Return of the Valkyrie
**
The colony clung to the ribs of the buried Titan, a sprawl of bone-white towers and luminous veins that pulsed with faint blue Breath. From the highest spire, Archivist Novek's office overlooked it all, a chamber of glass and light suspended over an abyss of mist. The bones of the Titan curved beneath the city like the architecture of a god, every rib a bridge, every hollow a street.
Inside, the air was still.
Novek stood by the panoramic window, hands clasped behind his back, the faint glow of the Breath gauges flickering across his Archivist uniform. Lys paced restlessly along the glass wall, her reflection ghosting with every turn. Therrin sat near the desk, sipping tea, calm and unreadable as ever.
"Six weeks," Novek said quietly. "Since he went under and never came back. The Guild's moved on. The anomaly's sealed. The reports are filed." He looked down at the colony far below. "We have to accept the truth."
Therrin exhaled through his nose, tea still in hand. "Six weeks is long enough for the Guild to file a death and call it closure."
Novek's gaze drifted to the readouts anyway, like a man staring at a locked door and waiting for it to blink.
Lys stopped mid-stride, jaw tight. "You mean accept that he's dead."
"I mean," Novek said, "accept that no one survives a descent like that. Not even Khalen."
Therrin set down his cup with a soft click. "Maybe not anyone else."
Before Novek could answer, the lights dimmed.
A tremor rolled through the floor, faint at first, then sharper. The sconces flickered blue. The Breath veins along the Titan's ribs flared once, like a pulse skipping a beat.
Lys frowned. "Another marrow quake?"
"Too shallow," Novek said, glancing at the readouts. "It's coming from above."
The glass wall vibrated. A low hum built in the air, steady, rising.
Therrin stood, eyes narrowing. "That's not the Core."
Outside, the mist above the colony split open.
A light tore through it, bright enough to hurt. A silhouette unfolded in the mist, winged and wrong, coming straight at them. Violet Breath streamed off it like torn banners, and runes crawled across its body in hard, burning lines, as if someone had branded a monster with language.
Lys's hand flattened against the glass. "That's a flyer."
Therrin leaned in, eyes sharp. "No," he said, and something in his voice tightened. "Look at the symmetry. Those aren't wings."
For a beat, even the wardlines went quiet, like the Titan itself had flinched.
Then the colony remembered what the towers were built for.
Sirens wailed through the streets. Ward-beacons blazed blue along the Titan's ribs. Defense towers shuddered to life as energy coursed through their veins. Archivists shouted orders, pointing skyward.
Lys pressed her palm harder to the glass, eyes wide. "Is that—?"
Therrin's face stayed calm, but his voice dropped low. "If that's actually him and he doesn't slow down, they'll blow him out of the sky."
Novek stared at the descending shape, throat working once. His hand tightened on the rail hard enough to whiten the knuckles. "That son of a breathling… he really came back like he said."
Therrin's tone hardened. "Then we better run."
They ran.
Lys tore down the stairs two at a time, her coat flaring behind her. Therrin followed, moving with the precise urgency of someone who knew panic was useless but ran anyway. Novek's boots struck bone and glass, the sound echoing through the spiral corridor that cut through the Titan's spine.
The colony was already in uproar. Alarms wailed across the rib-bridges, their tones overlapping in frantic disharmony. Sentinel Archivists poured into the streets, faces pale, weapons humming with half-charged Breath.
Above them, the silhouette cleared the thickest fog, and the "wings" resolved into structure: ribs and rigging, a hull that caught the colony's scattered light and threw it back in violet. Runes burned across its frame in deliberate lines, not the random glow of a breathling's gutfire.
A ship, in the sky.
The Valkyrie descended, runes pulsing with violet rhythm, mist burning away in its wake.
"Clear the cannons!" Novek shouted as they reached the outer terrace. "Hold your fire!"
He snapped it again, sharper, the way protocol was supposed to sound. "Hold."
The word should have carried. It didn't. The ward-beacons were screaming, the gun crews were already half-blind with fear, and fear outranks rank in a place like this.
A young officer on the forward bastion had already taken aim. His helm still looked new, the enamel barely scuffed, and his hands were shaking on the focusing ring, but he kept turning it anyway. The cannon on his tower spat light, a pulse of compressed Breath screaming upward in a spiral of blue fire.
Lys stopped mid-stride, eyes wide. "No—"
The shot struck the Valkyrie dead on.
Instead of shattering, the impact bloomed outward in a ripple of gold and violet light. For an instant, the air above the colony bent, refracting into a lattice of glowing threads that wrapped the ship like a living cocoon.
The net of light tightened once, not defensive but warning, like a beast showing teeth without biting. Then it relaxed, deliberately gentle, and the cannon's violence fell away into sparks that drifted down like falling stars. The net didn't lash back. It simply caught the violence and let it die.
The officer who fired staggered back, mouth open. The grin of triumph on his face turned to frozen awe.
"What in the Core's name was that…" Therrin murmured, slowing beside Novek.
"A shield," Novek said, breathless. "But not like anything I've ever seen."
