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 Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:28 pm
Word Count: 2245
"I pledge my life and loyalty to Jupiter, and to Valhalla. I humbly request your aid, so that in return I may give you mine."
Well, it worked the third time.
Valhalla had been avoiding the trip. Before he would have made his excuses, claimed he didn’t have the time, stressed the importance of Earth, but he realized his comments and resulting actions had somehow changed from moderate disinterest to outright avoidance when he finally powered up with the intention of visiting Jupiter. He wasn’t a puny page any longer, and he’d been a knight for almost a full year.
He told himself that this trip had nothing to do with Babylon’s nagging; he wasn’t going to give the Squire of Mercury so much credit. Rather, he made this trip because he thought he really did need to visit his wonder. He’d had too much going on to worry about it before—Paris and Peter being sick along with a good percentage of the city, youma and Negaversers and DMC senshi on Earth, which would always be his top priority to matter what anyone said—but now that things were settling down, he thought checking out his Wonder might help him somehow, guide him or lead him and reveal certain answers to him so that he could better understand this war.
Hopefully he would get the chance to talk to one of his ancestors, at the very least.
He’d fumbled over the words the first attempt. The second time was a bit smoother, but the effort wasn’t quite there and he found he didn’t mean it as much as he should.
But the third time, after taking a deep breath and closing his eyes against the world around him, a hand over his chest, over the starseed that had been so close to being lost only a few months ago, Valhalla quietly said the required words—words he’d always known, or so it seemed—and vanished from the rooftop of his apartment building.
When he opened his eyes again, he was met with a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder that seemed to reverberate inside his head. He’d ended up outside the mouth of a cave, under stormy skies pelting heavy drops of rain that soaked his tunic and darkened his hair. A set of double doors rose before him, wooden with iron joints and rings. They guarded a tall, stone structure that rose up high to pierce the dismal sky. Beyond that, he could see little else.
Valhalla glanced over his shoulder at the cave, wondering where it led. Vines covered most of the entrance. Peering deeper inside, he saw nothing but pitch blackness. The wind from the storm whipped around him, causing the cave to howl and whine, sending chills up his spine even though he knew he was the only living being there.
Remembering the ruins of Ganymede didn’t exactly settle his nerves. What kind of haunted past would he find here…? And was he really meant to disturb it…?
For a moment he hesitated, and then he turned back to the doors, taking a few hasty steps forward and reaching out to press his hands against the iron and wood. It was heavy and at first he thought it might be locked from the inside, but as his fingers felt along where the doors met each other, searching for a knob of some sort, Valhalla could have sworn he’d heard a click, and the doors slowly opened before him.
He didn’t waste time thinking about it, assuming that it had just taken a few moments to shift the large doors into place. Once he was inside, he quickly shut them against the wind and rain, and let out a temporary sigh of relief that he was no longer getting soaked. It figured that the one time he decided to take the trip to his wonder that it would be in the middle of a downpour.
Not that he knew anything about what the surface of Jupiter would be like. Hell, he thought the whole planet was a ball of gas! How was he supposed to know there would be rain?
It didn’t take him long to realize that there was another problem — by shutting the door behind him, Valhalla had successfully blocked out whatever light the outside world had provided, be it flashes of lightning or the faint light that made its way through the clouds, leaving the planet dark, but not pitch black.
Leaning his back against the doors, the squire took in a deep breath and closed his eyes for a few moments, wondering if this had been that great of an idea to begin with. He should have brought a flashlight with him, or something to start a fire. He had visited Ganymede when there was still light outside, although he was pretty sure some of the light had been reflected from the clouds of Jupiter.
Here, though. There was no light, no windows — just stone and darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, he was met with a very unusual sight.
Parts of the walls and floor seemed to be… glowing.
Valhalla stared at the floor, and then at the walls, before scaling his eyes up to the ceiling. No matter where he looked, there seemed to be a very faint green glow, dimmer than moonlight but enough to see by.
It seemed to be something built into the stones of the building, perhaps even a natural quality of the stones themselves. He knew there were stones that seemed to glow beneath black lights back on Earth, but as there was no such thing here he could not think how it was possible unless it was a naturally occurring event. Or maybe traces of light managed to get in from… somewhere… and enhanced the luminosity of the stone? Was it possible that there was something embedded in the stones to cause the effect?
