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Melancholia is sixteen when she first meets Valkyrie.
They bring her into the Temple quiet and withdrawn; grief in the gaunt lines of her face. Her eyes are like black fire, though, glaring around at everyone who steps too near to her. Melancholia can’t help but be curious.
“… found her practicing in the cemetery – ” She overhears Cleric Wreath saying when she comes to deliver dinner. They’re not allowed to eavesdrop – Necromancers are a secretive bunch, even among their own – and she knows that, understands the quiet sin of eavesdropping on a member so highly-ranked, but:
Well.
She discovers that the girl’s parents are dead, her uncle, too. She still has family, some aunt and uncle, cousins, but Cleric Wreath claims to have witnessed an impressive potential for necromancy, barely tapped, too great to miss out on – and the girl had been interested and curious and willing to follow. Of course she had: she’d just lost her only family.
“Nefarian Serpine will be looking for her,” Cleric Quiver warns.
She can hear Cleric Wreath’s smirk in his voice. “Let the Skeleton Detective deal with that. As I recall, he and Gordon were close enough. The girl is extraordinary, though.” “And you really think she’s capable? Even after losing her family—”
A throat clears by her elbow, and Melancholia twists on her feet, her head already ducking, already saying, “I’m sorry—”
Her head ducks enough that she meets the black eyes of their most recently acquired student.
“Ah, well, I forgive you, then,” The girl says, grinning through it, teeth sharp and white. Melancholia’s mouth twists. “Just try not to do it again.”
She’s tall for her age, her shoulders a square and her black hair a dense mane; she’s sun-tanned and athletic and wild from a life spent running outdoors, swimming in the sea. Melancholia doubts she’ll last a week down here in the cold and quiet.
“I wasn’t apologising to you,” Melancholia snaps.
“And yet you did anyway,” The girls grin widens a notch. That fire glows in her eyes, limned as they are with red, puffy skin. “It’s okay; I’d apologise if I were in the presence of brilliance, too. I’m Valkyrie.”
“I’m someone who doesn’t care.”
The girl snorts. “Obviously.” Her arm snakes past Melancholia too quick to stop and knocks on the door, announcing their presence. As she flits away, she calls back, “Food’s getting cold.”
-
She’s wrong, it turns out: Valkyrie lasts more than a week.
To start, the girl is little more than a shadow. When she’s not, though, she’s trouble. Showing up late to classes or simply not at all, leaving early, picking fights with Blight, talking back, casually disrespecting the studies and tomes and lessons with which the rest of them were raised. The name – Valkyrie Cain – suits her too well.
Yet, she is powerful. Cleric Wreath didn't lie about that, and is proud to continue saying so even with the girl firmly under his wing. She skips ahead of her age group and into Melancholia’s at the word of High Priest Tenebrae himself. One class, they’re learning about the concept of leeching another’s life, letting it flow back into their own bank of power. It’s a skill unseen in most Necromancers, too advanced; every now and again the scholars put students up to it to field for the next Death Bringer.
Melancholia focuses on the small, potted plant in front of her. It’s dumb, inanimate, but it’s alive in its own way. Magic curls in her anchor, running through her where it rests on her skin, and she reaches out with her thoughts, focusing too hard, trying to leech out the life until veins pop in her forehead. Her jaw grits. She pulls; pulls harder.
Her flower crankily curls in on itself and greys, withers, just a bit. Just a little. She relaxes, looks up at the scholar, and waits for him to smile and nod. Say something. Anything. He doesn’t.
At dinner, she discovers that Valkyrie – because of course, who else – wilted flower after flower in moments. Heat flushes up her collar at the casualness with which Valkyrie announces this. Agitated shadows flicker at their feet, and Valkyrie settles them all with an errant flick of her ringed finger. It’s galling.
She smirks, and says, “Maybe I’m just better than you.”
Melancholia doesn’t bother finishing dinner.
-
A thousand jibes follow, just like that first one. A thousand taunts. Smug glances in class. Notes passed in the hallway, a smirk thrown back over her shoulder. When they’re assigned cooking duty together, Valkyrie insists on standing too close, almost stepping on her toes. When they’re attending lessons, Melancholia lunges on any chance to answer a question Valkyrie can’t.