The Valkyrie's glow intensified, runes flaring in response to the attack. For a heartbeat, it looked alive, angry, almost, then the light softened again, folding calm as the ship righted its descent.
Lys looked over at the stunned gun crews, her tone sharp enough to cut. "You all done trying to kill the only man insane enough to save this colony?"
No one answered. The officer who'd fired dropped to his knees, staring at his trembling hands.
Above them, the Valkyrie's engines hummed lower, the light under its hull painting the ribs of the Titan in purple and gold. Breath shimmered along the ancient bone, waking runes that hadn't glowed in centuries. The entire colony seemed to breathe with it.
Novek watched in stunned silence, the shock on his face breaking into something between laughter and disbelief. "He just deflected a cannon. Using a net made of gods know what."
Therrin crossed his arms, a faint smile tugging at his mouth. "Sounds about right for Khalen."
The ship drifted closer, casting a warm violet light across their faces. Its shadow stretched over the colony, long and steady, not a threat, not mercy, just presence.
Lys pointed, voice low. "Look."
At the bow, Khalen stood framed in stormlight, cloak rippling, the crystal skull hovering at his side, both radiant and unbothered by the chaos below. He raised his good hand in casual salute.
He looked wrong in a way Lys couldn't name at first, until her eyes found it. Leaner. Hollowed out. The kind of strength that came from hunger and repetition. And the missing hand, held close to his body like the absence had become another tool. Not dead, just sharpened into something the surface didn't have a word for anymore.
Lys's throat bobbed. For a second she looked like she might laugh, or hit him, or both.
The skull hovered beside him like a smug second sun.
"Try not to get arrested on arrival," OH murmured, delighted. "It's gauche."
Then, quieter, as if he'd remembered this part mattered, "Also, those two are your lifeline. Try not to scare them to death."
Lys sucked in a breath that sounded like it hurt. "Six weeks."
Khalen's smile didn't quite match her relief. "Yeah," he said softly. "Six weeks… up there."
Novek exhaled a laugh, shaking his head. "Of course it's him."
Therrin's smile widened. "And it looks like he's home."
Below them, the colonists began to emerge from the tunnels, drawn by the light. Fear gave way to awe. Children pointed, miners dropped their tools, and for the first time in years, the city built on a corpse felt alive again.
The Valkyrie descended through the mist like a second sunrise, settling atop the Titan's ribs with a sound like thunder contained.
**
The Valkyrie settled atop the Titan's ribs with a sound like thunder contained, and then the ship did something no one expected.
It sighed.
Not smoke, not steam, but a low settling note through its frame, as if the hull had been holding its breath for six weeks above, and much longer below, and was finally allowed to let it out. The runes under the keel dimmed, then steadied, like a heart finding its rhythm.
The colony did not know what to do with that.
Dockhands kept their distance. Gun crews kept staring at their own cannon like it had betrayed them. A line of Archivists formed instinctively along the terrace with weapons half-raised, as if a ship could decide to bite.
Khalen walked the deck anyway, boots thudding on patched plates, his eyes flicking over weld seams and crystal scales and the improvised ribs he'd fused into something that could pass for structure.
Lys did not wait for permission. She grabbed a coil of tether line from a stunned deckhand and threw it over her shoulder like it was hers by right.
"Move," she snapped at the nearest crewman, then softened a fraction when he blinked at her like she'd spoken a dead language. "Sorry. Just, move. It's a ship, not a shrine." Her fingers stayed tight on the coil a moment longer than necessary, like letting go would make it vanish.
Therrin was already commandeering crates.
He set a ledger on a barrel and began writing labels in neat, severe script as if order itself might keep the Valkyrie from falling out of the sky.
TOOLS.
WATER.
DRY FOOD.
SALT.
CLOTH.
MEDICAL.
Then, after a pause, he added one more line, smaller: UNREASONABLE THINGS OH INSISTS WE NEED.
Novek watched them with his arms folded, half-amused, half-unnerved, like the sight of his people touching the Valkyrie made it more real, and therefore more dangerous.
"You're leaving," he said, not as a question.
Khalen didn't look up from a seam he'd welded himself. "Soon."
"That soon," Novek muttered, then raised his voice toward the gathered Archivists. "Stop staring and start hauling. If you're going to help, help."
A few obeyed. Most didn't. They hovered at the edge of the ship's shadow like people approaching a wardline that had decided it could walk.
The hull-light washed over them in violet and gold as the runes under the keel pulsed, not aggressive, not gentle either, just awake. The Titan's ancient Breath veins along the ribs answered it, faintly, like a body recognizing a familiar sickness.
Khalen felt it under his feet. The ship listening. The colony listening. The stone itself listening.
The skull hovered near his shoulder, catching the light like a jewel that refused to behave.
"Before you all improvise yourselves into a fiery death," OH murmured, delighted, "we're going to do something the old world used to call 'pre-flight.' It's like a prayer, except it works."
Lys glanced up without stopping her work. She was threading a tether through a crystal cleat, testing it with her weight like she didn't trust anything that hadn't tried to kill her first.
"Tell us where we're going," she said.
"No."
