Shades of Valhalla
Inner Origins Book One
Ellis Logan
An Earth Lodge® Publication
Roxbury, Connecticut
Copyright 2015, Ellis Logan
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this work in any form whatsoever, without written permission. For more information contact Ellis Logan c/o Earth Lodge®, 12 Church St., Roxbury, CT 06783 or visit Earth Lodge® online at www.earthlodgebooks.com
Published in the U.S.A. by Earth Lodge®
Cover Design by Maya Cointreau
ISBN 978-1-944396-11-4
“Myths are things
that never happened,
but always are.”
Gaius Sallustius Crispus
On the Gods & the World
Chapter 1
There had to be a better way.
I slammed down the box in frustration. I couldn’t imagine lifting one more box up into the apartment’s tiny overhead attic. What would I do when it was time to move again? How would I unload everything quickly?
I definitely needed to look into the whole zen-styling thing. Seriously. How many books and knick-knacks could a girl cart around from town to town? I had way too much stuff.
The problem, I thought as I huffed a curl of hair out of my eyes, was that I was just too sentimental. I needed to cut some ties to the past. Like this box marked “Raggedy Anne and Andy.” Those two sculptures had been made for me by my grandfather when I was a baby, and they were cute, but did I really need to keep them to pass on to my own babies someday? I might not even ever have children. I sighed. I didn’t particularly want kids. But hey, someday I might, and then they should have heirlooms, right? Maybe, yeah. Maybe some smaller heirlooms. Maybe just mom’s sterling baby spoon and sippy cup that I had used, too, as a toddler. I grinned and chucked the box of porcelain figures through the open doorway into the kitchen.
The box crashed, the unmistakable sound of tinkling broken pottery reaching my ears along with a light euphoric feeling. I could definitely get used to this whole Zen thing. There were still ten or twelve more boxes in the living room stacked up by the ladder to the attic, and I was wondering how many of them I could talk myself into throwing away when my mom burst into the room.
“Siri! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, mom, I just decided I’m going to get rid of some of these boxes instead of storing them,” I said, pointing at the dented box lying on its side in the doorway.
“Thank the gods, I thought you fell down the stairs or something! How about instead of throwing them, you start another pile on the porch, alright? We just got here, don’t want the neighbors to think I’m beating you already.”
“Ha! Yeah right, okay, mom.” I trailed after her as she walked into the kitchen to grab the abused box. “Speaking of beating, when do we start?”
For as long as I could remember, my mother and I had fought.
Almost every day, we went through the same dance –Tang Soo Do, Qigong, Aikido, Krav Maga, even a little Capoeira. Hand to hand combat, bo staffs, nun chukkas and the occasional sword. Mom said she started teaching martial arts to me as soon as I could run without holding on to something, which put my earliest days of training back to when I was just over a year old. According to her, we’d started with basic Qigong forms, building my strength and endurance. By the time I was three, she caught me on video doing flying kicks off the sofa.
Training always ended with sweaty hugs, good food, and a huge pitcher of water. There was never any shortage of treats in the house, either – mom believed in eating healthy, but also considered chocolate one of the four basic food groups. The kitchen was always the first room mom unpacked when we moved. Already the butcher block island boasted a large red ceramic bowl filled with peaches, honeycrisp apples and bananas next to several smaller turquoise plates displaying sleeves of organic dark chocolates, fresh brownies from the local market and colorful sugar cookies. The holy trinity.
I set the box down on the counter and opened a couple cabinets, trying to find where she’d put the mugs. Pulling out my favorite vibrant tangerine one with a little chip in the handle, I filled it with water and drank it half down in one go. Mom was a big believer in Fiestaware pottery, and our plates and cups came in every shade of the rainbow. No matter where we were, the bright colors always made us feel at home. They always clashed, so they always matched. Sort of like us. I’d given up a long time ago trying to match every new town we moved to. I was just me, like the mug. Not perfect, but me. If someone preferred blue and didn’t want orange, chipped things in their life, that was cool. Their prerogative. Whatever.
I wondered what this town would have to offer – matched or mixed sets? Not one to ponder the unknown, I grabbed a brownie and sat down. “So what’s the plan tonight?”
“Well,” my mom answered as she moved the damaged box off the counter and opened the door to put it out on the front porch, “I have to check in with work and find out what time they want me to come in Monday morning. They’re in a really big rush to start planning a new security protocol so they can sign a procurement deal with the NSA. Until the agency is sure their contract will be fully safeguarded, they won’t finalize the contract.”
“Oooh, sounds exciting.” I rolled my eyes. Mom’s work was mostly about numbers and angles. It was her job to determine the soft spots in a facility, where people could sneak in and out, the IT vulnerabilities, how many guards and cameras you needed to cover the weaknesses in the building, what kinds of alarms were best suited to the business, how soon local law enforcement could lend a hand if needed, and what sort of situations warranted a call to the cops. Like I said, totally riveting stuff.
Mom laughed. “Hey, it pays for those brownies you’re eating. So I bet your stomach thinks it’s pretty exciting. Anyhow, after I check in, I figured we could do movie night and pizza. At least it’s Friday, so we’ll have all weekend to buy some new school clothes, relax and finish unpacking before your big day on Monday.”