Yet… even as he went through the various possibilities in his head, something felt familiar to him. As if being there had somehow awoken the stones… perhaps even the building itself…
Valhalla shook his head and pushed off of the wooden door. He shouldn’t be thinking ridiculous things like stones “waking up” after hundreds of years of lying dormant when he had more important things he needed to be concerning himself with. Stones, or buildings for that matter, couldn’t “wake up.”
The path ahead was dark. The soft green glow—wherever it came from—seemed to only occur a few steps ahead of and behind him as he walked (another trick of the light, he was sure). He was unsure which way to go, but some deeply buried instinct had him choosing pathways with little hesitation. Of course, for all he knew he was getting himself lost the further he traveled inside.
So far, Valhalla was nothing like Ganymede and its large ballrooms and fancy balconies and halls of mirrors and mullioned windows. Valhalla was dark and damp and empty. How the hell anyone could have lived in a place like this was beyond the squire.
Debris from battle, or perhaps just the flow of time, littered the floor. There were rusted pieces of armor, cloth that had been eaten through by who knew what, and bones that Valhalla wasn’t sure he wanted to know what they belonged to. Some appeared to be human, but then there were others both smaller and larger lying in the dust. Various puddles littered the ground. He was pretty sure they were the result of water leaking in from somewhere. He could hear a steady “drip drip” some ways off. He looked at the bones and told himself blood would have dried long ago.
Just like on Ganymede, though… it didn’t appear as if Valhalla was currently host to any living creatures. Other than the vines and various plants outside the stone building, there didn’t seem to be anything alive there.
The steps he took down the stone path remained as confident as they could while wandering in a place he’d never seen before. It helped his courage that he could go home whenever he felt like it, no matter how lost he became in the process. The more he wandered, however, the more aware of how labyrinth-like Valhalla seemed to be.
Pathways split off at various points, ramps and steps to different landings (some leading to nowhere at all), and narrow bridges over dark waters several yards below. It didn’t seem very inhabitable, and the farther Valhalla made his way into the depths of the fortress (for lack of a better word), the more he started thinking that maybe this wasn’t Valhalla at all, but just the basement or some kind of ancient defense mechanism. What better to confuse intruders than have them wander around for days and days?
But as he continued on, he also realized that the confidence in his steps wasn’t necessarily of his own doing. If he started off in the “wrong” direction, the green light of the stones around his feet wouldn’t follow. It seemed as though they would only light up if he was going in the “right” direction… Not that he knew what the right direction was but… it felt right.
It wasn’t the choosing of a path at a particularly complex crossway that had him hesitating. As Valhalla approached the center of the star point, he realized he wasn’t alone.
A boy, probably a little younger than himself, was standing at the center, apparently confused about what to do. Dark auburn hair was bound back into a short pony tail in the middle of the back of his head, and he wore a tunic somewhat similar to the one Valhalla had worn as a page—green and trimmed with fur. The boy was holding a spear in one hand, and a small bag in the other, from which different colored light seemed to be glowing from hard objects. Crystals like the stones in the floor?
“Hey…?” Valhalla attempted at calling out, but he was ignored. There was no green light to guide the feet of the younger teenager, but after a few moments, it seemed as though the boy had made up his mind and took off down one of the pathways.
“Hey! Wait!” Valhalla called again after the… ghost? Was this boy one of the ancestors he’d heard of from the others? The person who once lived with his soul in the past? But then why didn’t he answer?
Unless…
The squire stepped forward once more, but the green glow didn’t follow his feet as he tried taking the path the young man had just gone down. Instead, it led him off in the opposite direction. Valhalla paused, wondering if he should follow the boy anyway.
No… no, if the boy had been what he thought it was, he was sure he’d see him again.
It had taken about half an hour to get there, but a few minutes after breaking away to intersection (with paths that led off as though from different points of a compass), Valhalla found himself standing at a set of doors just as large as the ones he’d passed through upon entering the place. Instead of wood, this one looked as though they were made of solid stone.
