Freya's Valkyrie
Germany, 1996
Elisa Maza looked up at the stately brick building that occupied 319 Rosenstrasse, Dresden, Germany—the home of one Valerie von Bismarck. When Elisa had contacted von Bismarck and expressed an interest in a meeting, the mysterious German had insisted on Elisa's visit to her home. She asked Elisa to call her on her cell phone when she arrived, so Elisa dialed the number and let the phone ring.
While she waited for an answer, Elisa tried to recall what she knew about von Bismarck. It wasn't much: just a name, an address, and the fact that she had been the one to sell the Eye of Odin to David Xanatos almost a year ago. It had taken that long for Elisa to trace the sale, considering the distractions she had in her life, like being dragged around the world on an Avalonian skiff. Now, at long last, Elisa was on the verge of getting some answers—such as how much von Bismarck had known about the Eye.
***
Every occultist is, at heart, a detective—probing the great mysteries of the universe for clues to the Truth that lies at the heart of things. When Elisa Maza had contacted me, I had reached into the leather pouch at my side and cast my runes. I had some investigating of my own to do, and at the end of it, even I was surprised by what I discovered.
Miss Maza knew of the existence of gargoyles. She believed in magick because she had witnessed it; she believed in the Illuminati because she had seen their subtle hand at work. She was, if not an ally, at least not an enemy, and she was equipped to handle the truth.
I opened the windows in my office—no harm in being prepared for a swift exit. There was a breeze tonight. Papers lifted in a whirlwind off my desk; ripples passed through the giant tapestry on the wall, sending waves across the woven Prussian eagle with night-black feathers and two heads. Then I settled myself in my desk chair and dimmed the lights to almost nothing.
Maza was younger than I had expected, but she walked with the movements of a warrior. She squinted into the room, trying and failing to make her eyes pierce the blackness, while mine saw through many kinds of shadow with ease.
***
Elisa leaned against the door frame, hesitating to enter a dark room with a stranger. She could hear the sound of breathing, and her ears caught the slight creak of a desk chair. The detective called, "Ms. Val Von Bismarck?"
A response came from the depths of the office, "Yes?"
"It's awfully dark in here."
"I know—but you're not here to discuss my living arrangements, are you? I'm quite prepared to skip the pleasantries and tell you what you've come to hear."
"Would it kill you to turn on a light?"
"And if I said it would?"
Vampire, was Elisa's instant thought. "I…"
"In fact, it wouldn't—to be honest, Ms. Maza, I do this for your comfort moreso than mine."
"Hey. Don't worry about me. I've seen some strange things in my time."
"You have no idea," the voice replied. "In the end, you need to show me you're willing to trust me if you want to hear this story. You can make yourself comfortable where you are, or you can leave."
Leave, that would be the proper way to handle this, but by now, Elisa's curiosity had the best of her.
***
He called himself David Xanatos, and over the phone he told me that he wanted to purchase the Eye of Odin.
Xanatos offered me a truly ridiculous amount of money, and I told him I'd consider it. He made a higher offer. I had to explain to him that the issue wasn't money, it was time. He didn't seem to like that.
So I asked him if he wanted the damned thing or not. If he wanted it, he could wait.
Apparently he wanted it, because he suddenly became a lot more cooperative.
Once I'd hung up the phone, I ran my hands over the necklace I wore, cleared a space on my desk, and cast my runestones.
Birca—Beginnings. Gebo—Gift. Dagaz—Transformation. Asa—Wisdom. Mannaz—Destiny.
That was a clear message that I had found the man destined to become the Eye of Odin's next owner. I supposed I should thank the Fates that the jewel was about to fall into the hands of someone who at least had the ability to give me a lot of money for it.
Still, I remembered what had happened to the last man to wear the Eye and I wondered if perhaps Mr. Xanatos wasn't about to get ahold of a bit more than he could handle.
***
"So you knew that the Eye has certain…unusual features," Elisa summarized.
A laugh in the darkness. "You could say so."
"And you sold it anyway."