“Ugh, yay, school. Can’t wait.” I pushed away from the counter and started to head back to my room. We were already a few weeks into the school year and I was pretty sure in a town this small I would be the only new student in my year.
“Yeah, well, before you get too excited, how about you sort your boxes while I’m getting ready. And no more tossing them around! Start a pile with the box on the porch and I’ll take them to a thrift store on the way to work tomorrow.”
“I’m on it!” The idea of ditching some more boxes was still pretty exciting. “And I’ll pick out some movies for tonight, too, I still haven’t unpacked my DVDs.”
“Action Romance!” She yelled as I went back to the living room.
“Pride and Prejudice it is,” I sang out, making her groan.
I hauled out most of the boxes, and went back to pick up the last one. Looking at it, I supposed I should go through it before tossing the whole thing. It had old photos in it, along with my martial arts ribbons from tournaments. I was pretty sure it also had some random mementos, like yearbooks and shells from beach towns we’d stayed in, that I didn’t really care to keep. I carried the box into my room and stuck it in the corner. I’d deal with it later.
I tuned into some psytrance on my Digitally Imported music app, sighed and flopped down on the bed. Another town. Another school. For the most part I didn’t really care about trying to fit in or joining all the little dramas each school had to offer. The last place we’d been, I had made some really great friends the first week I got there, and it had been really, I don’t know, comfortable. Everything had been easy in Tucson. Nice people. Great weather.
Awesome places to run and train. I wondered what this town would be like.
We’d moved into a tiny town called Falls Depot in Vermont, near Bennington and Mount Snow. Our apartment was actually part of an old farmhouse that had been split into several homes, and it had a huge empty field behind it that joined some state forest. The company my mom was working for was in Bennington – she had asked the company to put us in Falls Depot so we wouldn’t be too far from the mountains. I was really looking forward to getting some snowboarding in, since I hadn’t had a chance the whole last year while we were in Arizona.
I’d have to get all new gear, there was no way my old boarding clothes would fit since I had grown several inches in the last year. Now, at 17, I came in at a respectable 5’6”. Not too short, not too tall. Big enough to get taken seriously, not so tall that I automatically intimidated other girls. That was good, considering how often we moved. Next year I’d be starting college, so this was the last time I would have to worry about being the new kid in town. There, everyone would be new. I was kind of looking forward to that. It’d be a whole new experience.
I realized I’d probably need a new snowboard, too, and got up to look at my old handbuilt Gnu in the closet. Checking it over, I figured I could probably trade it in for a good deal on a new one. I set to work scraping off the old Daft Punk, Mesita and Quicksilver stickers and fumbled through the box on my desk for my army knife so I could remove the bindings. Those would still work with my feet, at least. I just needed to adjust them up to fit now that I was a size seven.
Sitting on the floor, working off the bindings, I started getting warm. At first I didn’t notice, but then the heat started building, more and more. I stripped off my hoodie and went to work on the last screw. Removing the old, rusted screws was pretty frustrating, but hardly enough to work up a sweat over. I almost felt feverish. I pulled the last screw out and dropped it in a bag with the other screws and binding plates, and secured the bundle to the bindings with a shoelace so I could find them all later when I got my new board.
I stood up to put the mess away and stumbled. My legs felt wobbly, my head was pounding. The room felt like it was swaying under my feet. Weird. I shook my head and reached up to place the bindings on the top shelf in the closet, and the whole room lurched beneath me, rumbling and shaking. The heat grew overwhelming, like I was going to vomit or pass out, and I reached for the wall to support myself, but all I grabbed was air.
I found myself outside in the early morning on an empty city street. Low buildings surrounded me where I stood and it was quiet, so quiet, and really beautiful. The light of the sun was just starting to shine on the horizon, and the birds were all still sleeping in the eaves.
It looked like the sort of gorgeous exotic getaway they always showed in movies – small apartments lining steep hills, cobblestone streets where no cars could pass, cream colored homes with tin and clay roof tiles, doors painted in brilliant hues of blue, green, yellow and orange. The type of place movie sets always filled with luscious accents, gorgeous men, and great food. The type of place that we all knew was probably actually filled with dirt poor families, lots of crime, and yeah, okay, probably some really hot guys and great food, too.
I wondered how I’d gotten here, I couldn’t remember, had we moved to South America and I’d forgotten? I tried to think where I was, but before I could really concentrate hundreds of birds flew up from the rooftops and trees, making my breath catch.
Well, good morning to me, I thought, and I laughed.
I almost didn’t hear the rumbling when it started, because of that laugh. And then, buildings were falling all around me, their colorfully painted doors disappearing under the crumbling bricks and mortar, the dust swirling all around me. Muffled screams and wails erupted in every direction. The people. The people were crying. I couldn’t see, there was so much dust, but I could hear them, and they were crying.
Crying, and dying.
I coughed, and opened my eyes. The city was gone. I was on the floor, lying half in and half out of a closet. My closet. Here, in Falls Depot. Right. Not Brazil, or wherever that weird dream had taken me. I still felt hot and unsteady as I got back on my feet. Maybe I was coming down with something, or having some sort of weird allergic reaction to Vermont. My head was pounding.
I reached into my bedside table and grabbed a couple Tylenols, swallowing them down with some water. My legs started to give out again and I crawled into bed.
The rest of the boxes could wait until tomorrow.