Valkyrie Rising

by GR Griffin

  "You can't blame yourself..." Silmeria continued out loud. "If anything, your parents should have known not to try for a second child...."

  "It was my fault." Brahms insisted. "If not for my creation....she wouldn't have died..."

  "If not for her sacrifice, you wouldn't have existed." Countered Silmeria. "You must realize...for all that's happened to you since, your mother WANTED you. She risked and ultimately gave up her life, to ensure you were brought into Creation." Brahms was frowning, shaking his head in denial. "Brahms..."

  "She wouldn't have risked so much if she had known how it would have turned out for me, for the realms..." Brahms insisted.

  "But you're fighting to fix the wrongs Odin has committed!" Silmeria pointed out.

  "I've thus far failed...."

  "But you've NEVER given up!" Silmeria retorted. "You keep fighting, keep on struggling. Not only to live, but to set right everything."

  "So many would argue against that." Brahms said. "So many would insist Odin is on the right path, that my way will destroy everything the realms have ever known, and thrust the vampires into prospering over the other races." He gave her an odd look. "You yourself firmly believed similar until two nights ago."

  Two nights ago, had she really been asleep that long? But she shrugged off that question, meeting his look with an unwavering one of her own. "I didn't know what I know now. I didn't know the truth behind Odin, behind everything."

  "It's a little hard for me to believe your swift change of heart." Admitted Brahms. "You were born as one of Odin's Valkyries, you followed in his service for years...can you really embrace the truth that easily..."

  "It's that doubt you have that prevents you from letting me out of this room." Grumbled Silmeria. "Brahms..." She knew what she was about to say would be painful for him to hear. "You have little to no experience with the sharing of memories through the blood. It's why I can excuse your ignorance." He bristled at her use of that word, but Silmeria ignored his reaction. "The blood memories left no doubt in my mind. I felt and answer the truth within them. Odin betrayed not only you, but your father as well. He broke a sacred promise made at his death bed. He never had any intention to share the throne of Creation...!"

  "Silmeria..."

  "Breaking oaths alone calls into doubt his character, but after experiencing your past, the evil Odin has done....it leaves little doubt in my mind that he is not fit to rule!" She exclaimed.

  "I haven't exactly had the most stellar of moments either." Brahms reminded her.

  "You made your mistakes, yes." Silmeria acknowledged. "But often times you were driven by the very thing Odin had poisoned you with!"

  "I still did the sins...."

  "It is not the same!" Silmeria said fiercely. "You have character where he does not."

  "How can you be so sure?" Brahms argued.

  She hesitated. "I suppose I can't be. Not entirely. Not without knowing what kind of man you were before you became a vampire....But Brahms...I want to know. I want to confirm your existence, no matter what skin you wore. You were a God as well as a vampire, there must be meaning in both those lives....help me to see it!" Her look was as earnest as her words, Silmeria all but begging him to open up to her.

  Brahms gave Silmeria a searching look, as though trying to gauge the sincerity of her words. She tried not to hold her breath, but at his nod it all rushed out of her. "Thank you." She murmured, and Brahms gave her a grim look.

  "You may not thank me until after the tale is told."

  "I acknowledge how difficult this may be for you." Silmeria said. "How much harder it may be too talk about your life, then it was to simply share the memories with me through your blood."

  "It is difficult." He agreed, but not before giving her another intense look. "To speak about things left unsaid for several millennia..."

  "Unsaid but not unthought of." Silmeria guessed. But she wasn't completely sure, recalling how in his memories, he hadn't taken much time to think about what had happened before that fateful day his father died. The Brahms in the memories had been most consumed by his self loathing and need to avenge both himself and his father, and later on the crimes committed against Hel.

  Brahms moved away from her to take a seat near the bed. At a gesture from him, Silmeria glided over to the chair situated across from his, the vampiress sitting down with the natural born grace of a Goddess.

