Part 23 - Interlude - Arlyen, The Shattered Valkyrie

  For gnolls born of lesser blood, the Sovereign Justiciary was a safe haven. A place for the many caravan traders of their race to call home in a world of constant conflict. A country that guaranteed sanctuary for any of their race.

  For gnolls of the ancient—ancient meant in the mortal sense of the word—noble house of the Andalucia Family, there was nothing but the struggle for power.

  The family prized their males so much that they would have the young pups compete for the honor of being the next family head through their achievements. Unlike other families, their reverence for Seira made them commit many heinous acts in order to remain in control of the law and order of the country.

  “The strongest pillar of the defenders of Stability!” Many would laud their family name with cheer.

  “Andalucia shall keep us safe!” The soldiers would cry as they enjoyed another celebration of a peaceful year under Andalucia command.

  Indeed, the great house of the Andalucias held the roles of military command, city governance, and even the high post of the Grand Judge Magistrate.

  Of course, no one family would be permitted to hold too many of the positions, so branch families were created. The head of the house was all too willing to have as many pups with as many wives as possible. Purity of their cherished bloodline meant the only true heirs were those born of the head of the house and his own sisters.

  Arlyen Andalucia was born to take the role of a mere harem member for the next [Great Lord] of the Andalucia family.

  No expenses were too high for the family to secretly cure the rampant birth defects brought about by the incestuous relations. It was just part of life in a high born family.

  Arlyen’s mother thought she was so very clever when she passed off her child as a member of the main family line, rather than the child of a servant. Instead, Arlyen had been a healthy child, which roused suspicions quickly, as she was the only child of the age group to be born without the defects. Her mother was, of course, sniffed out and cast from the house.

  Arlyen the orphan, raised in the Andalucia home in Mourningloft.

  She was truly a daughter of the former [Lord] of the family, but she was not offered any attention from her father. Just one of the many, many children born and bred to be a servant like her mother. If she was lucky, she could be married into one of the branch families, but it was the best she could hope for.

  She was raised in the house like she was a ghost. First, as a servant, and briefly taught what she would need to know in the event the new [Great Lord] came to her for the evening.

  “It’s the job of every housekeeper in Andalucia, and the pride of our tenure to be of such service.” That was what the maids had told a young girl who’d barely even unlocked her system.

  They gave her a list of skills to take for the potential of a special night in her future.

  After her unlock, she began to visit the temple on her days off, just as a method of escapism. After all, what was an eight year old to do with sexual education at such an age?

  That was how she’d first met the older boy who took her hand.

  Sylvestre Novem. A young [Priest] of the temple, born from a less storied human house, but still from a family with political sway. He was nearly twenty, but he was so kind and gentle, as well as understanding.

  Every week, she prayed to Seira—the only goddess she knew anything about—for salvation from the confusing life she was forced into.

  Nobles in the Justiciary never performed their level eight class-up right away.

  The nation once had held an old belief called the [Three Baptisms] that held their roots in ancient tales of Seira’s faithful. Theories abound over the original purpose, be they skill or some sort of blessing long past. Still, few families performed the ritualistic services after so many centuries.

  Texts about the ritual spoke of how a child’s first baptism was performed during the first class-up at level eight, then the second at thirty-two, and the third at one hundred twenty-eight in the first class.

  Each baptism was said to grant a higher chance at receiving Seira’s divine grace with their first class. Despite the ritual no longer being used, Sylvestre had secretly performed the baptism on her.

  And it worked.

  Arlyen became a [Nascent Paladin of Order] at level eight and then used her newfound strength as leverage to improve her standing. She continued to pray with every free day she had, and once she reached level thirty-two, she rose again in the goddess’ favor.

  She would never have the prestige afforded to the noble sons of the house, but the moment she had the levels and age to join the military of the Justiciary, she chose to escape the noble household. She slew monsters and bandits as her fellow [Warriors] applauded her estranged family for keeping the threat of war away from their borders.

  Andalucia was a noble house at the core of the faction of [Structure and Stability] that had long been losing power and had been steadily overtaken by their peers. Arlyen joined the stronger team. Monster slaying knights would often fit the same category as those of the [Natural Order] faction. It fit like a glove, and her star continued to rise. Before she knew it, she was the commander of an order of knights and taught many younger gnolls and humans about how to fight the terrors of the wilderness.

  Every day she could, she would go see Sylvestre, the man who’d cut her strings for her.

  Arlyen credited him with all of the good things in her life. He meant more to her than anything in life, but he was a [Priest] through and through. She never could’ve asked him to abandon his faith for her.