Therrin didn't even look up. "We're in the middle of a colony full of wardlines and listening towers. So your paranoia is either justified, or theatrical."
"It can be both," OH said brightly. "That's what makes it art." He paused, pleased with himself. "I have been overheard by worse rooms than this."
Khalen lifted a crate with his good hand, muscles protesting out of habit more than weakness. His body still remembered six months down there of scarcity, even if the surface air tasted easier.
He set the crate down and wiped his palm on his trousers, then caught himself doing it, and hated that he still wanted to be clean for this.
"OH," he said quietly, "tell them what they need. Not where we're going."
The skull tilted. A pause. Not long, but long enough to register as choice.
"Fine," OH said, suddenly helpful in a way that made Khalen more wary than the cannons had. "Listen closely, children of the wardline. You're packing for a sky you don't understand."
Therrin's quill stilled.
Lys's hands paused on the rope.
Even Novek leaned in, despite himself.
"Water," OH began. "More than you think. Not for drinking. For heat management. You'll find out why when your lovely Captain decides to punch the air with fire at altitude."
Khalen snorted. "I don't punch the air."
"You absolutely punch the air. You're just dramatic about it."
Therrin wrote WATER (EXTRA) without comment.
"Salt," OH continued. "For preservation and balance. If you get dizzy up there, you will blame the ship. It will be your blood."
Lys frowned. "Dizzy how."
"Sky-dizzy. Different pressure. Different Breath density. Your bodies will complain. Loudly. Especially yours, Lys, because you keep forgetting you're a person and not a knife."
Lys's mouth tightened, but she didn't deny it. She just yanked the knot harder.
"Cloth," OH said. "Not for comfort. For filtration. The upper air carries particulate you'll pretend doesn't exist until your lungs protest."
Therrin wrote CLOTH (FILTER) and underlined it twice.
"Spare hinges. Fasteners. Copper wire. Pitch. Something sticky. Something that can seal. Because the first time a panel vibrates loose, you will learn a valuable lesson about falling."
Novek barked a laugh. "This thing vibrates loose, it's coming down on my colony."
"Then perhaps," OH replied sweetly, "you should provide better fasteners."
Novek opened his mouth, then shut it again, and gestured for more supplies to be hauled up as if that ended the argument.
Lys straightened and planted her hands on her hips, squinting at the skull like she was trying to aim a shot with her eyes.
"Still not telling us where."
"Not until we're high enough that anyone listening can choke on the distance," OH said.
Therrin's tone stayed mild. "Define 'anyone.'"
"Guild ears," OH said lightly. "Church eyes. People who smile too hard. Things in the stone that notice patterns. And," he added, almost casually, "anything that learns to follow the Valkyrie's song."
That last line landed quieter than the rest.
Khalen felt Lys's glance flick to him. Therrin's too. Not fear, exactly, but the awareness that the world was larger than their maps.
Lys recovered first, because she always did.
She pointed toward the rigging. "Fine. If you won't tell us where, tell us how not to die. What does this do."
Khalen watched her as she moved along the deck, checking lines, testing tension, reading the ship like it was a beast she planned to ride.
Six weeks ago she'd been a pilot with a weapon.
Now she looked like someone building a future with her hands.
OH's glow dimmed a fraction, not tired, but focused.
"That," he said, "is a Breath-cable. It behaves like a muscle. Treat it like rope and it will punish you. Treat it like a living thing and it will listen."
Therrin raised an eyebrow. "You're being helpful."
"Don't get used to it."
Lys's eyes narrowed. "Why now."
The skull hovered in place, smugness quieting, and for a heartbeat the ship-light refracted across its facets like a shifting kaleidoscope, as if the Valkyrie itself was watching the conversation.
"Because," OH said, and he sounded almost irritated that the truth existed, "I don't intend to rebuild you from scraps if you fall."
Khalen's throat tightened around something he didn't want to name.
Novek stepped closer to the rail and lowered his voice, practical again. "You take off in the next hour, the towers will track you whether I tell them to or not. Archivist protocol."
Khalen nodded once. "Let them."
"And if the Guild asks where you're headed?"
Khalen looked at the skull. "He won't even tell us."
"Correct," OH said. "Let them enjoy the humility."
Therrin closed his ledger with a firm slap and handed it to an Archivist with an expression that dared him to argue. "Load in that order. If you mix the salt with the pitch again, I'm throwing someone off the deck."
The Archivist blinked. "Yes, sir."
Lys barked something like a laugh and went back to work, and it wasn't warm, but it was real.
Khalen stood amid the motion, watching the deck fill with purpose, watching his ship breathe light into the ribs of a dead god, watching two people he trusted move like they belonged here.
Not safe. Not comfortable.
But together.
The Valkyrie hummed under his boots, alive, listening. The deck vibrated through his soles like a purr trapped in metal.
And in the violet wash of hull-light, as crates slid into place and ropes tightened and the colony's fear turned slowly into awe, Khalen let himself believe he might not have to do the next part alone.
The wind carried that thought across the Titan's ribs, marking the first night of many aboard the ship that remembered how to rise.