"It was fated to be so. I am the sword of fate, Ms. Maza. Obstructing destiny is both painful and the complete antithesis of my purpose."
Elisa raised an eyebrow.
"Have patience, and I shall explain."
***
My involvement with the Eye began with the Swords of Odin. Founded in 1893, they were a group of German occultists who studied Nordic magick and legend. Mostly they combed through tomes of mystic lore in search of ancient rites and objects of power, picking up additional knowledge along the way. It was in the margin of one of these books that someone, at some point in history, had noted that the last sighting of the Eye of Odin was in a long-abandoned ceremonial lodge in Norway. They ran a few missions to find it, and failed. In their first two decades of existence, the Swords amassed a respectable library and successfully cast a handful of simple spells, but nothing more. Then the Great War broke out, and the Swords had their first real success.
They found the eggs in 1914, in France…or maybe it was Belgium. Somewhere along the march to the Rhine in the First World War, a German infantry unit came upon the nest. Rumour has it one of the officers was a member of the Swords. I never met him; he never came back from France. Thanks to his occult studies, he knew what it was they'd found. He arranged for the eggs to be sent home to the Swords in the Fatherland. They hatched within the year.
1914 was also the year I joined the Swords of Odin. Like the eggs, it was not my choice to do so. They found me one night in Dresden, a young gargoyle of twenty years.
***
Elisa interrupted me. "You're a gargoyle?" Incredulous.
"Why shouldn't I be?" I answered, and continued.
***
This is Mannaz—destiny. Of all the nights for me to break the rules and fly into the city alone, it was that night. Of all the windows in town to peer through, I chose theirs—drawn like moth to flame by the rhythmic chanting that was too low for human ears to hear, but not for mine. Of all the chants to intone, they picked one my gargoyle mentor had taught me, arousing my curiosity and sealing my fate. They saw me, and they caught me, and they brought me to their hidden room in the basement of that house in Dresden.
My people were—are—the Prussian Clan. We had a lair in the forests on the outskirts of Dresden and another in the loft of the city's great cathedral. Many of the clan had animal features: bulls' muzzles, stags' antlers, birds' feathers, lizards' scales. We were scholars and singers and magick-makers and prophets. We lived for knowledge and art.
In order to achieve those goals, we had to protect ourselves. Humans feared us, so we hid ourselves from their sight, and historically we'd scuffled with the French clans, but in my days they kept to their territory and we kept to ours, and so we avoided conflict. Primarily we were at war with the Iron Clan of Bavaria. History told us we had once been one great clan, until 1776 when Weishaupt's Illuminati corrupted the clan second-in-command and caused the Schism. The Iron Clan would kill us as traitors and degenerates if they could, and so from birth, we were taught the arts of war and the Three Great Virtues.
The first Great Virtue is the protection of the Prussian Clan.
The second Great Virtue is defence of the Fatherland.
The third Great Virtue is a warrior's honour.
Everything else comes after.
As a child of twenty years, I told the Swords of Odin that I was the last of my kind—that my progenitors had been killed and that I was merely seeking food and shelter. Whatever they did with me, my clan at least would be safe.
And much to my surprise, the Swords treated me well—if a little gingerly at first. I suppose a gargoyle does strike an odd appearance to human eyes. Perhaps my youth worked in my favour, for I was not as large or deadly as I would become in later years. But the Swords believed me to be a messenger from Valhalla—a Valkyrie of sorts—and they had read passages about gargoyles in their texts. They initiated me as one of their own and raised me in a chalet outside Heidelburg. A few months later, they found the eggs and soon I was elder sibling to an entire clan of gargoyles—thirty-four eggs' worth.
I taught Odin's Clan to fly and fight, to use their tails for balance and to find a safe perch before dawn. I revealed details on gargoyles to the Swords, but falsified the information of my own early years. The Swords taught me their spells, their history and mythology, and I added their knowledge to my own. In my private time I meditated on the things I had learned from my gargoyle teacher, so that I might not forget her training, and I chanted the prophecy spoken at my birth:
"…she is born with the sign, marked by the Wyrd…this one will change the course of history, and we gift her with this talisman that she might read the runes…" and in some shadowed corner of my mind I remember my mentor laying the necklace on me.
