Page 31 of Valkyrie Unknown

No. That wasn’t what was happening. Not that any of the answers mattered, given that my bear roared in anger every time I thought about walking away from her, and denying the beast was exhausting.

Ten

Azzie

There was a mostlynaked man lying on the bed next to me, and I shouldn’t give a shit.

Except that he was hot.Reallyhot. Well built. Scarred. Tattooed.

And his boxers did a poor job of hiding his half-erection.

It wasn’t as if I was going to fuck him. Not if I was learning from him or traveling with him. Both presented too many possibilities complications, and none of the bad things that might happen were worth indulging in lust.

Knowing I couldn’t touch wouldn’t stop me from appreciating the view.

Not that I had the attention span to do that the entire time he slept. Instead, I grabbed my bag, and pulled a book from a zippered pocket inside the main pouch. The notebook was thicker near the edge than the spine, thanks to the extras tucked between its pages.

I sat cross-legged on my own bed and unwrapped the strap keeping the leather-wrapped journal together and holding onto its contents. Setting the spine on the comforter, I let the book fall open, the same way I did each time I looked inside the pages.

Tonight, it landed on a page with a sliver of plaster cast sandwiched in place. An ache spiked inside at the reminder of Davyn’s breaking my arm, and the sight of my mother’s stilted script on the page. This was one of her visions.

The book was filled with prophecies—both the originals and Mom’s—about me. There were pages dedicated to each one, including notes about theories, discoveries, and possible alternate translations.

Mom’s handwritten notes were everywhere, and sometimes seeing it hit me hard. The pain at thinking about her hadn’t been as fresh as in the last few days in a while, and I didn’t care for it.

I forced myself to read the words, rather than focusing on my emotional reaction, and frowned at a poem I’d forgotten about.

When your life is laid bare

And you feel time has stalled

The road to nowhere

Will grab you by the balls.

The last line made me smirk. Mom wasn’t nearly as poetic as the original prophets, and a lot of the time I was grateful for that. It would’ve been nice if she could’ve been more clear though. Sometimes, she’d glimpsed entire scenes, and other times, it was only the words that came to her.

Over time, she and I had made various assumptions about what this snippet meant. Was it about Davyn? Did she get the wrong spelling ofbearin there? Or was I grasping at straws to make things fit when they shouldn’t?

My gaze flitted between Mom’s vision and the piece of cast. “How much did you see that even you didn’t understand?” I muttered at the empty air.

Not that Mom was going to answer me.

The page wasn’t as helpful as I hoped.

I shook the gloomy memories aside and repeated the process of setting the closed spine on the bed and letting the book fall open. It landed on the same page again. There was nothing here I needed to be reminded of, aside from that prophecy, and figuring that out was an exercise in assumption, at best.

I closed the notebook and let it fall open again and again, and every time, it opened to the same page.What do you want me to see? I’d rather shout the question, but that would wake up Davyn.

Fuck randomness.I manually flipped through the notebook, and when a glimpse of intricate line art caught my eye, I paused. The two page spread was all art, like the line version of a beautiful fantasy painting. Warriors on an urban battlefield of crumbling buildings and slipping out from alleys.

Several of the fighters were winged, and wearing intricate chainmail armor. When my broken arm was healing, Mom had me studying meditation with Shaolin monks. One of them had drawn this for me when I told him I loved Valkyries.

Mom was furious that I let him draw in my prophecy journal, and I’d argued that maybe thiswasa prophecy. It wasn’t as if she saw them all.

I traced my fingers lightly over the image now, not making contact with the lines. Stories about Valkyries were my favorite back then—women warriors who were strong enough to fight, but chose to help instead.

Since then, I’d learned that wasn’t the reality. Valkyries were created by Odin and bound to his will and did what they did because he said so.

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