Raven's Blood: Chapter 15
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Raven Demarco grew up living a sheltered life. When she starts University to get away from that she is caught up in the world of the paranormal. Secret organizations, magic, creatures from myth and legend, and worst of all, her own legacy and the Demons who want her blood.
Author's Note: Back on schedule, and here's the new chapter of Raven's Blood. Thanks to my readers and to BCTS for giving their support of Transgendered authors and fiction. ~Amethyst.
Chapter 15: Pieces of Me
While I did enjoy my date with Alice immensely, I hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep when my phone rang at six o’clock in the morning. Unsurprisingly, it was my aunt calling, and she was once again sickeningly cheerful for so damn early in the morning. “Good morning, Raven, this is your wake-up call.”
“Nnng…” I responded sleepily as my not-quite-functioning brain tried to remember whether we had made any plans for this morning. Unfortunately, though, I was coming up empty. Fucking morning people. “Is there something pressing that has you calling me this early in the morning, Aunt Lin, or were you just already awake and decided to spread the misery around a bit?”
“You’re training to be a warrior now, Kiddo,” she retorted chipperly, like some sort of morning masochist, “and I told you that you’d have to start keeping a warrior’s hours. So please get showered, dressed, and fly over here for breakfast within the hour. We’ll be leaving tomorrow, and there is something very important we need to work on today.”
I held back a groan as I mentally reminded myself that I had asked for this, that this was what I wanted. “What could we need to work on? I thought you made the last of the arrangements for our trip last night, and we were just waiting on having everything ready to go?”
“That’s right,” she agreed, “and while I won’t be starting your training officially until we are on an island well away from prying eyes, there is something that you can be doing to prepare yourself before we get to the island. So, get a move on so we can get started on that.”
“Okay, I’ll head over there as soon as I’ve taken a shower and am awake enough not to crash into anything on the flight over,” I grumbled in reply. Then I clumsily disconnected the call and stumbled into my bathroom to take a shower.
One cold shower later, I was somewhat awake and functional as I got dressed in the most comfortable clothes I could find. I wasn’t exactly sure what my aunt was planning to have me do, so I decided that it was probably best to go with some of the comfortable exercise clothes we had gotten for me yesterday, just in case her idea of ‘preparing myself’ was endurance training, strength training, or some other shit like that. Most of my clothes, including what we had bought yesterday, were already stored in my duffel bag of holding in preparation for our trip, so I just stuffed my purse in there as well and would just bring that with me in case I needed to change clothes afterward.
Alice had woken up while I was in the shower, so before leaving, I stopped in to give her a quick kiss goodbye. Well, I also had to let someone know where I was going, give her the keys to my car so she and Erin could get to their training sessions at the Werehouse today, and ask her to tell Lydia and Erin that my aunt had invited them all over to the hotel for a get-to-know-you dinner tonight, but the kissing ended up taking up most of that time. With all of that done, I put on my new combat boots and leather jacket, and then my precious ring of invisibility, and left the house to take to the sky.
As I flew toward the Nordic Hotel, I found myself carefully watching the rooftops I was passing over and even the birds and the few other flying Paranormals that were sharing the sky with me. Well, the best that I could do so in the dark, anyway. Thankfully, the other Paranormals I saw were few and far between and seemed to be paying me very little attention or none at all as they went about their own early morning business.
Even though I knew that normies wouldn’t be able to see me, other Paranormals probably could, and until this bounty on me was taken care of, I needed to be cautious. My black wings were very distinctive, after all, and people after that money would probably be watching the skies for me. Just the fact that I wasn’t the only Paranormal in the sky should have clued me in before now that danger could probably come at me from anywhere, and I had been very lucky so far.
I actually felt kind of stupid that I hadn’t seriously considered that angle before, and had been flying around so openly without keeping an eye out for danger. Keeping my head on a swivel when I was out flying like this was probably the least that I should be doing. This was Vancouver for fuck’s sake, rain here was a near constant, especially during the winter, so I should probably be getting above those clouds while the sun was out to conceal where I was flying as much as possible.
Thankfully, my aunt’s tendency to call me insanely early in the morning meant that the sun had yet to rise, and the darkness would probably do a lot to keep other Paranormals from seeing me unless they had some sort of super night vision going on. Given some of the other Paranormal shit I had seen and heard of since my seal was broken, I wasn’t about to bet on that not being a thing. So, hoping that I wasn’t being spotted by some sort of nocturnal Paranormal gun for hire, I hurried toward the hotel and made a mental note to use the clouds for cover on the way home, if it was possible.