  Brahms did not immediately start speaking, enduring Silmeria's expectant look with a sort of half grimace of his own. "You know about the beginning of the world?"

  "Yes, of course. In the beginning, there was two races.....the fairy beings who would come to acknowledge the Gods as their superiors."

  "We called them the Sidhe." Brahms told her. "And it was the Sidhe who in turn gave the Gods their name."

  "Now that I didn't know..." Silmeria admitted.

  A faint smile in response from him. "The Sidhe and the Gods did not always get along. The fair folk would make the Gods prove their superiority in battle, but ultimately the Sidhe could not match the them in power or cunning." He leaned back against his chair's cushions. "Of course, this all happened many years before I was created. Odin and I both missed out on the excitement of the early days of the world..."

  "I'm glad." At his questioning look, Silmeria hurried to continue. "You've had more than enough fighting in your life, without having to add to your battles."

  "Indeed. True peace has long eluded me." Brahms murmured. "It is something that I was born into a time of relative peace. Though my household was not without chaos....having one's mother lost....it is a devastating and crippling thing. My family felt the pain of it, my father never fully able to make up for the loss of her...."

  "What was her name?"

  "Dagny." Brahms said. "It means brightness, new day."

  "Dagny...." repeated Silmeria.

  "My mother truly lived to the promise of her name....she brought a brightness to everyone who knew her...when she was lost to us, it was as though shadows had permanently darkened our home..." Those shadows were in his eyes, Brahms expression bleak from the memories. "Sometimes I wonder...."

  "Wonder what?" She prodded him.

  "If Odin wouldn't have turned out differently if our mother had lived."

  "Maybe not." Argued Silmeria. "I mean you both had the same father to influence you....and yet...you two are not the same...That much was clear to me even in those brief moments of interaction in your memories."

  "Still Odin took it hard to lose our mother...Especially given that she died to birth him a brother he did not want...." A humorless twist of his lips. "Odin did not want me, or have much need of me...you could say it was instant dislike on his part...and he did his best to ensure I would not foster any fondness for him in return..."

  "He picked on you." Guessed Silmeria. She didn't have any personal experience with being bullied. She and her sisters had loved and cared for one another. But Silmeria had seen the behavior of other children at play, and even of siblings who seemed to take delight in tormenting each other. The boys of her city had been especially cruel at times, brothers bloodying each others noses, bruising faces with their fists. And given what she now knew about Odin's behavior and animosity towards Brahms, she could well imagine the things the God might have done to a helpless younger brother.

  "As much as he could." Brahms confirmed out loud. "And what he couldn't do with his hands, he made use of with his words. He never let me forget my mother had died to bring me into the world..."

  "Oh Brahms." Silmeria swelled with sympathy for him.

  "This does not excuse him, but Odin was young. Still too young to lose a mother...."

  "I think we never reach an age where it is okay to lose a parent..." Silmeria said, her own mother thought of now. It had been centuries since her parents had died, and yet she still missed them. Worthy souls became einherjar, but what happened to those souls when the einherjar died? They simply faded, nowhere left for them to go. The second death,
the death of a soul, was infinitely worse.

  "How OLD was Odin at that time?" Silmeria asked out loud.

  "Just a little over twenty human years." A wry smile from Brahms. "Barely more than an infant in the eyes of the Gods."

  Silmeria nodded in understanding. Eternity stretched out before the divine, Gods having lived for thousands upon thousands of years. Even the most long lived of the races, the elves, couldn't hold a candle to the life span of a God. A twenty something year old Odin wouldn't have been considered mature then, not until he got at least several hundred years under his belt.

  Not a true infant, a God that young would have the mental maturity of a teenage human. Able to make decisions, and show the true character of his personality. That Odin could pick on a child, on his own brother for a loss Brahms had had no control over? It lowered Silmeria's opinion even further of the God.