To make things more complicated, there seemed to be no break in the doors, no indication that it was anything but a solid rock wall inside an archway. Hell, he didn’t even know how he knew to call it a door, but… somehow…
Slowly Valhalla approached it, reaching out curiously to touch it.
It was then that the boy appeared again, reaching past him with a stone in his hand. Valhalla withdrew his own hand to watch as the boy reached into the bag he’d been carrying to place each stone into its respective places. He looked a little worse for wear, as if he’d been in a fight of some kind. He was still breathing heavily and his knees appeared to shake from fatigue, but he seemed proud of his accomplishments. Olive green colored eyes blazed confidently as he pressed the stones into place before disappearing into thin air.
Valhalla nearly let out a yelp as he jumped back in surprise. He’d been confused enough by the appearance of the boy. He hadn’t even thought of the possibility of him simply vanishing into thin air. Ghost or not, it wasn’t every day that someone just disappeared in front of him!
And that wasn’t the only problem. As Valhalla got his senses back and reached out once more, he noticed that the stones the boy had pressed into place had disappeared or been removed at some point in time.
And yet…
He only paused for a moment, before reaching out to press his hand against the stone door. His eyes widened in surprise as the green light from his feet seemed to move up the door, the mysterious light illuminating them catching the crystals so it seemed as though a current was flowing through a circuit board. It circled around his hand, glowing much brighter than his eyes were used to. He had to shield them with his free hand.
And once it had reached its brightest, there was a click, and the light disappeared.
The huge stone door slowly lowered into the floor, leaving Valhalla to stare up at a ridiculously long flight of stairs.
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Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:36 pm
Word Count: 661
At the top of the stairs Valhalla began to look more like a habitable living place. There was still a long corridor and a couple more doors to go through before furniture started to appear, but the squire knew immediately that his previous assumptions about the labyrinth below were most likely correct. It seemed as though the mazes of Valhalla were more of a backdoor entrance and something of a defense mechanism—though why the boy he’d seen had needed to make his way through it, he didn’t have a clue.
Tapestries of unknown subjects lined the walls now, dust covered and frayed, and small pieces of furniture lied in various states of disrepair. He was sure that the floor had once been lined with carpets and furs, but whatever was left had disintegrated beyond recognition.
There was no more need for the faint green glow that had guided his steps in the belly of the fortress. Instead, the walls, at least sixteen feet high in the corridor he was currently in, had rows of thick, transparent bricks a few feet from the ceiling, letting in a surprising amount of light for such a stormy world. Instead of the constant drip of water and relatively eerie silence, he could now hear the storm raging outside, cracks of thunder following blinding flashes of lightning.
So far, nothing really stood out to him. Well, other than the fact that there was a huge fortress-type building on the surface of Jupiter and he was wandering the halls, of course! But other than pausing to inspect a few pieces of broken furniture and various masonry work, there wasn’t really anything that seemed important. It was deserted, sure, and he couldn’t help but think the bones he’d seen and the general decrepit state of things spoke of some sort of calamity, but he hadn’t seen any clues that might lead to a cause, and he didn’t know where to look to find them.
On Ganymede, Paris had spoken to him about visions of the past. Hearing music and laughter and snippets of conversation. Seeing people, and a castle as it had once been many, many years ago.
Here, though… All Valhalla could hear was the storm outside. Most of it was muffled by the thick stone, but a few particularly loud rumbles of thunder seemed to shake the very walls themselves.
Other rooms and hallways opened up from the main hall he traveled down. He paused to look inside a few of them. Most of them were large dining halls, pantries, meeting rooms, and a kitchen that he doubted was big enough to feed an entire castle. In fact, he began to wonder if the higher he went in the fortress, the more ‘important’ it became.
Flight by flight, the tapestries began to change in quality. There were even a few he thought he could make out — a harvest scene of some sort, with Jupiter’s red clouds taking up the top half of the image, but the bottom was surprisingly abundant with gathered grains of some sort.
The quality of the furniture changed as well. Instead of heaps of broken wood and dilapidated furniture, several of the hall tables remained upright. Some even had a candelabra or decorative vase set on top.