***
In the late 1920s things began changing. Germany's prosperity began to crumble as the world economy slid into depression. The Swords—my adopted family—took on some new members. I did not like these men. They were angry and filled with hate, and they sought the magicks of the Germanic tribes not for a love of their own heritage, but out of a belief that Nordic lore was somehow superior to the magicks of other nations. They wanted power, not knowledge, and they planned to use the power they found to subjugate the rest of the world. Democracy collapsed, fascism rose, and the Swords of Odin were brought in as a secret arm of the new German government.
Some of us older Swords protested the slow takeover from within, but these new members had political allies and some of them also had money, which was in short supply in 1930s Germany. The older members either quit or acquiesced. The rituals changed in tone, and I…by then forty years of age…was tasked as a soldier and assassin for the new Swords of Odin.
What could I do? If I fled back to the Prussian Clan, the Swords would pursue me and I might bring my whole clan to ruin. Even if I succeeded in my escape, who would raise Odin's Clan? Who would instill them the values that belong to gargoyles, not humans? On the ground the Swords told the young clan to Obey and Sacrifice, but on the winds of night I taught them that their first loyalty was to one another, their second loyalty to their Fatherland, their third loyalty to their own honour. The Swords would have to settle for what remained.
By the time the Second World War broke out, the other gargoyles of Odin's Clan were 24 years old. Yes, they were youths by human standards, but these were youths who could best an adult human in hand-to-hand combat, outmaneuver a fighter jet in the skies and leave claw marks in solid stone. They had been raised their entire life by the Swords of Odin and they were consummate war machines—disciplined, deadly, and loyal unto death.
And now that the Swords had their own gargoyle army to do their dirty deeds, I was tasked to another mission. I was sent to Norway in 1942 in search of the Eye of Odin, to succeed where humans had failed.
***
"God," Elisa said.
"Knowledge doesn't come easily," I informed her, "you should know that. If you don't want to hear it, leave."
She stayed and I continued.
***
February 13, 1945. Over two years of searching Norway with a map and a stack of books and all I had to show for my efforts were a list of places where the Eye of Odin was not. Truth be told, I'd long given up hope of ever finding the damned thing; nevertheless, I planned to stay in Norway as long as the Swords permitted. Think what you will of my values—you who are not a Prussian gargoyle—but I never did care for the feeling of human blood on my talons.
Having exhausted all the possible leads in the Swords' library, I did something I had not yet done during my quest. I journeyed into the wilderness and found an empty cave, where I sat down on the floor and meditated on the necklace I wear and then cast the runes the way I had been taught by my mentor in decades past, before I had ever learned of the Swords of Odin.
In my trance I read the message laid out before me. Thuriasz—Opposition. Othala—Roots. Raido—Travel. Thuriasz, the threatening rune, lay directly on top of Othala—my home, and Raido right next to it.
Home. The fates were summoning me home to Dresden. This was a call from the gods of my clan, a call higher than the orders of the Swords. I would leave Norway the following night, asking no one's permission and giving no notice of my intentions. That day was spent there in the cave, a stone statue wearing a necklace and leaning over a handful of runestones, lost in dreams of endless fire.
***
I reached Dresden, or what remained of it, two weeks later. On the thirteenth of February, 1945, the Allied air force came over with incendiary bombs and firebombed Dresden to the ground. The city was not a military target—it was clogged with refugees fleeing the Russian advance. Estimates suggest that almost half a million people lost their lives. That is a guess. There was no way to count the fallen when only ashes remained.
When I first saw the holocaust that had ravaged my city, I spread my wings with a terrified cry and flew to the Prussian Clan's forest lair. I had not been home since the Swords had found me, and while part of me was overjoyed at the opportunity to rejoin my clan at last, another part of me feared what I might discover. My worst fear was realized when I found nothing.