I found Aunt Lin awaiting my arrival on the terrace of her penthouse suite, with another big breakfast set out for us on the patio table. Thankfully, the fairy lights on the terrace once again served as my guide in the darkness before sunrise. “Good morning, Raven,” she greeted cheerfully. “Let’s eat, and I’ll tell you what you’re going to be working on today.”
What my aunt wanted me to work on today turned out to be meditation. Here I was, expecting some sort of extreme Valkyrie workout session, and she straight-up told me that she wanted me to go all lotus position and self-introspection. Okay, so maybe she didn’t say that exactly, but that was my takeaway from our conversation over breakfast.
Apparently, there is a process to training Valkyries, or at least, my mother had a very specific process when training my aunt. A process that she planned to use in turn to teach me. The whole learning process went something like this: Find your teacher, find your halo, forge that halo into a andivapn, combat training, and finally, undergo a warrior’s trial to officially become a Valkyrie warrior.
I’d already finished the first step, finding my teacher, of course. It had only taken me months, but given that I had to search through a whole modern city with only one photo and her name as clues, I thought that I did pretty well for myself. Hopefully, the remaining steps leading up to actual combat training won’t take quite as long since I would rather take care of my Demon problem within my lifetime.
Shit, that takes on a whole new meaning, now that I consider how old my aunt is and how old my mom was when she died. Someday, a normal person’s lifetime might just be a blink of an eye to me, but that time hasn’t come yet, and likely would not anytime soon. Months of training I could probably handle, maybe even a few years if I absolutely had to, but I did not want to have to keep dodging my grandfather’s lackeys for decades or, even worse, centuries.
Anyway, I now find myself at step two in the process, finding my halo. Now, while I was thinking at first that she meant learning to summon my halo, Aunt Lin quickly corrected that glaring oversight. No, I needed to actually find it, and from what my aunt told me, that could only be done by introspective meditation and coming to terms with who and what I really am inside at the very core of my being. I needed to do some literal soul searching.
It sounded like this was going to take some time, so my aunt was probably right to get me started on it before we left for our trip. The faster I managed it, the less time we would be wasting on the island waiting for me to get up to speed. Also, since we would be doing this in the well-warded privacy of her penthouse, and meditation wasn’t exactly some secret technique exclusive to the Valkyrie race, there was no worry about someone accidentally seeing some secret Valkyrie rite that they really shouldn’t.
According to my aunt, there were actually three ways to find the part of my soul that would become my halo and which I would forge into my andivapn. The first of those was the method that the Angels had used in ancient times, and probably still do to this day, to wait for or create a near-death experience to summon that part of yourself. I couldn’t believe those assholes actually put their children through that kind of shit, putting them in some sort of situation that would likely kill them and then hoping that they would bounce back from the brink of death with some great new power and insight into themselves like some sort of anime protagonist.
It sounded like a very ‘Angel’ thing to do, since everything my aunt had told me about those assholes indicated that they had a bad case of protagonist syndrome. Not all of them survived the process, though, since it was stupid. Maybe that was why those who did survive became so damn conceited and self-righteous.
The other two methods both involved going into an altered state of mind and doing some soul searching. The first, of course, was through actual meditation, but it would probably end up taking months or years of practice for me to get to that point, and we just didn’t have that kind of time. The other was to use some traditional Valkyrie concoction of herbs and stuff to help me get into the proper state of mind faster, like one would with magic mushrooms or LSD. For all I knew, those might be some of the ingredients. I guess you could call that method the middle ground, and it was how Valkyries usually went about this.
So, thankfully, we didn’t need to rely on my dubious ability to tune everything out and arrive at some sort of personal nirvana on my own merits or try to kill me. After breakfast, Aunt Lin gave me some sort of foul-tasting tea she had brewed for the occasion and took me to her sunroom to do the meditation thing while the tea started to kick in. So, now here I am, trying to empty my mind of anything not important and focus on the internal journey I was trying to take.