He didn’t dare to touch anything. He assumed most of these objects were hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, and he didn’t want to break them. It was bad enough that he was walking on what was left of the carpets.
Yet… there was something about everything that seemed so familiar, even though he knew he’d never seen anything like it before, not even in his wildest dreams.
Valhalla had been calling to him, as if waiting for his arrival, waiting for him to return—if only for a short visit. Perhaps there was something to be discovered here.
It was that thought and nothing else that kept him from returning home.
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Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:43 pm
Word Count: 974
As he made his way through the fortress, Valhalla found himself drawn to a particular set of barracks, nestled away from the main hall, but still accessible for those who knew where to look.
Granted, he really didn’t know where to look. He didn’t even know why he’d decided to wander towards the large room lined with dozens of what must have been beds. His feet seemed to have guided him that was, as if taking an oft used path to a familiar place. It was a subconscious decision, made more on gut instinct than any level of certainty—though why he should feel any instinctive pull toward certain places unsettled him somewhat.
He tried not to hesitate too much, and made his way through the debris with more ease than he would have expected. Upon first glance, he couldn’t tell what could have been so interesting so as to draw him there, but after glancing around and getting his bearings he realized he was heading toward one of the beds near the center of the room. It seemed out of place there, when most of the others were lined in neat rows, as if someone had placed it there to denote importance or put the owner on display.
The frame had been broken—a heap of crumpled woods and threadbare linens, delicate to the touch and nearly dust after hundreds of years of disuse—but he approached it nonetheless.
Suddenly, the same boy he’d seen before approached the bed as well, fading into existence as Valhalla reached the headboard. He was older now, the squire noted. His dark auburn hair was still bound back in a ponytail but longer with age. Valhalla thought the boy’s—young man’s?—bangs were somewhat similar to his own, only longer as well, framing a severe looking face and a stiff jaw. The boy had grown into a handsome young man, though rather fierce and stern. The ghostly image sat stiffly down on a bed that no longer slumped to the floor, but stood upright and undamaged.
Valhalla watched the young man in wonder. He suspected they were of a similar build as well, though he could admit the… hallucination?... memory?... looked as if he were built somewhat thicker. Valhalla almost called out to him again, watching as the unknown man reached down to pull off one of his boots. The young man’s attention was then gained by someone else entirely.
“Coward! Running away from a fight!” another, larger man called out as he approached.
Or at least that was what it sounded like. Everything seemed muted, as coming from a radio that hadn’t been tuned properly. The other figure wasn’t as clear as the young man, either. From what he could see this new man didn’t look quite as frustrated as the one sitting on the bed, but he definitely didn’t seem all that pleased. Both he and the young man were dressed in tunics similar to his own, with various bits of added fur or leather here and there. The new arrival seemed not as well kept as the younger man.
“Stand down!” an even larger man grunted. He seemed as if he were trying not to sound too flustered. “The young lord’s no coward and you know better than that!” he reprimanded the first man, his rosy cheeks poking out from a rather bushy beard.
In fact, the only one who didn’t have a significant beard was the ‘young lord’, who only had a neatly trimmed goatee.
“Valhalla or not, he failed to accept a challenge!”
Valhalla stared at the angered man, before glancing back to the ‘other’ Valhalla. This…? This angry, stern looking guy was Valhalla? His ancestor?
No… that couldn’t be right....
This wasn’t his ancestor. He knew that as he watched the exchange, as if from the other side of a movie screen. These people were memories. They had to be. The boy he’d seen down in the labyrinth and this man before him were one in the same. They were both him at different ages, and from a very long time ago.
The two larger men argued some more, but he and the other Valhalla seemed to tune them out. He was still trying to understand how he could have come to the conclusion that this man was the one who shared his soul in the past when the first of the two larger men lunged forward, maybe provoked by something the Valhalla of the past muttered under his breath, for he still sounded fuzzy and out of focus. What happened next was too fast for Valhalla to really understand.
“Val!” he imagined the second larger man gasp, for he couldn’t actually hear him. His mouth moved but no sound came out. The memory was going soft around the edges, but he could see that the young man on the bed had lunged forward, a knife in his hand that was now pressed against his attacker’s neck. The man backed down quickly, but the ghost Valhalla followed through with a hard punch with his unarmed fist.