The clanstead was in a comfortable state of repair; here was Dagmar's room, with pens littering her writing desk and several half-finished manuscripts, while over there was Siegmund's armoury, spotlessly tidy. There were new portraits on the walls, some of familiar faces aged by time, others of gargoyles younger than myself whom I had never met.
What was missing, however, were the gargoyles themselves, and with a frantic gnawing at my heart, I winged my way to the cathedral in Dresden.
The cathedral was a ruin, burned to the ground, with only a half-wall still standing. I remembered, however, that gargoyles did not only frequent its upper levels. The Prussian Clan kept its greatest treasures in the catacombs beneath the church.
It took long hours of digging through rubble, but at last I managed to clear the trap door leading down into the vaults and tug the heavy stone aside. I am certain that humans saw me at work and yet did not see me; the debris all around me made one single figure, even a gargoyle figure, fade into the background. I slipped into the silent darkness, hauled the vault door closed, and moved forward through the narrow catacombs.
Something scuffled ahead of me. I drew my sidearm, better safe than sorry…
…you are surprised that a gargoyle should carry a gun? Why not? We are not some relic of the Dark Ages, not some beasts just crept in from the caves. We are a people, a non-human people in a human's world. In order to keep our place in this world, we must adapt to it. We change with the times. We seek knowledge of both countless antiquity and cutting-edge modernity. Out of loyalty to our clan and to ourselves, we survive…
For years I wondered if perhaps some of the Prussian clan had survived. They were awake when the bombs began to fall; surely at least some of them could have escaped the fighters and the bombers and the flames. After all this time, I have come to believe that they fought—or perhaps tried to assist the humans—and perished. In fifty years I have never seen them. For fifty years I have haunted the spot where the cathedral stood, the place my clan called home. After the war I built my own home on the spot and this is where we are today. And all I have left of the Prussian clan is a chalet filled with the souvenirs of fifty-odd lives and this patch of ground in Dresden—and the catacombs that lie beneath our feet.
***
The chamber in the catacombs was as empty as the chalet, though the dust was thicker, suggesting that no one had passed this way since the last clutch of eggs had hatched. There were no eggs in the rookery—more's the pity, for they would have survived while Dresden burned above. What remained of the Prussian Clan was a rack of wands and swords, a table of ceremonial artifacts, a shelf of books and a single item wrapped in a black cloth. I opened it up and saw the crystal of Odin's Eye winking back at me.
My clan was dead and their artifacts were now mine—would have been mine anyway when I became an adult gargoyle, had the Swords not taken me away, for I was the destined mistress of magicks, born with the sign and gifted with the talisman. I should have been in these catacombs long ago, fulfilling my role as spiritual leader of my clan. Instead I'd spent my life killing some humans in the name of others and dabbling with dark magicks, complicit with one of history's greatest atrocities.
I do not hold the Allies innocent. I do not see how firebombing a city full of refugees and civilians helped their war effort. But I also knew that were it not for the Nazis and their damned lust for power, the bombers' wrath would never have fallen upon the Prussian Clan. These were the thoughts that filled my mind as I squatted in that subterranean chamber, holding the Eye of Odin by its chain and realizing that I was not only the Prussian Clan's child of destiny—I was, perhaps, its last child of all.
I set down the Eye, caressed my necklace, reached into the pouch at my side, and threw the runes.
Ur—Strength. Jera—Harvest. Tiwaz—Justice. Gebo—Gift.
Wyrd. The blank runestone. The unknown, or unspoken, or unspeakable. It skittered across the floor and landed on the Eye of Odin.
Asa—Wisdom. The last rune in my handful. It, too, skipped away from the others and bumped up against a large, dusty book.
I opened it.
To the Lady Bismarck—The words were written in my mentor's hand, and they were written to me—he had addressed me by my true name, the name given me when I hatched. A name I had all but forgotten, since the Swords called me simply "the Valkyrie." My teacher was gone, but his wisdom remained.
I flipped through the tome.
