Valkyrie (Complete)

3: Invasion

Another year of training passes quickly. She is nearly seventeen now, and fully matured. Her muscles have steadily grown stronger and she's faster, able to move so quickly that one could lose sight of her in the time it takes to blink. As well, over this time, her father has grown ill. He is aging quickly, and has very little strength left. He doesn't work at The Academy anymore and he hardly leaves their house.

She throws herself into the training as a way of distracting her mind. She cannot bare the thought of losing her father. He's the only thing she has left, and she doesn't want to be alone.

She shakes her head and narrowly dodges the sword coming towards her face. Phoenix pauses and sighs. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," she says, her face covered by a cool blankness. "Pick your sword back up."

"Val, I know something is wrong. Why won't you just tell me what it is?" His voice is calm and reassuring, like always, but something in her refuses to talk about it.

"I said nothing is wrong."

"I know there's something. We've always told each other everything. You can trust me with whatever it is."

"I don't want to talk about it." Her deception of calm is starting to crumble and she knows that she won't be able to hide it for much longer. She can feel the familiar ache in her chest at the very thought of losing her only other family and she refuses to break down in front of one of her teammates. The only time she allows herself to put the walls down is when she's completely alone.

"Val-"

She turns on her heel without another word, dropping her swords and disappearing into the forest. She's so preoccupied with getting away before she loses control that she doesn't notice how tightly her fists are clenched. Storm clouds are rolling in and dry lighting is cracking across the sky. Fire burns in the clouds, turning the whole sky red and orange. Despite the heat of that, rain drops fall from them and pour down. Thunder rumbles loudly and the land quakes, completely at her mercy.

Birds scatter from the trees in groves, fleeing to a less dangerous area. Deer run off and smaller creatures hide in their burrows until the storm passes. Rivers surge with the new water, flooding angrily across the land in alignment with her emotions.

She looks up and catches sight of what she's done, but she cannot control it any longer. Purple-white lightning cracks and seems to touch the horizon as rain still continues to fall. The sky is bathed in red and orange and the townspeople don't know what's happening. They don't know it's her.

She looks down at her hands in shock and notices the cuts shaped like crescent moons in her palms. Her nails bit through the skin and drew blood, but she doesn't care. She's too focused on figuring out she managed to use all of her powers at once. She's never done that before. The only other time she used more than one at a time was that time in the classroom, but that was years ago and she had thought it was a fluke. She trained and tried to use more than one, but it never worked.

Her heart pangs and she claws at her chest with her hands, trying to make it stop hurting. She lost her mother and knows that she likely won't ever see her again, but her father was always there. He always had her back and he was her rock. Without him, she would be completely lost.

She finds an outcropping of rocks and crawls underneath an overhang. There, her tears finally overflow her eyes and run down her cheeks. They drip off her chin and land in the dirt in front of her, but she doesn't notice. She can't see clearly through the tears, so she doesn't. She closes her eyes and her other senses heighten, but she ignores them.

A sob escapes her lips and into the open air. She quickly clamps a hand over her mouth in an effort to be quieter, but it's in vain. Once the first sound escaped, she couldn't stop the flood. Her black eyeliner runs down her face and gives her an ominous, frightening look. Her body shakes like a leaf in the wind and she wishes that everything would stop for a bit, or at the very least slow down. She can't handle not having either of her parents.