The present day Valhalla stared blankly at the image that was no longer there, shocked by how violent the fortress of Valhalla had apparently been. He hoped that maybe these guys were just having a bad day. He didn’t like the sickening feeling that twisted around in his gut. From what Paris often said, Ganymede sounded like a peaceful place. Valhalla couldn’t say anything about Jupiter itself—not with any certainty—but this fortress seemed somehow militaristic, harsh and violent and, perhaps appropriately, full of conflict.
As he turned to head out of the barracks, something caught the light from the bedside of the broken bedframe and its crumbling mattress—a dagger, shining silver in a flash of lightning, left right where its previous owner must have kept it.
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Posted: Fri Apr 06, 2012 12:49 pm
Word Count: 1689
After leaving the barracks, his feet seemed intent on showing him other parts of the fortress, guiding him along as if following some invisible path. Perhaps it was a distant memory drawing him up the spiral stairwell, or his soul leading him on. The most recent glances at his past life were still heavy on his mind. Ganymede had suggested his past life’s self knowing Valhalla’s, but if he’d been such a violent person, he couldn’t say he felt all that comfortable discovering even more about that man.
About himself.
No, it wasn’t him. Just because they might share the same soul didn’t make them the same person. That wasn’t fair to either of them, and it certainly went against his desire to stay unbound by the tragedies of the past. He refused to be boggled down by regrets and memories of things he hadn’t even been a part of.
There was already so much to worry about that had nothing to do with this. He was only here to look for possible answers, or hints, at what they could do to stop the war that was taking place on Earth.
He came upon a landing of a decent size. It seemed to be purposefully secluded from the rest of the fortress, and while there was little to no view of the outside world, the transparent bricks still lined the walls at intervals, letting light in the deserted hall. There were only a few doors leading off the hall he currently found himself drawn to, but there was a particularly ornate looking one with careful masonry work—carved to look something like a compass rose—on each door.
This must have belonged to Valhalla. He wasn’t completely certain, but it seemed too important of a place not to have belonged to someone notable, and as Valhalla seemed to be some sort of overseer of the fortress… what other explanation could there be? Maybe he’d slept in the barracks with the soldiers whenever it seemed pertinent to do so, but it didn’t seem too strange to think that he might have had his own rooms as well. If people had reacted to him as strongly as his last flash of memory made it seem, the guy was bound to need some privacy from time to time.
Curious and wanting to see if his assumptions were correct, Valhalla moved forward to try and pull the doors open. The first tug did nothing, but as he stood with his hand on the knob, he heard a familiar clicking noise as the door unlocked itself for him.
He stepped inside and saw that he’d found an office and parlor of some sort. Everything was covered in dust—the tables, the chairs, and all the rest of the furniture. He doubted the couches could withstand being sat out with the shape they were in now. Bookshelves and vertical bins holding rolled parchment lined the walls. Something inside told him they might be maps.
A few doors lead off from the room. One was stationed directly behind the desk, while two others were at ten and two o’clock respectively. There were no shelves, cabinets, or other such containers lining the walls between doors, but large windows. They were unlike the bricks that let in light to the rest of the fortress, which were only semi-transparent—allowing in only dim, distorted light. Instead, the windows were made of thick, fully-transparent glass.
It was here that Valhalla got his first real glimpse of Jupiter since he’d arrived. Or at least what the clouds allowed. It was still pouring, of course, but he was surprised at how bright it was despite that. It definitely wasn’t like a sunny day on earth, but it wasn’t so dim that life couldn’t thrive here—although it didn’t anymore.
As he took a few steps towards the windows to get a better view, another memory began to materialize before him.
Sitting at the desk, stern as ever, sat the man the present Valhalla was trying to accept as the bearer of his soul in a past life. The man seemed older now, perhaps a little more worn down, as if he’d spent too much time working and not enough time at leisure. He couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties, but his eyes spoke of someone who’d experienced far more in his life than a normal man in his mid-twenties.
Then again, this had all occurred how long ago? Maybe mid-twenties then wasn’t as young as he thought it was now.