The Eye Of Odin—a dangerous gift. Bestows wisdom on the wearer and those around her by physically revealing the wearer's innermost self. While the jewel brings great power, it is also the embodiment of the phrase "absolute power corrupts absolutely." Beware—the knowledge gained may not be worth the price.
It was then that I knew what I must do.
***
Odin's Eye—reflects what you truly are inside.
It takes your strengths, your weaknesses, and exaggerates them for all the world to see.
And you must suffer for this wisdom, as Odin suffered, hanging upside down on the World Tree for nine days to unlock the secrets of the runes.
There was a man I had to meet. A gift I had to deliver. Another step in my destiny to fulfill—why do you frown? I was chosen by birth as the sword of destiny, and gifted with the talisman that could unlock the runes and guide my hand.
This man I sought—this was not a warrior. This was a madman. His lust for power and his greed and his hatred had grown and infected a nation. Now, in the last days of the Reich, he had truly fallen apart. He ordered his people to burn down their towns and destroy their food supplies to spite the enemy—never mind that the German people themselves would starve to death. He gave guns to children and old men and sent them out against the Russians. His mad teachings had infected the Swords of Odin and driven them to attempt to use magick as a weapon rather than as a path towards spiritual enlightenment. Caught up in the contagion, the Swords sent a generation of gargoyles to fight in a human war.
I leave moralizing to you humans. I am a warrior and a priestess, not a philosopher. I concern myself with my own business, and at the end, the Reich committed a crime against its own people—offering them up as a sacrifice for their leaders' sins.
Those were my people. This was my land. Odin's Clan, the young gargoyles the Swords attempted to control, were the only clan I had left, and I was honour-bound to protect them. There were many others with their own vengeance to seek, but they did not have access to the Bunker in Berlin during those last days.
Most of those in the Bunker knew me. Several of them were occultists. A few were even members of the Swords of Odin. Only one of them tried to stop me, though, and his comrades were smart enough to drag him away from me before I dealt any permanent damage. There were a handful of aides and secretarial staff who had never seen a gargoyle, and it was these people who stared at me in disbelief or shrank back in terror. I ignored them. I was looking for one man.
***
"I bring you a gift," I told him softly as I went down on one knee before him. "A device of great power. With this you can defeat the Allies—the Russians, and the English, and the Americans. All of them."
I held out the Eye of Odin.
His hands were trembling as he reached out to take it. His eyes were desperate. "Can this be true? How?"
"Put it on," I urged him. "Put it on and let its power fill you."
"What is it?"
"It is Odin's Eye."
A smile split his lips and he took it. "Odin's Eye. Yes. A pure power. A Germanic power!"
"So it does not matter if your soldiers have not brought you the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail. What use are such things? What powers could they have next to the pure warrior will of the ancestral German peoples? Claim that power, and unleash the wrath of Odin himself upon the Allies, upon the unbelievers!"
Buoyed by my words, he slung the necklace about his neck…
***
I was there, in the last days, in the bunker under Berlin. History has left me—among other details—out of its accounts. History is, in fact, rather vague on what precisely happened in the Fuhrer Bunker during the last days of the Reich. Even those who were there have left things out…
…which, all things considered, is perhaps a blessing. There is something eternally scarring about watching a man's madness consume him from the inside out. There is something wrong in the sight of a human body twisting itself into an incarnate avatar of hatred and greed. There is something infinitely difficult in the act of standing back and allowing that avatar to struggle to feed its hunger, consuming all around it while also consuming the mind and body that house it. It is a vicious thing when Odin and Freya pronounce judgement on those who profane their names.
Perhaps the worst affront to sanity is at the end of it, when life is wrung out of a frame so powerful and yet so tortured by the metamorphosis it has undergone, when the Eye of Odin ceases to shine and falls, a simple jewel, on the breast of a corpse—and the corpse stiffens, and you realize that what you are looking at was just a man after all. Not a demon, not a monster, not a beast—just a man. So much pain and so much evil sprung out of something that was only ever a man.