Over time, the insults lose the worst of their thorns. The poison dries up. They continue to volley insults back and forth like tennis players, though, the very practiced of it grooved into the dirt of their relationship like it’s essential.
It’s not a friendship, Melancholia tells herself insistently. Not quite. Not yet. Valkyrie is still smug and annoying and careless and stupid, so stupid.
She sucks at theory, one of Melancholia’s pet mockeries – which bites her in the ass when she looks up and finds that Valkyrie has joined her in the library one evening.
"Hey, Mel."
“What are you doing here?” She blurts.
Valkyrie’s face pinches, mean. “I got assigned extra homework.”
A smile almost dances around Melancholia’s lips. “Scholar Rapture?”
Valkyrie nods. “Asshole.”
“Well, go do it elsewhere. I’m trying to read. I can’t focus when you’re around.”
(She thinks on that, later that night, and regrets saying it. Stupid.)
“Then leave,” Valkyrie snips back, and sits down to work. Melancholia would say more, wants to say more, but Adrienna Shade takes that moment to hiss at the two of them to be quiet, so Melancholia thrusts her face back into her book and continues reading about the Passage.
-
Valkyrie gets assigned more extra homework. Melancholia, ever the dutiful student, reads to breach the gaps in her skills on her own. More often than not, the two of them wind up alone in the library, each lit by their respective candles, reading into the night.
It’s good to see Valkyrie stuck in the library so many nights, surrounded by books. Proof of some failing, at least. It makes Melancholia smile to herself, more than a little smug.
One night she glances up and spots Valkyrie looking back at her. She’s smiling, too, just a bit.
Valkyrie makes a small gesture, a beckoning one. Her eyes are bright and daring.
Melancholia quickly looks back down at her book and keeps reading.
-
When Melancholia is twenty and Valkyrie is sixteen, she hears a knock on her door. There’s a book of Signum Linguistics propped on the shelf of her lap, the pages full of barbed-wire shapes and wheels and the unique grammars of sigil-magic. Cleric Craven is having her and a few others her age read up on it.
It’s boring, but she’s committed. Or she is, until she hears that knock. It’s not a curt, short rap, so she doubts a guard or a scholar. And if it were a Cleric, they’d walk in without even bothering to knock. It’s probably just another student.
“Come in,” She calls. The door creaks open, and a brown face fills the slat. Melancholia almost doesn’t recognise it: Valkyrie does most of her training with Cleric Wreath alone now, and so she’s usually only a wisp of black hair disappearing around the corner these days, a gunshot laugh somewhere down the halls.
“Hey, Mel,” Valkyrie says, grinning with half her mouth. “Come with me.”
“What.” Melancholia says. Valkyrie’s mouth twitches, puckers, so she sighs and amends it to: “What do you want?”
“I want you to come with me.”
“Sad. I’m reading.”
“I know, you’re very boring. I have something to show you,” Valkyrie insists. “Come on, Mel.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“I’ll stop if you get off your lazy ass and come with me,” Valkyrie says. Melancholia is—well—she doesn’t entirely like Valkyrie but it’s a little hard to hate her all the same when she’s always so vibrantly alive and unapologetically herself, and Melancholia can’t really help but be curious.
“Fine,” Melancholia slides off her bed, bookmarks her page, and follows Valkyrie down the hall.
Valkyrie’s cell is mostly uniform to the rest of theirs. A bed, a wardrobe, a bookshelf, and a desk to sit and study at. An environment dedicated to focusing on one’s commitment to Necromancy and the Temple Order. Valkyrie’s shows signs of the outside world in the few fiction novels she’s stuffed between tomes, the clutter of trinkets on the desk.
Valkyrie opens the wardrobe and a pile of loosely-folded clothes spills out.
“You’re such a slob,” Melancholia tells her, watching Valkyrie fish through the fabric. Valkyrie lifts out—
Melancholia shuts the door before anyone can look in. Hefted between Valkyrie’s arm is a squat, bulky, portable tv.