  Around that time, a charismatic man named Jayce arose to power within the [Faith and Certainty] faction, which had no core ideology to speak of. The Monument that described Seira’s [Tenets] had been damaged several hundred years prior, and thus, the faction had no true direction. Most of the adherents simply had faith in the goddess and didn’t think beyond that.

  Jayce was different. He was a man who espoused the idea of the [Tenet] representing faith that the gods and goddesses would preserve and protect life, and that the nation didn’t need to take such strong international stances to maintain peace. It was an ideology of laziness and short-sightedness.

  Arlyen believed the faction to be a trivial, unimportant farce, but she’d been wrong.

  Jayce had somehow managed to rally the nation to his cause, and the cracks began to form. When Arlyen had begun an investigation into Jayce’s unusual success and charisma, she’d found assassinations and espionage secretly coercing events to unfold as if divine intervention had solved problems just as Jayce predicted. A clever game of spies revealed itself before her, only for Arlyen to become entangled in the conspiracies.

  Threats arrived implicating her in the murder of a foreign official she’d been investigating, and she knew the game was over before the demands began.

  Sylvestre came to her with a mission he’d been tasked with, files marked by the same people who’d threatened her. She had no right to refuse. Natural disasters had struck some areas—especially the gnome forests—around that time, and Sylvestre was joining a team of specialists to investigate and deliver aid to the people suffering from the strange quakes that had begun.

  The team was a band of unusual characters, led by a man with a driven mindset who went by the name Nyx. The man was deathly pale, owing to a restriction skill that required him to avoid sunlight. The rest of the team followed his every word, and Sylvestre and Arlyen had followed their example.

  When they’d found the first trace of the source of the disasters, the culprit was long gone. What they did find was some sort of warped gate covered in complex runes. Regardless of the mission, she continued to suspect Jayce’s daggers to find her in the night. And yet, none came.

  Over time, the team began to grow closer, learning more about one another and expanding their arsenals of materials and skills as they traveled, repelling monsters and searching old ruins full of traps.

  Their target must’ve been extremely well traveled and become an even more prolific collector. Each abandoned lab they found held different research materials and samples of monsters and even chunks of jewels and magic metals. That was how Arlyen had come to possess her Stygium whips and modified her second class to use them.

  Amongst the many creatures the culprit had been investigating was an unusual egg. The sort that amphibians came from, except it was much larger. Under proper care, it had hatched into a tiny winged fish.

  If that had been the largest it grew to be, it would’ve been no problem at all. But the creature grew to be massive within months, and somehow Arlyen had found herself mothering the huge fish creature. That was the birth of her bonded companion, a legendary Kun-Peng.

  She’d gained the ability to breathe underwater from the companion bond, and it had capped her leveling in the process, eating her experience as it eventually became powerful enough to hunt for itself. It had to, as every dungeon or ruin they delved into was far too small for the creature to fit inside of.

  The man they were after took extensive notes. Too many to carry, and often about random creatures and plants he’d found. All too often, they’d simply leave the research materials be and focus their attention on the gates.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  There was a lot to learn from Nyx’s example. The man was a genius in every field anyone could ask him about, but he was also so very dark and brooding. She was glad she never took a complex restriction skill like Nyx’s, but she learned a ton from her time with his team.

  She had traveled to a lot of mortal lands as a [Paladin], and with that in mind, she and Sylvestre would visit the disaster zones by day to gather information and help whoever they could, then Nyx would collect their data and narrow their search area down dramatically every evening. He was frighteningly efficient.

  After years of travel and investigation, searching for clues about the next lab or the next experiment, they finally caught the person they were after. An elderly human with grey hair and sunken eyes.

  Nyx had a plan in place for the event they ever found their target. He would slip into the darkness and, being very cagey about his own skills, ‘handle the situation if anything went wrong.’

  Meanwhile the rest of the team had their own instructions for handling a powerful classer, and that required them to fan out and prepare synchronized uses of skills at range. Arlyen’s role was to cover the team normally, but she also had instructions to prioritize the target’s death before anything else.

  The man, Henry, was a raving lunatic. A powerful lunatic with unfathomable runic knowledge and disgusting tastes for research of plants and animals that Arlyen thought were unspeakable.

  Likely because their mission was so close to being over, someone made a mistake. One wrong move tripped an alarm, then a trap had begun to pour a hazardous slime from the ceiling onto them all.

  She was close enough. She had the chance to end the mission. To stop the most complex gate they’d seen from being activated, and tearing a rift in the space of their world.

  And yet she thought of Sylvestre first. She leapt towards the man she loved, and the look in his eyes in that moment as he watched her choose him over the mission told her everything. He had been willing to fulfill the mission at the cost of his life, and she hadn’t.