At that moment, you look down at your own hands and you wonder how complicit you were, by what you did and by what you failed to do. And more—for the man is dead but evil, and greed, and hatred live on. And we are all complicit. By what you know and do not speak; by what you know and pretend you do not know. By the small atrocities we allow daily. We say we did nothing wrong, when what we mean is, we did nothing.
When it was over, I reached out and reclaimed the Eye, setting it into the pouch at my belt with my runes. Some of those who had been in the Bunker had escaped the madman's slaughter. I let them go. There were others than I who wanted justice—let them have the rest.
With this man dead and with the German resistance crumbled to nothing, the Russians and Americans would take the city. A similar reconstruction lay in store for the Clan of Odin. I would gather them in and they would serve humans no longer. It was time for them to discover what it truly meant to be gargoyles. Perhaps in time both Germany and the Prussian Clan would rise again, like gargoyles in the evening twilight.
***
"Wait," said Elisa Maza, squinting into the darkness for a glimpse of her host. "You're telling me that you killed Adolf Hitler and…"
"He killed himself," the Prussian's voice interrupted in heavily accented English, "and if we must be metaphysical, blame Odin and Freya. It was Odin's Eye that transformed him, and Freya's prophecy who told me to deliver it."
"You killed Hitler," Elisa muttered to herself, and quietly wondered how much of history was hidden from human knowledge. How much of the way the world was now had been shaped long ago by mysterious cabals and magical artifacts and meddling fae and who only knew what else? How much did people really know and how much did they only think they knew—and was she happier before she'd learned about the world's mysteries and just how much there was out there that nobody really had an answer to?
"I didn't think you were here to discuss Nazis," the gargoyle known as the Valkyrie said. "I thought you were here to ask why I'd sold David Xanatos the Eye of Odin."
"Yes," Elisa replied, summoning her usual detective-on-a-case bearing and wearing it like armour. "Do you have any idea what it did to his wife?"
"Oh dear. I certainly hope that whatever it was, he knew it going into the marriage."
Elisa felt a flicker of anger. "You knew, all along, what that jewel could do. Do you know what it did to Goliath? Goliath, of all people…one of the most noble beings I know…"
"….and it drove him nigh mad, corrupting his strongest traits by driving them to extremes. I know."
"Then why did you…how could you…" Elisa leaned forward into that smothering darkness, unable to finish the sentence somehow as she tried, and failed, to fix her eyes on the mystery gargoyle in the darkened room. "You know what it does, and you let it loose without warning Xanatos, no matter what it might do to him or the person he gave it to. What power in Heaven or on Earth gives you the right?"
Something heavy landed with a hollow thud on the desk and a single light came on, gradually brightening to a medium glow.
She wore combat pants that would not look out of place on any human soldier and a brass breastplate like a Norse warrior-woman. She had a belt that sported a holster on the left and a leather bag of runestones on the right. Taloned feet and clawed hands no longer frightened Elisa Maza, and the Valkyrie's feathered wings and twin tails were curiosities, nothing more.
It was the eyes that got a reaction, much as Elisa tried to suppress the sudden chill in her stomach when she saw five glowing eyes regarding her.
The gargoyle had two heads.
Two crested avian heads, black as the Prussian night, each with a hooked beak that could fall with lightning's swiftness, sitting on top of two strong necks rising side by side out of the torso. Around both necks hung a golden necklace with an eerily familiar pendant, and that pendant was the Valkyrie's fifth eye, a jeweled eye, a crystal set in silver. She straightened up, standing proud atop her desk, and behind her hung a tapestry depicting a double-headed eagle.
"It was a vision," the Valkyrie said through her right beak, "a message I read in the runes. I can read them with this…" Her hand drifted across the jewel set in her breastplate.
"The Eye of Odin," Elisa whispered, mouth dry, wondering how that was possible. She had seen Goliath return the Eye to Odin himself, seen the fae lord put the eye back in its socket.
Twin heads shook no.
"Freya," spoke the left mouth, its voice soft but guttural. An old voice. A mouth that spoke dead languages still alive with power. "The mistress of magicks. Freya's Eye."