“Where did you get that?” Melancholia hisses. “You know we’re not allowed to have things like that—if anyone saw you with it, you’d be in so much trouble—”
“Relax, it’s fine. Tenny loves me,” Valkyrie insists. She’s on her knees, setting up the tv, perfectly carefree. Scrambles of static startle across the screen.
A choked noise of outrage and frustration and god-knew-what-else tries to claw its way out of Melancholia’s mouth, ridiculous, toad-like. “Don’t call him that.”
Valkyrie smirks. “Why not? He loves it.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Like you’d know.” An image flickers to life. Valkyrie sits down on her bed, her back propped against the stone, cold wall, and pats the mattress. “Well? You just gonna stand there looking like a cow?”
For a moment, Melancholia’s feet drum the floor. The Clerics names are a lump in her throat; she could call down a guard, a scholar, and have them here in a second. They’d confiscate the TV and wipe that smug, stupid grin off Valkyrie’s face, captured in a square of nacreous blue light. Finally bring her down a notch.
Except…
“You look more like a cow than I do,” Melancholia mutters lamely and perches herself at the very edge of the mattress, too far away to touch. A cartoon blares its way through the theme song.
Valkyrie points to the frowning, purple-robed girl and says, “She’s totally you.”
-
It becomes something of a tradition, the girls creeping off to Valkyrie’s room once a week after all the lights are turned off and they’re all supposed to be sleeping. They learn to stuff a blanket to the bottom of the door to block out the TV’s quiet, flickering glow.
They never invite anyone else in. When they finish Teen Titans and begin She-Rae, Melancholia points to the intense, lively blonde and says, more to get her back than anything, “She’s you.”
-
When Melancholia’s Surge comes, it hurts more than she was expecting, but it passes in only a few hours. Her body and magic align to lock into Necromancer permanently without question. Of course it would: what else could there be? She’s been here at the Temple since she was a baby, delivered in a swaddle of cloth with no name and no family. There’s nothing else.
Afterwards, she has a vague memory of dark hair and a dark hand and Valkyrie’s voice when the pain was at its worst: “Come on. You can do this. Don’t leave me in the dark alone. You cow.”
-
When Valkyrie turns twenty-one, her Surge hits. It’s horrible, people whisper. Agonizing. They don’t know if she’ll survive. Melancholia tries to visit, and the guard there firmly but gently reminds her that the Surge is personal, that each Necromancer must experience it alone.
Melancholia opens her mouth to say that Valkyrie was there for her, then shuts it. She nods. She walks away.
For a short while.
She waits until the guard is summoned away, and then reaches out with the shadows on the floor. They slip into the doors lock, working intently, until it pops open with a small, soft snk.
Inside, she discovers the rumours weren’t only that: Valkyrie looks almost dead, curled up around herself on the white sheets. Her hands claw into hooks. She’s shaking. It’s the only sign she’s still alive.
Melancholia leans over her and listens to the small, shallow rasp of her breath. Worry puts a cold spike in Melancholia’s ribs. There’s hair sticking to Valkyrie’s cheek.
She’s almost ready to leave – she feels ill – she shouldn’t have come here – what was she even hoping to do? – when one of Valkyrie’s eyes slant open. It’s bleary, but even now there’s fire in it. Alive. Melancholia tries to tell herself she isn’t as relieved as she feels.
“Guess you missed my pretty face, huh?” Valkyrie whispers. Melancholia’s face heats. She turns, blunders towards the door.
“Wait. Wait.”
It’s the plaintive agony in her voice that catches Melancholia more than anything, a hook pulling her back to the bed. Dark, sweaty hair drapes over Valkyrie’s face. This time, Melancholia reaches out and sweeps it back.
Valkyrie’s clenched fist opens a little. Melancholia fits her hand into it, and Valkyrie grips it tight.
“It hurts,” She admits.
Melancholia almost snarks at her—I’m not blind—but then she looks again at Valkyrie’s face, the colour leeched out of it, the coin-thick dimes of sweat on her cheeks and brow. There are tears in her eyes, tears she’s too stubborn, too proud, to let fall.
