Vallen: The Marking (Vallen series #1)

Chapter 37

My resurrection was big news in the castle. Everywhere I went people stared at me and whispered behind my back. I suppose it makes sense, you don't see someone come back from the dead every day. Though I highly doubt people recognized me from before.

There was also another reason why people started staring at me. The first day after I found my gift I still had to wear white, simply because the school didn't have the right colour skirt for me. The day after that I was faced with the truth: A deep grey skirt.

My gift was level ten, the highest there is.

To me, it looked like someone just accidentally washed my white skirt with something black, but the other students looked at me with big eyes as I walked by, some even moving out of the way for me.

Alaric, Eldon and I spend an entire month trying to figure out what the heroes meant. I was feeling pretty frustrated. Couldn't they have been a little bit more specific?

"Slay the king, break the ring." I repeated for the millionth time. Most of our brainstorm time was during Gift enhancement. The single most useless class for me, even more so than human studies. There was no enhancing my gift, nor could it be learned to control. When the heroes wanted to speak to me they would kill me and bring me back. There was nothing I could do about any of it.

"I thought it was 'Kill the King'?" Eldon asked me, looking like we had a major breakthrough.

"Maybe it was," I admitted. "I don't remember exactly."

"Tell me word for word what happened." Eldon pushed on. I had told him and retold him more than a hundred times already. It was starting to get harder to keep up with my own story. I needed to cut out a big part. The part where I was told I will die.

I still hadn't told anyone. Not my friends nor my family, who I had to call nearly every day now or they'll freak out. I had tried to tell Maddie, but I couldn't. She kept on going on about how hard it was when mom and dad told her I had died. She even sounded like she was choking up about it. This secret was mine to keep.

I told Eldon what happened again, and again and again. But we didn't get any further. Eventually, we just gave up and left gift enhancement earlier than we normally would.

Finals were coming up. Next month would be my time to prove that I belonged here to my professors. The pressure had only increased, before I just wanted to show everyone that I was just as much of a Vallen as they were. Now I needed to show them that the heroes didn't make a mistake when they chose me.

We ran into Silus after we left the classroom. "No animal possession, thankfully." He shrugged when he saw me. Silus still hadn't found his gift, but he was one of the first to congratulate me on mine. Eldon excused himself, he had been itching to start studying the entire time.

"I wanted to ask you something." I said to Silus as we walked to the library together.

"Ask away." He said. I hadn't even thought about the photo since the fire. It had been neatly tucked away in one of my drawers in my room. It was only this morning that I decided it was time.

"Do you know this man?" I showed him the photo, pointing to the Viking man holding me. Silus studied it for a moment, squinting his eyes at the picture but eventually gave it back.

"Sorry, I don't." He said. "Did the heroes want to know about him?"

Complete strangers had come up to me asking if the heroes mentioned them when I was dead. I used to think that it was hilarious, but as time went on and people kept asking, sometimes more than once, I was getting more and more annoyed by it. Stupid heroes with their stupid riddles.

"Something like that." I just said. "Thanks Silus."

There was no reason to feel defeated just yet. There were a hundred more students in this school that were from nordic descent. And thousands more in the world. I needed to keep believing that eventually, I will know how he was, and who my parents were. 

Hi friends! 

Right now, the world is kind of a shitty place. We literally cannot escape the news about corona and most of us are quarantined or dealing with restrictions right now. I decided that while this is going on I wanted to do my part to at least try and make everything seem a little bit more fun. So I am changing my updating schedule to every Tuesday and Friday. It's a little thing, but I hope I can temporarily make you forget about all the bullshit that this virus brings with it. 

Stay safe and stay away from eachother

Storiesofelysian