IV.
After that, there were still many days filled with grim war work and unspeakable horror – yet between them, many evenings full of bliss. After hours of fighting in the frigid wastelands and dimly lit ice caves, slaughtering hellspawn and rescuing prisoners, the girls returned to the keep weary but infused with a new sense of purpose. When the supplies were restocked, wounds tended to and reports made, they entered their quarters – where they hastily shed their furs and armor, and latched onto each other hungrily, as if making up for the long weeks of traveling in each other's company yet not being together in a "proper" way.
Passion has not turned them relaxed and complacent on the battlefield. Instead, it made them even more deadly as a warband, because now they had some unspoken new thing to fight for – each other, and a brighter shared future they were yearning for. Since they were both adepts of ranged combat – though each of her own school – they were cautious before, but now they really took no chances. The hellspawn never knew what hit them, as volleys of the Rogue's arrows and the Amazon's crossbow bolts, both enchanted with powerful cold magic, devastated them without fail.
And the ever faithful, taciturn Valkyrie was always there to cover them in the rare cases when the going got rough (she and the occasional Horror spawned by a spell in Fiona's bow, but after the first shock of seeing an undead ally spring up nobody paid much heed to the skeletons anyway). Since the spiritual emissary was always keeping silence and doing her grisly job, the pair of mortals never really noticed the change in their heavenly protector... if only because they did not even think they could ask.
They say the Valkyries do not dread death – that's why they walk headlong into unbelievable odds to protect their champions. This is generally true – as they cannot really die. What would have been a fatal wound to a human would just exhaust the celestial soldier's mystic energy, desummoning her and sending her back to the heavens – discorporated but simply weakened. It would take a period of respite and regeneration before she would be able to answer another call, so the Amazon in question would just ask the Goddess for a new protector in due time. Usually no one really did mind this arrangement – usually but not this time.
The Valkyrie understood with a sharp certainty that she knew fear now. More specifically, she was afraid of returning to the shapeless mirth of the heavens before unraveling the mystery of her own origins, the interest in it awakened by the fateful change in her champion and the latter's teammate-turned-lover. More than anything the spirit woman was terrified of losing this silver strand that connected her to the past. Would she forget all that she had remembered by then if she were to go back to the side of the Goddess? She could not take a chance like this. But she could not begin failing her champion either.
Damned once if you do, damned twice if you don't.