Melancholia has seen Valkyrie with a broken arm. A cracked knee. She’s seen the way Valkyrie held herself, too stiff, after breaking up with Blight. She’s never once seen Valkyrie cry. Never once heard her admit that something hurt.
So, Melancholia just says, “You look dreadful,” and holds her hand tight.
Quietly, after so long that Melancholia thinks that maybe Valkyrie dozed off, or maybe Valkyrie thinks that Melancholia has and can’t hear her, Valkyrie admits something else that Melancholia’s never going to forget: “I miss my family.”
-
They’re both in their twenties when word starts bouncing around that Valkyrie could be the next Death Bringer. There’s always been talk of it, but now – now that she’s locked in – it’s becoming something serious. Something with weight.
And Melancholia can’t help but hate a little, can’t help but lie awake and ask: but why? why couldn’t it have been me? why did it have to be her?
Pulled away by the rope of being their potential future Saviour, Valkyrie drifts.
Melancholia doesn’t stop her.
-
Melancholia is in the library. It’s late, nearly midnight. A hip shifts into the golden circle of the candle, and Melancholia says without looking up, “Don’t knock that over.”
Valkyrie’s chuckle is soft thunder. “What’re you doing?”
“Ignoring you,” Melancholia says. Pointless: the flowing script has always been impossible to focus on with Valkyrie near.
As if to prove it, a finger dimples the paper and pushes down. Melancholia lets it go without resistance and gives Valkyrie her full attention.
She’s been gone a month. There’s something new in her eyes, a hard edge. Her hair’s back off her face in a ponytail, she looks bigger, stronger.
“Hey, Mel,” She says, trying for playful. “I see you’re still boring as dog shit.”
Melancholia only looks at her. Valkyrie’s smile fans down.
“Okay. I get it - I’m sorry for disappearing without telling you,” Valkyrie concedes. Apologies have always been salt on her tongue, and even this one comes out with difficulty. “I can see how maybe you’d be a bit annoyed about that.”
“Actually, I’m annoyed you came back. I didn't want to see you again,” Melancholia lies. Valkyrie settles, smiles again.
“I didn’t realise you cared. But, no big deal. C’mon. Look at this,” She reaches up and swiftly removes her jacket. Underneath, she's wearing party clothes, more colourful than Melancholia's entire wardrobe put together, and Melancholia's eyes run across the strong shoulders, the butterfly curve of her collarbone, further, and heat rushes into her face, turns her tongue clumsy.
“Yes. Your… breasts. Wow,” She glares back down into her book. “They’re hardly impressive.”
“I meant the clothes, you idiot. And—fuck you, by the way, I look amazing.”
“For a complete mouth, sure.”
“Whatever. You love me. You love me, and my impressive breasts.”
Melancholia shifts her a sly look. “What’s there to love?”
Valkyrie snort-laughs. “Jeez, Mel.”
The nickname’s never quite left, and by now she doesn’t really want it to. Even when Blight sometimes calls it across the classroom in a thick, mocking voice and nudges her in the ribs with her elbow, because Blight’s a dick.
“I’m going out,” Valkyrie says. “For my 24th. Some of the others are coming.”
“Did Cleric Wreath say you could?”
Valkyrie shrugs. “Who cares what Solomon says?”
That disrespect has never quite stopped grating on Melancholia’s nerves—nor the jealousy that she couldn’t get away with it herself.
“I need to study,” Melancholia insists. Shadows flicker, encroach on the light a little.
“All you ever do is study and practice,” Valkyrie wheedles. “It’s my birthday, Mel.”
“So? Everyone has one. It’s literally the least special thing about you.”
“C’mon,” Valkyrie leans in, and Melancholia’s eyes go to her biceps, the rounded muscle there. Valkyrie could easily pick her up and carry her out if she wanted. Not that she’s thought about it a lot. “We’ll watch a movie, go to a party, do some normal shit for once—”
“You don’t take any of this seriously, do you?” Melancholia blurts. Valkyrie blinks at her, stunned, and Melancholia hopes she’ll scramble, try to deny it.