  She got him out of the Ooze trap and saved his life.

  When she turned around, several members of their team were less fortunate, flesh burning as they clutched their throats, then began to be fully devoured by the slime creature gathering in the hallway. The smell of melting flesh assaulted her senses in a way she’d never experienced before then.

  Beyond the hall and through the door, the gate had roared to life, twisting and devouring everything nearby. The image in the gateway seemed to stretch and contract, and the old man seemed to be waiting for the right moment to enter.

  Nyx blurred out of the darkness the moment the man threw himself through the portal, somehow at the exact time a grassy park could be seen with impossibly towering buildings in the background. Nyx’s strike was a hair too late, and the gateway wasted no time in devouring him as well, as the image in the portal swung beyond the grassy hillside view.

  A battle began after that.

  The slime was an artificially created amalgam of a slime—from the dangerous ‘Below Levels’ of the Pallos underground caverns—with some other elements, showing itself to have remarkable durability and intelligence.

  The only reason why any of the remaining members of the team survived was because the suction of the gate continued, and after they’d damaged the creature somewhat, the portal devoured the slime, and had tried to devour the rest of them as well.

  Sylvestre refused to speak to her again after the incident, and the team silently sealed off the portal behind barriers and their own runes, then layered more durable metal and stone layers after that.

  They’d failed, and lost their leader.

  A return to the Justiciary ended in her banishment and Sylvestre being sent to a far-flung temple in a small village.

  The rest of the team must’ve continued without her help, but it was no longer her problem anymore.

  More spatial magic-induced nightmares occurred. She heard about them constantly in her banished wanderings, and took it upon herself to help out each disaster region she could get to.

  During an effort to aid some human city caught up in another spatial tremor, she’d met a powerful woman with an unyielding conviction to help others. She was the embodiment of everything a [Paladin] should’ve been. The shining wings on her helmet caught the eye of anyone who saw the woman, and her pegasus mount cut a fine image.

  Upon meeting Arlyen while aiding the people, the woman had offered to allow her to join her knightly order: the Valkyries.

  Homeless and wandering, the offer seemed like a chance to do better things with her life. A chance to make amends. She'd taken the deal, sworn the oath of the Valkyrie, and then continued doing the same work, only she was finally a part of something greater again. She rode on her companion to seek out traces of Nyx and Henry White, the old man that had gotten away.

  Her search was fruitless, but she saved lives.

  She hunted monsters plaguing villages, used her companion bond to slay sea monsters, and used her skills to solve problems with lethal force.

  She saved lives.

  Every day, week and month, stretching into years, she kept hearing muttering about the Justiciary, about some group out in the world assassinating leaders in various mortal lands. The mutterings grew, and she recognized Jayce’s handiwork.

  The man had his ‘Alpha Team’ composed of [Priestesses] with [Artisan] second classes high enough to cover up their [Identify] tags. These [Artisans] could slip into a country amongst a caravan, slaughter leaders and move on without a trace.

  By coincidence, she’d been in Khazad when she caught wind of a group of beautiful [Artisans] that had arrived in a caravan, exactly how the team operated. Arlyen tracked them down and managed to kill one of them before they could disappear after assassinating their target.

  The dwarves had the ability to investigate the corpse of the one she’d gotten, and she’d swiftly been brought into the ranks of the coalition to dispose of the Justiciary’s rotten core. She wanted Jayce gone, wanted revenge, and had all the knowledge and skills to feed all the information the coalition would need to dismantle the entire country within days.

  She prepared the coalition with everything she had, and when she received Seira’s guidance to teach a specific disciple, she’d realized it was the first she’d heard the voice of the goddess in years. When the town in question turned out to be where Sylvestre had been sent, she’d thanked the goddess.

  The girl Seira had sent her to was strong. She’d clearly been through a lot of agony to have received the best pain skill Arlyen had ever seen. Never once did Liz seem to falter in her training. She was receptive to lessons and picked up skills and suggestions rapidly. Even small mistakes in posture were never made again after being pointed out.

  Liz had mentioned she was an actress before her ‘incident’ and had needed to make rapid adjustments to small details frequently in her prior life. Arlyen could see the markings of the skill [Adaptable] all over the way the girl drank in the lessons.

  In the end, it was all a mistake.

  The timeline of the attack she’d planned with the coalition was advanced by months, and many factions of attackers were replaced by mercenary companies.

  Rather than ignoring the small towns of no consequence, those mercenary companies slaughtered the towns of all the people over level one hundred twenty-eight.

  None of the coalition members trusted tags with [Identify]. Scared to death of the assassins showing up as non-combatants, the mercenaries performed atrocities, and then sent the left over kids to be sold into slavery, a small ‘bonus’ on top of the compensation for their work.