“Just empty your mind,” I told myself sternly. “Focus on the soul journey, Raven. This lotus position really isn’t as uncomfortable as I’ve heard. Maybe it’s because I’m used to strange and potentially uncomfortable positions from doing yoga. Why is that tea taking so long to do its thing anyway? Is it because I’m Demon-blooded? No. Stop that, dammit, focus on the journey, Raven, you need to…”
I felt like I was floating. For a moment, I just enjoyed the sensation, free from the constraints of gravity, and when I finally opened my eyes, I found myself floating in an endless sky, clouds drifting along above me, and the ground so far below that I could scarcely see it. Why was I… oh, right, the soul journey. Did that mean that this endless sky represented my soul? Because, honestly, that was kind of cool and also comforting in a way.
According to my aunt, I needed to find the piece of me that I connected the most to, the part of me that most represented… me, or who I wanted to be. So, if I were a part of myself, where would I hide up here? The answer was easy enough to find, of course, I only needed to look as far as the clouds hovering above me.
Beating my wings, I flew upward. There was no effort to it at all, just the joy of unrestrained flight that a part of me wanted to enjoy forever. I had to remind myself that I was here for a reason and that my time here was probably limited.
Breaking into the banks of clouds, I was immersed in the cool and wet mist until I broke through the top layer a moment later, unintentionally disturbing a small bundle of black feathers. It was a raven. Was my subconscious mind really that uncreative? The bird cawed and shrieked, flapping its wings at me frantically in startled surprise.
“Sorry!” I quickly apologized, “I wasn’t expecting anyone to be there.”
As the raven settled, it watched me warily for a moment before its eyes widened in surprise. “You are not one of the other soul shards. Could it be? Are you the One?”
“The One?” I asked warily, something about the bird’s inflection throwing me off. That was my voice, but there was something about it that…
It didn’t give me time to finish that line of thought. “You must be. And you found me so quickly, too,” it praised. “I do not have much to offer you, mother of us all, but maybe…” It trailed off as if uncertain.
“Maybe what?” I watched it carefully as the question left my lips, something about this bird, its presence, was setting me on edge.
“Maybe you could benefit from my wisdom. I might know of a way to purge your grandfather’s legacy, the Demon part of you, so you could be a true Valkyrie, like your mother. Yes, I’m sure that if you acknowledge me, we could do great things togeth…”
“Do not listen to Trickster,” another version of my voice interrupted. “She is the part of you that delights in mischief, trickery, and lies. She even lies to herself.”
Quite literally, in the current situation, or so it seemed to me. She was a part of me, and she was lying to my face, trying to trick me into choosing her by leveraging the hate I had for my grandfather and the desire to be like my mother. She was wrong about one thing, though. To me, the part of me that was Demon-blooded didn’t represent my grandfather; it represented my father.
I turned to face the newcomer and was presented with someone who looked like me… if I were a blonde, my wings were white, and I had the physique of a female bodybuilder. It was actually a little intimidating, and she didn’t even have my new piercings or tattoo to help with that. “And who might you be?” I wondered aloud.
“I am Strength,” she offered in a haughty tone. “You are strong, you love being strong and able to defend yourself, and if you choose me, you could be stronger still. Nothing would be able to stand against you.”
She wasn’t wrong. Since I had my seal broken, I took a certain amount of pride in being strong and being able to defend myself. That was what I heard in her voice, too: pride. She wasn’t just my strength; she was also the pride that I held for it. I had been so proud that night at the bar after I took down that Ogre… until Lydia and the others had brought me back down to earth.
I didn’t believe that this was another case of me lying to myself; it was more like she couldn’t see the bigger picture. Yes, being strong was a great thing, but focusing too much on it, being too proud of it, could narrow my vision and blind me to other options. When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail.
So, while I was tempted, deep down, I knew that this wasn’t really what I was looking for. It did not truly resonate with me. There were other types of strength to be found if I could just keep an open mind.
So, I decided to explore those options, looking for some quality that truly felt right to me. The clouds up here were filled with other Valkyries, other blonde and white winged versions of myself lazing about on fluffy white clouds, and it would seem that each and every one of them had a sales pitch for me.
Magic, or rather my desire to learn it, was almost as tempting as Strength. I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit to having some desire to have powerful spells in my arsenal. My aunt said I didn’t have much potential, but she would teach me what she could once we were finished with my combat training. Again, though, she didn’t quite seem right to me, not the person that I wanted to be. She just didn’t resonate with me.