“Nope.” Just like that: nope, the P popping, insolent. “But I do take other things seriously.”
Melancholia can’t help but scoff. “Like what?”
Valkyrie’s eyes dip. Her bottom lip disappears under the white shelf of her teeth, and the corner quirks a little, and Melancholia has just realized that Valkyrie is staring at her mouth when Valkyrie finally sits back and says, “Well, not getting caught.”
She lingers a few more moments, but she’s never been one to waste time on others who don’t want her; she discards others easily, uninterested in them. It’s one of the reasons she has so few friends even inside the Temple where she’s spent her entire life. She leaves when Melancholia doesn’t say anything, and Melancholia looks back at her book and tries to read.
-
Valkyrie is still waiting for her outside the library when she emerges four minutes later, muttering, “Okay, fine, fine, fine, let’s go.”
-
They do watch a movie, something stupid, their hands bumping in the popcorn box together. Afterwards, Valkyrie leads her to a party at someone’s apartment. Melancholia meets the host briefly, some smug, spiky-haired Teleporter Valkyrie met during one of her trips out of the Temple.
He laughs into Melancholia’s frowning face, passes her a beer that she takes only a few sips of before tipping the rest down the sink. When she comes out of the kitchen, she spots the two of them – Valkyrie and the Teleporter – standing by the window, clustered close together.
Something dull and ugly runs through her. Loneliness yawns open. She wants to be back in the Temple. She never wants to go back. She wants to rip Valkyrie away from that laughing blonde boy for reasons she can’t understand.
Then Valkyrie is there, taking her hand, pulling her away from the noise and bright lights and beer into someone’s bedroom. With the door shut, the music mutes. Melancholia collapses onto a stranger’s bed, her head woozy. Valkyrie laughs.
“You looked so sad,” Valkyrie tells her, still laughing. The mattress rolls when she sits, and then her head slumps down onto Melancholia’s shoulder. She laughs into the crook of Melancholia’s throat, rosy. “Wow. I haven’t had the chance to just let off steam like this in—in months.”
Melancholia should ask where she’s been, what she’s been doing. She doesn’t. This is their next Saviour, she thinks. The Death Bringer, hanging off her, ever-so-slightly drunk. It feels sacrilegious. It feels unfair.
Valkyrie lets out a hard gust of breath that sends Melancholia’s hair fluttering, and says, “Here, let me braid your hair, it’s getting everywhere.”
Melancholia rolls her shoulder, hard enough to shrug Valkyrie off, but says, “Okay.”
“Really? Seriously?”
Her hair’s always been her one vanity in a life otherwise committed to her studies, to becoming the best, but—but what? But she feels reckless tonight, so okay. But her heart hurts and the realisation that she’ll never actually be the best is finally dawning on her, so okay. But she just wants someone to touch her, to make her feel like her life hasn’t been wasted, because all she can think about is Valkyrie lying in that bed and whispering that she missed her family, and Melancholia’s never known hers, or felt anything like this before.
So, okay.
“Do it or don’t,” She goads. Valkyrie’s foot twitches, and the mattress dips and shifts again as she moves. She grips Melancholia’s jaw lightly, turns it away to better get at Melancholia’s hair.
“My mother taught me how to do this,” Valkyrie admits conversationally as her hands craft a rope out of Melancholia’s hair, less mercurial than Valkyrie’s own. “The Clerics used to hate it, though.”
“Hard to imagine the Clerics hating anything you do.”
She can’t see her face, but she knows Valkyrie has missed the jibe—or simply doesn’t care. “Cleric Craven loathes me, actually. I think he wishes I never showed up to the Temple.”
A question hovers unasked in the air: do you?
“There. Done,” Valkyrie sits back. Melancholia reaches up and strokes the furrowed ridges of a braid. No-one’s ever done this for her before.
“Thank you.” It comes out stiff, and Valkyrie is already shrugging it off, lying down, heedless that this bed doesn’t belong to her. Melancholia joins her. They lie facing each other, listening to the muffled pounding of music and people.
