For a middling amount of time just after her becoming part of the world of magic and wonder, Valkyrie Cain believed in portents. Not necessarily all of them, not necessarily the more commonly known ones (for example, she had nothing against black cats or broken mirrors, other than the tendency of the former to shed and the latter to be a potential source of a possibly rather nasty cut), but she did.
She occasionally voiced thoughts along this vein to Skulduggery, hesitant despite herself. She didn't want to be seen as silly, especially by one such as him, for he had no qualms whatever about teasing her absolutely relentlessly, but it turned out that he didn't, in this particular area. He would tilt his head at her, and when he spoke, his words were gentle and his voice sounded like it might contain a smile.
She asks him about that, years later, when she is grown and weary and hurt and doesn't really think she believes in anything anymore, and certainly not portents. Once again he tilts his skull and pauses, collecting his thoughts to him like the threads of a story, and when he speaks his tone rings with a smile.
He tells her about his wife, his child, his life of domesticity and calm. He tells her about Tarot readings at the crack of dawn, cantrips before dreaming, secrets stolen by the storms. He tells her about fairy rings in the garden, ghosts in spaces that had never known mirrors, and he tells her that there is no belief that is not in some way true.
She grins, has to, and that is how the conversation ends for then.
There was a time, once, locked in the vault of her memories she swears she will never forget, when the portents were real as anything she's known, and on another evening, she tells him about it.
"I was thirteen," she starts, uncertain as she draws her recollections close. "Fourteen, maybe. Really young, in any case. You were still in this world. It was a windy day—I think it was a Saturday, maybe a Sunday—and we were on our way to the Sanctuary. They still liked us then, I suppose. We didn't have anything too important on our minds.
"She popped out at us from the shadows, though she didn't move. She was a skeleton laid into brickwork, sunk into it, almost. You told me that that's what Reflections look like when they're left to rot. That made sense. She looked almost two-dimensional, like a silk-screen. We were going to move on. We would have moved on.
"But the wind started to sing.
"We'd both heard it a hundred times before, a thousand since, but on that day, it made sense. It sounded like words. And the skeleton against the wall shone like a rainbow caught in an oilspill, and something said that we needed to run.
"So we did. I started first, and when I glanced back, you were still staring at her. I wondered what you saw there. I still do, I guess, but it's not that important. You started running too, and I laughed when you caught up. I felt like we'd escaped something that was horrible as it was beautiful.
"When you were with the Faceless Ones, I thought about that a lot. I think it was an omen after all. Maybe. Do you remember it, though?" She smiles at him.
"Yes," he says, after a pause. "Yes, I do."
"Do you think it was a portent?"
"I saw my wife in that wall," he answers her, head angled back to face the ceiling. "I think it was."
Valkyrie Cain has been in the world of magic and wonder for the better part of her life. She loves it like nothing else, and she's gotten used to it, in an odd sort of way.
She still believes in portents.
A/N: This is a reworking of one of my oldest oneshots. It bears little resemblance to the original, though I enjoyed writing it just as much.
~Mademise Morte, June 24, 2012.