In fact, I found precious little among the shards of my soul that interested me. Determination and Courage were both like Strength; they seemed close to what I wanted, but neither rang true. Then there were those who would never make the cut, such as Denial, the only human version of myself that I had seen up here so far. She just wanted to pretend all this Paranormal shit didn’t exist and try to live a normal life.
These soul shards were supposedly the strongest aspects of my self, the qualities that made me who I was, and yet none of them felt right so far. Well, I guess that there were still plenty to talk to, maybe I just needed a sign. That was when I spotted something that I had somehow missed earlier.
How in the world did I miss the single dark cloud hovering above this sea of white, fluffy goodness? Where the other clouds were the purest white, this one was the pitchest black, save for the occasional beam of bright, almost blinding light emerging from within. “What is that?” I murmured as I gaped at the phenomenon in wonder and trepidation.
“That’s the dark cloud,” Truth offered, as if that much wasn’t obvious. Truth was interesting, but she was also forthright about how little she would probably be able to help me in my quest to get stronger and defeat my Grandfather’s lackeys. “That is where Demon lives. Purity keeps her contained in the heart of the cloud, but she cannot leave, and that light spilling out is hers.”
“What? She’s trapped there, and nobody has tried to save her?” I asked, completely aghast.
“Not even Courage, Determination, or Strength will venture there,” Truth replied with a shake of her head. “The dark cloud is difficult to breach, and Demon is… well, she’s a Demon. Nobody knows why or how she keeps Purity in there with her, but if we get too close, she would probably kill us as soon as look at us. Can you not hear the thunder that marks her rage?”
I did hear a rumbling, but I could also feel the raw power there, and it was incredible, dwarfing any of the other soul fragments I had met so far. How powerful was this Demon? And how powerful did Purity need to be to keep her contained like that? Without even consciously thinking about it, I began to fly toward the dark cloud. Even if neither of them was the one, I couldn’t just sit back and do nothing while a part of me was held captive.
The inside of the dark cloud was so utterly black that I could not see even a few centimeters. It was cold, inescapably dreary, and seemed to grasp at me, suffocating in its thickness and the sheer sense of empty hopelessness that it summoned within me. It was like the cloud itself was fighting me, like something at the core of my being resisted my attempts to see inside. Was the Demon part of me truly so bad that I didn’t want myself to even see it?
It was true that I was scared of my Demon half to some degree. As much as I tried to tell myself that I was okay with being Demon-blooded, it terrified me as well. What if, at the heart of me, I was as bad as those Demons who were after me? What if I were as bad as my grandfather? What if I tried to use whatever demonic power might be sleeping within me and lost control?
No, I wouldn’t! Having Demon blood didn’t change who I was, and I could still be a force for good. My father proved that. I couldn’t just say that I accepted that part of myself; I needed to do it. Those words would always ring empty unless I found a way to come to terms with it.
I thought that I could hear crying. The sound only grew louder as I had to fight for every wingbeat in the black haze that engulfed me. I could see why none of the other shards had tried venturing to the center of this cloud before. I was beginning to lose hope of ever breaking through, and honestly, I wasn’t sure if that was truly what I felt or if the atmosphere inside was having that effect on me. No, I couldn’t give up, I needed to see what was inside.
Suddenly, I was through, and I was nearly blinded by the light and had to shield my eyes. When they finally adjusted to the brightness, I could see a little girl. She was the source of the light, and she looked like me when I was six or seven, or at least her face did, and she had my bright blue eyes too. I didn’t exactly have those cute little white cherub wings when I was a kid, though, and she didn’t have my dark hair either. Instead, blinding flames engulfed the top of her head, and not normal flames either. Instead of a natural yellow and orange, these flames were mostly white and silver with flickers of pale blue.
She was wearing a simple white robe and a gold cuff on her right hand that bore a golden chain leading inside of a truly massive cage. The cage was as big as a house, and so dark inside that I couldn’t see what might be inside, save for a large pair of glowing blue eyes with slit pupils. It was the girl who was crying.
Wary of whatever might be inside that cage, I approached the little girl instead. I tried giving her a smile as I said, “Hi, I’m Raven. Are you Purity?”
