Of Gods & Valkyries: Book Three

Ruined Pasts

– T A Y A H –

I had no real interest in pursuing this man.

I stared at my immortal's furred shoulders as she crouched near horse tracks. She had been distracted–and distracting.

My power grew in leaps and bounds that neither of us could fully understand yet.

Manipulating the ebb and flow of immortal energy had taken her centuries and could only be achieved as an original... as I was. Yet quick like fire I was learning. Fast fuelled like an inferno I was growing. We both hoped it had no cost. But we were both not foolish either.

She cast those burning silver eyes over her shoulder and met mine.

"Perhaps no more than a few sun quarters ahead." She said simply.

"So we find him and finish this quickly." I supplied.

She nodded and threw her travel sack over her horse without hesitation. I was carefully aware of my helm at my hip and the shield on my back that sung with a strange sort of power. That did not sing the way a relic did.

"Do you think the men made it to the capital by now?" I asked, throwing a leg over Parsnip.

The moment I did the ground beneath me shattered in a way I had never seen on any realm. Then fire sent me and my steed skyward. I made out my beloved horse slam into a tree and hit the forest floor with his soft brown eyes still wide open.

An impossibility. I stared in confusion.

Movement went to my left and right. A dark blur here and there. The strongest pulse of power I had ever felt... And yet all I could focus on was Parsnip's dead gaze ahead.

"TAYAH!" A roar broke my stare and I came back to the realm. All my senses rushed me.

But it was nothing I recognised.

The immediate forest around us was scorched into blackness. Into death. Into far, far too much power. A figure was crouched in the centre of it all. Shrouded in... I could not tell. It was a dark, deformed set of armour that burned–no... glowed. It was like staring at a God.

It felt like one.

Kára had summarised this all faster than I could comprehend and was before me in a blink with Thanatos protectively set and her spear upon it electrified.

"State your business." She snarled in dark fury. Yet it felt like a drop next to the thing that rose before us with no voice at all. It walked upon smoke. The ground beneath each step was annihilated. It felt like. It felt like the power at my hip. Like the power waiting in Kára's hand.

"Kára..." I mumbled in disbelief. She did not flinch from her warrior state over me. "Kára, those are relics."

My immortal simply responded by slipping her helmet over her head and igniting Thanatos itself in purple vines of god power. The skies shuddered above us.

"Then it will die as a relic." She said in a low voice.

This made me come to my senses. This was not something you won. There was no victory here. I grabbed Kára the moment the being raised a sword and all four elementals rushed through it in a high arc of power neither of us had ever seen.

The moment before impact I turned my back on it and felt my cloak absorb the considerable amount of energy. I felt my eyes burn and my skin heat until the power surged and built. The second the relic adorned being cut off the arc I turned upon it and. Unleashed the arc straight back. The power felt like nothing I had ever wielded.