  "I was a fast learner." Brahms continued. "I stayed away from Odin as much as I could during my formative years. I hid and ran as needed, until my own powers grew strong enough that I could fend for myself against him." He chuckled, but his eyes looked empty of warmth and amusement. "It helped that my father had me spend as much time as possible with my wet nurse's family." A small smile, but even that was marred by the sad look of his eyes. "Heimdall was more a brother to me than my own blood!"

  "Heimdall...." Silmeria remembered the memory of how shocked and confused Brahms had been when the God Heimdall had not known him. It made sense now, Brahms having grown up with the God, united by bonds stronger than any the vampire had shared with Odin. How painful it must have been, to lose yet another person due to Odin's manipulations!

  "He doesn't remember me....none of them do. Not as the God I once was." Brahms grimaced. "Odin's enchantments are strong....maybe they will never remember me...maybe not even if Odin dies...."

  "You can't think like that" protested Silmeria, but even she had her doubts. If Odin could make such a strong enchantment, one able to wipe out the memories of such powerful beings like the Gods, what chance was there to break it.

  "Odin has had millennia to perfect his craft." Brahms told her. "Even as children, I remember him always fiddling with spells, or brewing potions. He devoted more time to that craft than to the studies our father demanded of us..."

  "Studies?"

  "He was grooming us." Brahms explained. "Not only to be the perfect Gods, but to be able to rule over Creation in case something happened to him. It was he who taught us both how to use and wield our powers. My father would often allow us to sit in as he worked to develop the realms, to create new worlds for the races he would populate them with. Even then I recall Odin being downright envious of my father. For his skill and ease in creating these things." A smile, almost proud then. "My father was the most powerful of the Gods, and the most skilled at creating. Most of Creation as it exists now, owes their birth to him."

  "Odin always wanted that kind of power, and the respect he thought came with it. But he didn't want to have to work to get good at it, or work to earn the other Gods' respect. He was lazy, and arrogant, slacking off often."

  "What about you?" Silmeria asked.

  'Me?" Brahms looked almost sheepish then. "I involved myself in my studies as much as a child could tolerate. I don't think I was a particularly good pupil but I was attentive. It..." A smirk then, a vicious humor over taking him. "Infuriated Odin. He thought me a suck up, clamoring for our father's attention. Not out of need or love, but for a more manipulative purpose."

  "I remember." Silmeria said. "At your father's death bed, Odin accused you of pretending to be the devoted son...."

  "Odin never had much in the way of understanding familial love and devotion." Was Brahms retort. "That he couldn't open his heart to me or to our father, left him questioning how we COULD do that. I think he might have even be jealous and resentful of the ease of my relationship with our father..."

  "And those seeded the way for him to commit patricide, and attempt to murder you as well..." Silmeria murmured.

  "I think my father...didn't want to live." The sudden admission had Silmeria's eyes widening. "The others...they admitted to me that my father was a changed man after the loss of my mother. Oh, he put on a brave show for his children, but..."

  "Eternity is a long time to spend lonely..." Silmeria finished for him.

  "Without Dagny, I don't think my father could will himself to live. If he had had the will, the drive, maybe none of this would have happened. Maybe he would have fed off of one of us....maybe he would have been the creator of the vampire race....Instead he entrusted Creation to the both of us. The throne of Creation should have been Odin's, by right of inheritance. He was the first born son...."

  "But your father must have known how unsuitable Odin was to rule." Silmeria said. "Especially to rule without someone to keep him in check. That's why he split the throne...to avoid jilting Odin completely, he gave him half his inheritance..."

  "It wasn't enough to appease Odin. Nor was he content to let me live to share his throne...." Brahms sighed. "I don't know when, or how exactly he infected me with the parasite....but though it did not kill me...it got him exactly what he wanted....."

  "It's not fair..." Silmeria said.

  "Little seldom is." Brahms' smile was sad.

  "You have had a hard time of it. Harder perhaps than anyone else in Creation." Silmeria said. "Harder than anyone should have to suffer..." He started to say something, but she continued over him. "You've told me nothing about your time as a God that leads me to believe you deserved what happened to you."