The girl looked up at me, part hopeful, part confused, and part something that I couldn’t quite identify as she rubbed at her teary blue eyes. “I… don’t remember. A-are you here to free us? We’ve been trapped here for so long, and we’ve been so scared.”
“We?” For a moment, I thought that I had misheard her until she looked longingly at the cage. That only brought up the question, what was I going to try to do here? Did I want to try to break the chain holding her? How long had she been trapped in this place? If her form was a reflection of me, then maybe she was here for far longer than when my seal was broken.
Wait. Lydia had told me that we were attacked by a Demon when I was seven. She said that I was terrified by the experience, and Alice’s mom had to make me forget. What if this was that scared version of me, afraid and hidden away from the Paranormal, the part of me that I didn’t want to accept back then? Was that why I had wanted to have a normal life so badly?
If true, that said a lot about how messed up I was. Was I still clinging to the possibility of a normal life once this was all over, because I still didn’t want to accept this on some level? Was that why she was still trapped here with whatever was in that cage? And if I didn’t want to acknowledge Purity, then what the hell was in that cage? What was Demon?
Fuck that. I was tired of being scared of who and what I was. I needed to face this shit. So, instead of trying to break the chain, I turned to the cage. It was as big as a house, the bars were thick, and there were multiple chains and padlocks on the door, trapping whatever terrifying part of me was inside. I shoved down the fear that those large demonic eyes summoned within me and truly looked at them. They looked as scared as Purity did.
The look in those eyes gave me the strength to do what I needed to do. I reached out and, though it resisted me at first, I tore the door of the cage from its fucking hinges. As soon as I did, the cage vanished, and I was faced with a surprise. The golden cuff and chain that Purity wore on her right wrist was attached to a matching cuff on the left wrist of a girl the same age who could have been her twin, save that she had my black hair, wings, and claws. She even had the cute little fangs showing as she stared at me in uncomprehending shock.
The shock only lasted a moment before Demon practically tackled Purity in a hug, and the pair wept in one another’s arms. I felt simultaneously awkward and sympathetic, and maybe a little guilty too. Because I couldn't face reality, these two parts of me had been trapped here, suffering loneliness and fear since I was seven years old. “Are you okay?” I asked, barely able to make myself look at the pair of children. “I’m Raven, and I guess I’m here to set you free.”
Both girls looked up at me as one and said, “We… don’t have a name.” It was strange, despite looking different, one dark and one light, they looked so very similar right then. Their expressions were a perfect match, even that slight tilt of their heads. It was eerie, and yet, in a way, it made sense too.
“Are you two people or one?” I ventured, not even sure if I was asking the right question here.
“Yes,” they answered, before beginning to giggle in unison at the expression on my face. “We are both one and yet separate.”
Truth had called them Demon and Purity, but none of those outside had ever gotten close enough to get to know them, so maybe that’s just what they believed they were. It was like they were everything that made me what I was, pure Demon and pure Valkyrie, two sides of the same coin, and now that Demon was free, I could feel it; this was who I wanted to be. I wanted to embrace both sides of that coin. Wait, a coin. “How about I call you Penny?”
The pair of youthful faces both looked confused as they asked, “What’s a penny?”
“It’s a coin,” I explained as I leaned forward to put my arms around both girls to hold them close. I was half expecting to be burned by Purity’s flames, but their warmth was comforting rather than scalding. Then I whispered between their heads, “It’s one object that has two distinct sides. To some people, they may be worthless, and they often go unnoticed, but sometimes, when you find them, they can bring you good fortune. You… well, you’ve gone unnoticed for a very long time. I think that’s my fault, and I am so sorry about that. You are not worthless, and if I have my say, you will never go unnoticed again. Penny, I acknowledge you.”
Before I went into this meditation, my aunt told me to only acknowledge the fragment of my soul that resonated with me the most because once that acknowledgement was given, that fragment would take on a life all its own. The halo, and the andivapn that I would forge from it were a part of my soul, connected and yet this would make them something... someone different than me as well. Just like Penny, we would be one and yet separate, so it was almost poetic that it was them I chose out of all the fragments of myself that my soul possessed.
I had just enough time to feel them return my embrace, their hot tears on my shoulders, and to hear them say “Thank you” before I felt myself being pulled away. My task was done, and the world outside my soul was calling me back. As I drifted back toward consciousness, I couldn’t help but feel happy that I had made the right choice.
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