“I don’t know if I want to be the Death Bringer,” Valkyrie admits. Melancholia is shocked into stillness, a statue of ice. “Sometimes I think about just… leaving the Order altogether.”
“What?” She can’t fathom it: to be so talented, and to let that talent rot away unused. To not want, the way Melancholia has wanted for all of her life.
Valkyrie shrugs, instantly defensive, her eyes going dark. “I said I don’t know, alright? I just—I thought there could be more to life than this.”
“So, you don’t want to be our Saviour?”
“I didn’t say that,” Valkyrie snaps. Her cheek scrunches. “The Clerics are pushing me into making a decision, and I don’t know if I want to, just yet. If I’m so powerful, I don’t see why I have to make a choice now.”
Melancholia can’t think of anything to say. The anger dissipates. Valkyrie’s never been interested in the spiritual or religious side of Necromancy, so this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
Her chest hurts at the idea of Valkyrie not being there.
Valkyrie is lying very close. Her breath purrs over Melancholia’s mouth, and she’s waiting for Melancholia to say something, limned in the soft light. Melancholia looks at her through the slats of her lashes and feels rotten inside.
Melancholia wants to tell her to stay. She wants to ask what could be more important than saving the world. She waits too long, and Valkyrie asks, “Well, do you want me to be the Death Bringer?”
“No,” Melancholia admits frankly. Valkyrie’s knee taps hers. “I think the Clerics are making a terrible mistake and wasting their time, and you’re only proving me right. I think that Cleric Wreath’s an idiot.”
Valkyrie grins. “Ooh. I think that’s the first truly mean thing I’ve heard you say about the Clerics.”
“I could say more,” Melancholia offers, relaxing. Valkyrie shifts: rises up onto one elbow so that she’s leaning over Melancholia, their bodies pressed together. Her hand flicks lazily across the skin of Melancholia's stomach.
“Nah,” She says. “I think I’d rather talk about something else.”
“You?”
A shrug, guileless. “I am my favourite topic, that’s true.”
Melancholia’s heart is a runaway rabbit’s foot in her chest. “You’re always such an arrogant prick.”
“Normally you call me a cow.”
“Fine, then, you’re an arrogant cow.”
“I’m about to become your saviour, Mel. You might have to learn to love me.”
Not a problem. Melancholia’s breath shudders. “I thought you weren’t going to be the Death Bringer.”
Valkyrie’s hand strokes the back of her cheek; flits up to brush a few, errant strands out of her face.
“Better start praying to me, just in case,” She says with a smirk.
Well.
There’re other words for what Melancholia does, plenty of them - but she supposes she can call it a kind of worship, too. Valkyrie certainly seems to think so.
-
Valkyrie disappears a few months later. The Temple plunges into a flurry of chaos as they try to find their missing Death Bringer; as they try to convince each other, themselves, that this is just a temporary blip and not a pattern; and then, finally, with resignation, as they try to find a replacement powerful enough to supersede her.
At first, they suspect it’s another Lord Vile situation and wait for her to reappear. She doesn’t show up, though, and no-one really expects her to. No-one knows why she even left. When they come ask her—you two were friends, weren’t you, they ask, and Melancholia almost chokes on a laugh and her own bitterness—Melancholia pretends to know nothing.
Pretends not to hurt.
-
She's wrong again: Valkyrie does reappear. Sort of.
It’s two years later, and she’s been Cleric St. Clair for at least three months when the inevitable finally happens and the world turns to cinders.
She finds Darquesse floating in the wreckage of the Temple they were raised in.
Her hair drifts around her, a stormy nebula, longer than ever, and her eyes are white with an awful, unfathomable power. She crackles with it, burns with it, glows with it. Death folds around them, sinks into Melancholia’s anchor, too much, that icy cold burning even through her clothes. Shadows lap eagerly at the ground around them. She stares up at the face of the woman who caused all this and remembers the way it felt when she kissed her for the first time. She realizes then that she's fallen in love with the end of the world.
Darquesse looks down at her and grins with a Gods terrible, seeking madness. “Hey, Mel.”
Start praying, indeed.