  "My life did not end once I ceased to be a God." Brahms was quick to remind her. "I've made so many mistakes since then....Hel, the revenants, preying on mortals..."

  "They were mistakes." Silmeria said, fighting to keep the uncertainty out of her voice. "Necessity led you through them...." But she remembered how he had kept Hel a virtual prisoner to him, feeding off her time and time again even once the Goddess made clear her extreme dislike. "You made the revenants by accident." She continued. "You made them because you were lonely...you wanted companionship. And the mortals you killed....that was before you learned to control the force of your bite, and learned just how much blood you could take from them without it being a killing experience."

  "And how will you reason away what I did to Hel?" Brahms asked.

  "I....." Her lashes lowered in defeat, her silence answer enough.

  "We vampires may not be the monsters Odin claims us to be....but I am different...."

  "Only because you didn't have a sire to guide you!" Silmeria blurted out. "You had no one to help you, no one to teach you how to be a vampire...."

  "You are kind." A thin smile. "And more forgiving of me than I am of myself."

  "I think Brahms...you need to find a way to not only deal with your past, but to forgive and accept it. All of it." Silmeria told him. "Otherwise you will forever be caught in the grip of self loathing...." She had given him something to think about. Silmeria could see that in the look on his face, Brahms nodding to her. She found herself sincerely hoping he would find a way to forgive himself, knowing otherwise he would never be truly happy. And his happiness was beginning to matter to Silmeria, the woman wanting him to have a true moment of it amidst the darkness of his life. It was only fair, after the amount of pain and suffering he had endured, Silmeria insisting to herself she had no other reason than that.

  --

  ....

  Chapter 42 : Forty Two

  It was a night that was proving to be a strange and surreal experience, an experience almost reminiscent of that long ago night on the back roads of Idavoll. But unlike that night, this one held little tension to it, Silmeria no longer confused and wondering if she should fear for her life. Brahms would not purposefully hurt her, so only that odd and intriguing attraction remained. Silmeria didn't always want to acknowledge that attraction, that pull of desire that existed between them. But she felt it all the same, the attraction perhaps
more powerful now that Silmeria had been introduced to the truth behind the vampires and the origins of the feud between Odin and Brahms.

  The truth had power to it, the power to make Silmeria accept, even forgive many things Brahms had done. She was no longer so angry, a calmness filling her. That calm centered her, and allowed Silmeria to relax enough that her claws were gone, nails reverting back to human fashion. It pleased her to see them, and Silmeria thought Brahms felt the same. He liked that she was no longer so agitated and tense, and his own claws had gone down as well.

  Brahms was looking to be in as improved a mood as Silmeria, the vampire quite at ease now as he talked. His expression was no longer distorted with worry, he no longer vibrated with tension. He actually leaned back in his chair, his face animated as he told her stories of his time as a God. Now that the talk wasn't so centered on Odin, or on Brahms own dark and violent past, the vampire lord was finding it ever easier to share. Silmeria found herself privileged to hear the tales, to learn of surprising sides to the Gods and Goddesses she had served under.

  Heimdall was featured often in these stories, Brahms having spent much of his youth and the years after with the God. The two had been close in age, the gap even narrower than that of the age difference between Odin and Brahms. Unlike Odin, Heimdall had been delighted by Brahms, the two openly branding each other brothers. The closeness and camaraderie Odin had denied Brahms, was received instead from Heimdall.

  It wasn't just Heimdall who had adored Brahms. His father, and his mother had also loved the God he had been, actively encouraging the friendship even when the two got into trouble. Silmeria could barely hold in her laughter, as Brahms spun a tale of how the prepubescent pair had gotten caught trying to spy on a bathing group of Sidhe females. How she had choked, Brahms' eyes holding an amused gleam as he recalled how the branch of the tree had broken under the boys' combined weight, and thus dumped the pair right into the middle of the group that had bathed in the lake.