Valhalla watched the man sigh. He looked tired and frustrated, as if he had too much to do and too little time in which to do it. He was using a quill to write something on a sheet of… parchment maybe?... but the squire couldn’t read the language.
Eventually the quill was placed back into its holder and the man’s gaze went down to a small object lying on the desk. It was circular in shape and had a chain attached where a clasp was holding it closed. He seemed to hesitate before reaching out to pick it up and open it.
A pocket-watch?
The squire frowned curiously as he watched the man look at the lid of the watch rather than the clock face. He tried edging closer to look over his shoulder, but a knock on the door had his past self snapping the watch shut and glancing up to see who required his attention.
Valhalla couldn’t help but feel a bit disappointed. He’d wanted to see what was so interesting about a pocket-watch. The way the man looked at it made him seem much less harsh, almost longing or, in a way, sad..
Presently, he was unable to see who or what had interrupted the man, but the ghost or memory nodded with another sigh, his attention brought back to his desk and the watch he’d placed back on the surface. He pulled out a new sheet of parchment and lifted the quill to write something. The movements of his hand were deliberate but precise, making large, looping designs that must have been words before placing the writing utensil back in its home. From a drawer just in front of him, the man pulled out a ring of some sort and pressed it against the page. It disappeared as he lifted the ring away.
The memory faded with it, dust and debris taking its place.
The ring. Of course. It was, admittedly, one of the reasons he’s come, though as soon as he’d said foot here he’d nearly forgotten about it. Everything else seemed to have overshadowed it.
Valhalla stepped forward to pull open the desk drawer. Another click sounded as his finger tips touched it. It slid open with ease. Inside were various knickknacks and desk essentials—a few quills, measuring tools that might have been used for making maps, an odd-looking ruler that was straight only on one side, but curved on the other, and various mechanical objects that looked like they’d been either taken apart or half-way put together. There were other items that he didn’t even try to guess the purpose of, and then there was the signet ring—the very same ring he’d seen the Valhalla of the past use to send his message.
Beside it was the pocket-watch.
Valhalla reached for the ring, first. He grabbed a scrap of parchment that had been left in the desk, and after struggling with the only sealed jar of still usable ink, messily scribbled a note to his boyfriend with one of the quills.
I’ll be home soon. Sorry for disappearing for so long. – Valhalla
He pressed the ring to the paper. The image of the signet imprinted where it touched and the message disappeared. He realized, now that his thoughts were with Paris, that he must have been gone for over an hour by now—perhaps even more than that—and that he probably had a worried boyfriend waiting for him at home.
Once he’d resealed the ink and placed the quill back where he’d found it, Valhalla reached for the pocket-watch. To his great surprise, he could hear the quiet tick-tick of the gears inside. At first he didn’t think it was possible. How could a watch so old still be working after all these years? But as he opened it up, Valhalla discovered that that was, indeed, the case.
Little hands moved in a steady rhythm. Tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick.
He didn’t know how to read it. It didn’t seem to run on any sort of time he was familiar with, but then he supposed that made sense. Why would a watch on Jupiter run on Earth time, after all? The thing that his past self had seemed so interested in appeared to be a small, painted image of a very pretty young man—blonde haired and blue eyed—smiling serenely and stuck to the opposite side of the watch.
Valhalla stared at the picture for a few moments, before shutting the watch to inspect the rest of it. The front was decorated rather ornately, with tiny gemstones embedded within, and engraved on the back… words… but they seemed far more familiar to him than anything he’d seen written in the memory.
“What the heck?” he sputtered out loud, turning the watch over in his hands a few times before staring down at the engraved phrase.
He thought it might be Latin. At least, it looked like Latin, and now he was beginning to wish he’d paid more attention to his Latin lessons during high school Sunday school, because even though it looked familiar enough for him to recognize the language—it looked nothing like the loopy words he’d seen written by his past selft—he still couldn’t translate it.
It had to be Latin, but… what the hell was something Latin doing on Jupiter of all places??
A loud crash of thunder shook Valhalla from his thoughts, and he pocketed both the ring and the watch without thinking.
He’d been here long enough. He’d gotten what he’d come for, and he’d seen more than he expected.
It was time to go home.
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