath the Disir's skeletal fingers. A mimicry of her own stance. A challenge. *Come see what you are.*
The moths pulsed brighter, their wings etching binding-runes into his ribs—each stroke precise as a scribe's quill. Myrnda knew these marks. They were the same ones Freya had carved into her own bones when she'd woken screaming in the goddess's hall, her mortal death still smoking in her lungs. The priest's mouth moved again, but no sound came out. Only black vapor, coiling into shapes that resolved—briefly—into faces. *Hjordis. Arnketill. Thrainn.* The names she'd scrubbed from her skin with blood and fire. They mouthed something at her, their features dissolving before she could parse the words.
The archway groaned. A draft—cold as a widow's breath—slithered through the chamber, making the torches bow. Myrnda's rune pulsed in time with the priest's glass-heart, each thump sending a jolt down her arm. She could see it now: the Disir's fingers weren't just gripping his heart. They were *stitched* to it, blackened sinews twining through the valves like roots through a crypt wall. The priest's fingernails cracked as they lengthened into talons, scratching at his own chest as if trying to pry the thing loose. Blood welled, thick and sluggish, turning to frost before it dripped.
The moths abandoned him in a single rippling motion—a golden tide reversing course. They surged toward Myrnda's outstretched palm, their wings brushing the raw edges of the rune. Where they touched, her scar tissue *bloomed*. Lines branched outward, jagged as lightning forks, etching a topography of wounds old and new. A map. Her breath hitched. She knew these contours: the ragged gully of her first battle-scar, the puckered knot where an arrow had pierced her thigh, even the faint sickle-moon of a childhood fall—all now connected by pulsing golden threads. The Disir's stolen names wriggled beneath the pattern like maggots in a corpse.
Chapter 3🖤
The archway exhaled again, this time with the wet stench of turned earth. The priest-thing collapsed, his glass-flesh shattering against the stones in a grotesque parody of Freya's pendant. The moths ignored him, swirling into a helix that beckoned Myrnda forward. She stepped over the twitching remains—her axe still dripping, her new rune *pulling*—and crossed the threshold.
The hall swallowed sound. Not silence, but something older—the hush of a tomb sealed before the mourners finished weeping. Mirrors lined the walls, each one warped as if blown from molten glass. The moths split apart, alighting on the frames, their golden light fracturing into a thousand splinters. Myrnda saw herself reflected in jagged pieces: here her braids undone, here her armor stripped to the waist, here her mouth sewn shut with rusted wire. But the worst weren't the alterations—it was the *recognition* in their eyes. Each reflection had taken the Disir's key without bleeding it clean. Each one had let the names root.
The priest's shards skittered behind her, not scattering but *arranging*. They rose like a swarm of silver-backed beetles, clicking into place against the floor. Where they settled, they formed rivers—not of water but of mist, winding between mountains carved from fingernails and plateaus of kneecaps. The map pulsed with stolen breath. Myrnda crouched, her axe scraping the glass. The path wasn't downward. It coiled inward, spiraling toward a center marked by a single, perfect handprint. Freya's. The fingers were too long, the palm too broad—a goddess's grip, yes, but also a warrior's. The print wasn't pressed into the glass. It bled *through* it, welling up from some depth beyond the map.
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