  Heron Lake was no different. Fearing the precious disciple of Seira would be killed, she’d gone to Liz’s side to protect her. Instead, an artillery spell had demolished the majority of the temple, shattering the walls, tossing Arlyen clear of the building.

  Upon opening her eyes, she saw Sylvestre’s final moments. He’d fought bravely against monsters for years at her side, but against ten classers with practiced teamwork, she didn’t reach him in time before his head was rolling on the cobblestones.

  Curse her Vitality being so high that she saw it all in such vivid detail.

  She’d fled.

  She escaped to the north, joined with her bonded companion, and went to confront the coalition leaders in the capital city.

  The coalition greeted her as a hero.

  By all the gods and goddesses, she hadn’t known what to do.

  Everything she’d ever grown to care about was gone. She’d always thanked Sylvestre for bringing her out of the darkness her life had begun in. She’d prayed to Seira, received her divine class, and she did have reverence for the goddess, but she’d never considered Seira her savior.

  With him gone, she became a husk. She went along with the coalition, her fury like ash in her heart as she turned the blame inwards. She’d been the one to share the information that created the plan in the first place, after all.

  The Victory Gala was just another function in her new role as a Grand Judge Magister. The role her family, the Andalucias, had always used as the mark of the next family head. Somehow, her life had led her to the role her stupid family had coveted so much.

  The irony wasn’t lost on her.

  Then, at the Gala, Liz had appeared, using the name ‘Anallaya.’

  Arlyen had truly thought the girl dead in the blast that destroyed the temple in Heron Lake. She needed to revise that assumption.

  How the girl had talked her way into an Exterreri Envoy was beyond her, but the young woman had changed. It was there, in her eyes.

  A haunted look sometimes reached the girl’s expression when she thought nobody was watching. Arlyen remembered the girl as an inquisitive, excitable sort. But at that moment, Arlyen could tell her wayward apprentice had been through so much more. It was different from her first time taking a life. That version of Liz had been somewhat bewildered by feeling nothing about killing people. The version Arlyen witnessed that night was a person who’d killed, enjoyed killing, and been revolted at the realization afterwards.

  She tried to reach out, but Liz had been avoiding her.

  When dances began, Arlyen cautiously maneuvered herself into an opportunity to dance with her former pupil. It hadn’t been hard, and she knew Liz had a tendency to prefer women when choosing partners.

  Their dance had been tense and Arlyen had no idea exactly when the girl had taken over leading in their dance. Nothing could be openly shared on the dance floor, but Arlyen made sure to follow Liz to the private room after.

  She truly hadn’t intended to scare her into talking, but finding out the girl was there to save a child had warmed Arlyen’s heart a little. Of course, she knew Liz was half lying. Liz was a cunning person who knew better than to tell outright lies to someone who knew her well. She’d omitted some details. That part wounded her a little.

  The trust and teacher-student relationship was all gone.

  Arlyen never expected the murder of the child. She’d been carefully dodging Andalucia assassination attempts all night, but had never expected a random child to be killed and planted in the Exterreri resting room.

  Everything had gone wrong, and even with Arlyen trying to stop the expanding clash, she’d seen the imminent disaster as the highest level bodyguard of the Exterreri diplomat began to channel a powerful Spatial spell.

  Somehow, it all made sense.

  How does one best kill off the foreign dignitaries at a gathering without being incriminated? Someone had planned for all the right pieces to be on the board. And then they’d inserted a Spatial classer into the equation, and waited for the tinders to ignite.

  The synergy of a Spatial spell being cast near any one of Henry White’s bunkers would cause a distortion in the area near the spell, and the resulting tremors would reflect the strength of the spell used. A [Gate] skill used to jump from the Justiciary to Exterreri would be an unparalleled disaster.

  And a disaster it was.

  The entirety of Mourningloft, with the exception of the outermost city walls, had collapsed into the ocean.

  Arlyen had fallen into the ocean, but she was in the least danger out of anyone involved. Kuai Bao, her companion, had been patrolling the ocean water near the city for food, and she swiftly called him back to her and the pair began trying to save lives.

  One woman and her legendary flying fish weren’t nearly enough.

  So many would lose their lives, as so many already had.

  After all the years of her life, she’d remained an utter failure.

  She tore the symbol of the Grand Judge Magistrate from her tattered formal jacket and cast it into the ocean.

  The most good she’d done in her life was as a Valkyrie. A Valkyrie she would be once more. Her life had shattered into pieces she could no longer put back together.

  From that day on, Arlyen Andalucia would be dead. Instead, she would be Arlyen, the Shattered Valkyrie.